Baroquebobcat

Lost Japan files series:
The zoo

My hometown has a zoo. While I think that it is more modern, in some ways than the Ueno Zoo, as far as size goes, it is, well it loses that one pretty handily.

I went to the Zoo on a weekday. It was in midmorning in January and most people were at work. On the way there, I saw school kids playing with kites.

The park was pretty cool. The weather was a little chilly, but it was January and compared to Montana it was great. The park has a number of interesting shrines in it as well as paved walking paths etc. There are also cats, but I didn’t get any pictures of those.

I did however get some of a small temple — left over from one that burnt down. And a small Inari shrine( thats the fox-ish god for you not down with the shinto folks).

The zoo was fun. It had pandas.

Also, praire dogs, no joke.

 Afterwards I went to akiba. but thats for another day.

Play is important. Must institute changes in life. again.
Also, TED is awesome if you didn’t know already.
I give you Stuart Brown’s presentation.

As, I said earlier, I have been reading Time Management for System Administrators and trying to take the useful things out of it, while ignoring the bits that don’t particularly apply. Like any book of advice, much of it has a sort of “well duh” quality but sometimes those are the very things you aren’t doing because they seem too easy.

One bit of good advice that everyone already knows but few actually do anything with is to write down your goals and to set goals that are reachable. Or, more aptly, testable, like “I will do X by Y.”

So rather than my usual, “Hey, I want to be more involved in the ruby community.” I should set some goals that are more reachable. One of those is to add a patch to some bit of software maintained by someone else.

So, I have been looking at projects on github and poking around at them. One thing I would really like to do is to make it easier to test file uploads on rack apps without using rails. Mostly with webrat. I have this killer sinatra app that I would like to write features in cucumber for, but file uploads refuse to be easily testable.

I kludged some stuff together that I have been working on, but it is not working yet. Essentially, the problem is that webrat for rails uses some bits of rails that handle that stuff, while the sinatra code doesn’t. In fact, the sinatra code makes things more difficult–maybe. I have had some trouble following stuff up the call stack.

Hmm. Maybe I should have tests for my tests. and send mocks to the code that I am going to use for testing to figure out what it does that I should change.

I git cloned the webrat repo from github and got its specs running, mostly. Then I installed more gems, like redgreen and running rake spec still didn’t work. But, I found the problem.

There was a spec in the merb session code which used setup instead of before which was breaking.

Now, all the current specs pass, except the pending ones. That leaves where I am this weekend, trying to figure out where my changes fit. I think I should build a small sinatra app to test my testing, so it will be more in context.

Later.

I am currently working up something dealing with testing sinatra with webrat and a review of Time Management for System Administrators, but I haven’t had time to work on them much recently.

Monday I had fencing.
Tuesday I went to game night at the GSLIS building
Wednesday I went to the CUtweetup.

So, busy.

Went to the first cutweetup.
It was at Boltini’s which is a martini bar in Champaign.
Talked with Brian Marick for a bit.
He explained Micro-Scale Retro-Futurist Anarcho-Syndicalism. Which is about as complicated as it sounds. Or not, I am too tired to explain, but he talked about it at mwrc.

I also chatted with some CS students from UIUC, working on social projects. One of them had developed a twitter app for hungry CS grads to notify others in the building when they wanted food, that they might pool their efforts and cash.

There were also some more entrepreneur, businessy type people and some twitter groupies(yes they exist). But, I mostly didn’t talk to them.

My friend Brendan has started a reputation market/identity tracker called mnikr. I am in the top ten right now, but I expect that to change.

w00t.

Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.

“Hara Hachi Bu”: eat until you are 80 percent full.

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

My VFF(Vibram FiveFingers for those not in the know) feel even more like my feet. I am still not entirely use to them though–I still get the giggles thinking ‘I am barefoot AND yet I am wearing shoes’ every so often.

It rained today. I successfully tested the shoes in wet conditions, as well as mall conditions. Champaign has this really big mall that has sucked the life out of the smaller, more centrally located one in Urbana(not surprisingly). It was a good test wet asphalt followed by corporate tile and occasional carpet.

I talked with a shoes salesman who was unable to have and yet envious of my shoes. Apparently, his big toe is not the longest by a good margin. This I have read can be a problem. Luckily for me I didn’t have that one.

Flashback:
At first, the VFF, or crazy shoes as Sara calls them, felt a little loose and I was afraid that I might need a size smaller. But since adjusting the strapes, they have been awesome.

Back:
So, the VFF are snug. And Comfortable. I guess I could be called a satisfied customer.

It is spring, and as I promised my self, I bought me some spiffy new shoes.

So far so good. They stick to my feet pretty awesomely. So much so, I sometimes feels like I am walking around barefoot. It feels strange, wandering around a supermarket feeling barefoot.

That, and I was a bit of a spectacle at work. Which was part of the point of getting them, apart from feeling like I am not wearing shoes.

Like last year, I am again suffering from mac envy. But, oddly it is easier to deal with now that I could, hypothetically, buy one. On the other hand, I think that the number of PCs(mostly Linux mind you) is higher than last year.

I still want a web capable phone though.

James Edward Gray II started things off wonderfully talking about how reading code helps you to understand it better and write better code yourself that fits in the community. He tied it into Little Big Planet by showing how he developed a Tower’s of Hanoi level. It has its own developer community who borrow ideas from each other and its own style and idioms.

It was great to see someone who I had seen posting on comp.lang.ruby when I first began following it in person.

Restclient looks pretty awesome as a way to interact with services. It is a microframework for consuming webservices, sort of like an inverse sinatra.

James Edward Gray II recommended it as interesting reading. He also suggested looking at BJ and Terminator.

Or, you could just pick a gem and gem unpack it. But, it probably would be better to start with something less complex than rails.

Rack Middleware was the next talk. \m/

Essentially, the goal of rack middleware is to make webapps more composeable. Rather than mixing in open-id oauth and session management inside your app, you use smaller middleware apps and selectively apply them to different url spaces.

map '/private/awesomeness' do
  use OpenID
  run AwesomenessApp
end

You can also set internal headers inside special namespaces that allow middleware further down the stack to access messages set for them in a secure manner like for instance, whether the current session is authenticated.

One neat idea: do you need to have a proper web app at the end of the middleware stack? Not really.

Yehuda Katz made me think more about what Rails 3 will look like with its merby goodness. It is being reworked to be a set of rack middleware so different components will be more pluggable. For instance, right now, using datamapper with rails is alittle painful. standardizing the expecteds will make this much easier.

Puppet looks pretty freakin awesome.

I would care more about rubyCocoa if I had a mac.

TenaciousG is a super cool name for a graph(DAG et al not pictures) library.

Jeremy McAnally’s talk on DSLs was slick.