a view from afar

In a mission to get Sven Fuch's Mephisto plugin Tag Cloud working, I decided to upgrate to Mephisto-trunk (revision 3005). Ultimately it was successful (this blog is now being served by the Mephisto-trunk), but here are some things you should know...

Now, it is a widely known fact, among possibly half of my six subscribers, that I'm working on an ORM and database migration package for Rubyists that will kick ActiveRecord into the floor. Not that I don't have some respect for the library - it has, after all, seriously raised the bar in terms of user (ie webapp developer) simplicity. But it suffers some serious architectural faults, and has begun to outgrow the spirit of the ActiveRecord pattern (obligatory Fowler link). I am not the only person who thinks so either, some people such as Matthew at PlayLouder are far more frustrated than me.

Seeing as it's the theme for today...

Nothing like a good dose of cynicism. No idea where it came from. I'm pretty sure it's not a screenshot of my profile, but I'd be hard pushed to tell it apart.

Oh, and is it me, or is that Jennifer Aniston on the left, taking a different sort of modelling contract?

WARNING: the following post is not suitable for anyone who has left high school, unless (like me maybe) your sense of humour didn't

Here is a simple bash script I use to get the latest RSpec gem and update the TextMate bundle:

After a discussion today on rspec-users, I confirmed that it would be nice if you could structure specs like this, to break your behaviour descriptions down into related groups:

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describe MyClass do
  facet "my_method" do
    it "should do this" 
    
    facet "some stuff" do
      it "should do that"
    end
  end
  
  it "should do the other"
end

I assumed this would be really obvious but I had to scour the internet to find instructions.

I wanted to use the included server side highlighting, as described on the Mephisto wiki. It turns out, though, that the correct tag is "filter:code", eg: