dave astels

As Nancy pointed out, I had some adventures in ink cartridge refilling today. What usually involves the included hand drill bit (to drill a hole in the ink cartridge to allow refilling) ended up involving a saw and snips.

but.. as discussed in the 37s blog today… I made it work. I’m pleased to report that surgery (hacking) was successful and we are printing again :)

Arrrrrr… I be wishin’ ye all a mighty fine International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

For those amongst ye all that have ne’er set sail, ye’d do well to be watchin’ this.

So to all ye salty sea dogs and saucy, sharp tongued wenches I say… yo ho yo ho… now where’d me rum get off to?

I’ve whipped up a simple TextMate bundle for making rSpec a bit nicer to work with. You can download it here.

You might need to unzip the file (Safari does automatically), and put it in ~/Library/ApplicationSupport/TextMate/Bundles. Note you might have to create the Bundles folder.

At the moment it tweaks the ruby rules for coloring to colour context, specify, setup, and teardown as keywords. It also adds snippets for the same four: context<tab>, specify<tab>, setup<tab>, and teardown<tab>.

Just awesome.

I just finished watching the video of Apple’s new product event of today.

I grabbed the new iTunes and it rocks. Good job folks. It really is a great leap forward.

I liked how Steve Jobs said “What do you think? Do you like it?” after demoing the new iTV product. Well.. I like it. Apple again shows how it kicks ass with class & cool. I’ll be in line when iTV is released.

I love watching these Apple events. It never ceases to make me realize all over again why I’m such an Apple fan.. and why I have been since my first Apple ][+. (OK.. there were some dark years when Steve Jobs wasn’t there).

Nice.

It was a nice day today. Here’s the view from my desk:

I love working at home.

I’ve made up a cheat sheet for rSpec. It’s checked into the rSpec repository on rubyforge. You can grab it directly here.

Tweaks will be made as rSpec moves forward.

Update: I should mention, it’s 2 pages with a cmd line reference reference on the second page. Works great printed two sided.

Finally.. my ReadingList app is live.

For quite a while people have been asking me for book recommendations. I put together a static reading list on my site with the intention of replacing it with something more dynamic at some time.

As Dr. Suess said “The time has come. The time is now.”

Nancy and I (ok.. mostly Nancy) deployed it to one of the servers (using capistrano & migrations).

I have a few tweaks to make in the maintenance part of the app , and I have a bunch of features to add, but it’s alive.

And it has a Tag Cloud :)

For now it’s here.

I am pleased to announce that we are opening our doors as a boutique web application/site development and hosting company.

Dave, who heads up development, has over 2 decades of experience developing software.
He is a thought leader in the areas of Object Oriented Techniques and Agile Software Development Practices.
Nancy, who is in charge of hosting, has extensive experience with web application hosting and server management.
We leverage various state of the art techniques and technologies including OS X, Debian Linux, Ruby, Rails, and AJAX, to name a few.

What’s this mean to you as a client? Solid, high quality applications delivered as efficiently as possible.
Because we can host your application as well as develop it, it’s easy for you to have changes and enhancements made.
There’s only one company to deal with, and our development and hosting are tightly integrated, providing you with the quickest turnaround time possible.

Not only do we use the lastest, most productive technologies available, but we’ve been around long enough to
have a deep understanding of the issues involved in developing and maintaining high quality, robust applications.

Legend has it that Pablo Picasso was sketching in the park when a woman approached him and asked him to sketch her.

After studying her for a moment, he used a single pencil stroke to create her portrait.

When she asked the price, he replied “Five thousand dollars.”

The woman was flabergasted: “How could you want so much money for this picture? It only took you a second to draw it!”

To which Picasso responded, “Madame, it took me my entire life.”

Experience counts. Who do you want developing your applications?

For more information, contact us at info ‘at’ daveastels.com

I just finished working on notes for a Java5/jUnit4/TDD tutorial. This is a version of a Ruby/rSpec/BDD tutorial that I recently wrote. The app is a simple “guess the secret code” game. The contexts of the two are the same other than where language differences make themselves known. Primarily this is the in code. So, two codebases, same set of tests/specs, same functionallity.. 100% same. Both written by me… which, IMO, means pretty clean, tight code.

I’ll be looking over the code in the next few days, and probably blogging anything interesting that I find. But I’ll start off with this comparison… just how much difference is there in the amount of code?

So, in Java there is almost 50% more code. In this case.. a simple app… that’s only about 5000 characters… but what about a bigger app? That will add up fast. I can’t help but wonder if that comparison will be linear with the size of the app. Somehow I doubt it.