a view from afar

I have recently been sick to death of PacificPoker.com emails. After clicking the unsubscribe link in their spam^H^H^H^H newsletter for the fifty thousandth time, I can say - without hyperbole - that I was not very happy. My festive spirit somewhat dampened by yet another promise of a chance at the $75m dream ticket, I sent them this rather terse email:

    Subject:    TAKE ME OFF YOUR MAILING LIST
    From:       <my address removed for spam prevention>
    Date:       December 27, 2007 11:50:19 am GMT
    To:         support@pacificpoker.com

    I have lost count of the number of times I have tried to
    unsubscribe.  Please remove me IMMEDIATELY

Their reply is priceless...

Recently (last few months) I've had the opportunity to show two developers some BDD techniques. The first was in Ruby, using RSpec (new URL!), the second was in C# using MbUnit and Rhino Mocks. Here are my observations about the process. This is quite a long post, and strays a bit into the technical details that can become obstacles to teaching BDD, but I decided to include as much as possible to emphasise just how tough I found it.

I normally try to avoid anything that sounds like Java-bashing - every language has faults, and often the real accusation should be aimed the people using languages well past their sell-by date for things they were not designed for. But trying to decipher some of the examples in Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture makes me want to scream. He does explain that he chose Java and C# for accessibility, but it definitely doesn't help clarity, like this extract from page 224 (Compound Key):

I'm a big fan of the FreeBSD operating system. It's fast, stable, secure, supports a wide range of hardware out of the box, and has - or will have soon - some really cool features

The actual purpose of this post is to advertise something I hadn't seen before, namely bsdstats...

Just stumbled across iusethis - well actually, I was pointed to it by someone who knows a little more about Mac desktop apps than me.

To think of the hours I slaved over my list of useful desktop apps, when I could've signed up on there and just clicked "i use this" 30-odd times. Of course, then you wouldn't get all my insightful comments in one easily-digested article.

Also, +1 to the site for supporting OpenID!

Drop this into your Rakefile and let the heckling begin!

Between me and the helpful folk at rspec-users, I managed to come up with a solution to specify that a gem is loaded and used in a library. This is for the case where you don't want the gem loaded all the time, or where you can put the loading in a method called at some point (as opposed to just at the top of a file) - although I'm sure it could be adapted.