B!? Links

We decided to add another perspective to this discussion – we checked out the impact of the Death Grip on the level of radiation a user is exposed to. We checked this on several devices in parallel – the iPhone 4.0, the BlackBerry 9700, and the Android Nexus One.

GrandPerspective is a small utility application for Mac OS X that graphically shows the disk usage within a file system. It can help you to manage your disk, as you can easily spot which files and folders take up the most space. It uses a so called tree map for visualisation. Each file is shown as a rectangle with an area proportional to the file’s size. Files in the same folder appear together, but their placement is otherwise arbitrary.

Inspired by Jef Raskin, our zoomable user interface shows you all the stuff on your computer on a single surface. Using zoom and pan to view, arrange and open documents feels so right.

Commenter is a candidate for “look what this guy wrote”

Virtually all the items I’ve posted to this tumblelog are from things I’ve previously “starred” in Google (news) Reader.  Therefore, to save some time, I’m replacing “Recent Feeds + Reads” with my Shared Items in Google Reader.

“I have 2 problems with this

1. I have to learn and start using this new language to talk about tests

2. I have to learn a whole new syntax to write tests”

   #RSpec describe Account, “ when first created” do before do @account = Account.new end it “should have a balance of $0” do @account.balance.should eql(Money.new(0, :dollars)) end after do @account = nil end end # Test::Unit class AccountTest < Test::Unit::TestCase def setup @account = Account.new end def test_should_have_a_balance_of_0_dollars assert @account.balance == Money.new(0, :dollars) end def teardown @account = nil end end

RSpec == Yoda-speak?

We live in a day and age where many people still believe that our world is mostly deterministic, and that through action we can and will fix all of our problems, regardless of whether or not a solution is really possible.

“What’s the best Rails testing framework? The one that makes your testing life most enjoyable, of course. For me, this has been RSpec, but I’m beginning to prefer Shoulda.”

“…language is deceptive. They try to make it English-like. But it isn’t English. It’s a programming language. And it has rules and a syntax that are very unEnglish like. There’s a major cognitive dissonance—I have to take ideas expressed in a natural language (the problem), then map them into an artificial language…”

“ThoughtWorks started using Ruby for production projects in 2006, from then till the end of 2008 we had done 41 ruby projects.”

a PostScript and PDF interpreter for HTML 5 canvas

a BASIC dialect for developing Android applications

A while ago I was discussing some software architectural options with a fellow developer and we ran into a little hitch with our conversation. Put quite simply, the word ‘dynamic’ has a couple of possible meanings. He was using it one way, and I was off on a complete different definition.