I had a chance to play around with Capistrano this weekend. It’s a cool little tool and it works very well.

This is nice to know: Subversion’s default keyword substitution setting is exactly opposite of CVS’. Subversion will never attempt to perform textual substitutions on your file contents unless explicitly asked to do so. So that’s why -kb isn’t ever necessary when svning.

Discovered via. Dr. Nic: ZenTest. ZenTest scans your target and unit-test code and writes your missing code based on simple naming rules, enabling XP at a much quicker pace. ZenTest only works with Ruby and Test::Unit. autotest is a continous testing facility meant to be used during development. As soon as you save a file, autotest will run the corresponding dependent tests.

I really should start using Mauricio Fernandez’ rcov code coverage tool for ruby.

Over the past, oh, year and a half or so, I’ve followed the rapid ascension of Ruby on Rails to the top of the web development heap. In the process I read a lot of blog entries, a lot of “Hello World!” introductory articles and a lot of best practice documents. A big part of the thinking behind Rails is Test Driven Development (TDD) – the idea that you should write automated tests before writing code to make sure that a) you know what the code is supposed to do before you write it and b) once the code is working there is a quick, easy way to make sure it keeps working as you further develop your application. Read more

Typo supports Markdown, which is super sweet. I far prefer it to Textile. The only problem with Typo is that I have yet to find a good Emacs XML-RPC mode/library that work with Typo, so I’ve decided to compose my blog entries in Emacs as Markdown and then add them to the blog when I’m done. This may have the added effect of making me think more about what I’m writing. Read more

There’s a whole lot of very cool web music technology in the works right now. Services are popping up to facilitate tour tracking, music blog tracking and seamless music experiences. I don’t really have much to say (for now) but here’s a good list of some cool stuff. Hype Machine – See what music all the cool kids are blogging about. Tour Filter – Track the latest and greatest live shows in your area. Read more

I’ve switched this blog to Typo. this is exciting and fun and it means that you can comment without waiting for me to read your email and add it to the post. It only took one day of that for me to get tired of it. All the old content is still here except for the few comments that were left; for that I apologize. But I won’t apologize for anything else! Read more

At my office we do a lot of functional testing – interacting with our software as an end user would. This, in itself, is enough of a problem: much of what we do would be better tested with unit tests or automated functional tests (see Selenium for example). But it’s hard to retrofit comprehensive unit tests into a large, established code base (that wasn’t created with unit testing in mind) and it takes time to convert from written functional tests to automated functional tests. Read more