PragDave

Mining Build Statistics

Mike Clark’s been posting some interesting views of CruiseControl build statistics (here and here). These are cool pictures, and I suspect there’s a bunch of information to be gleaned from them:

• what’s the blob density (how frequently do folks check in)?
• are they mostly red or mostly blue (red is broken builds)?
• after a red blob, how many more red blobs do you see before you get a blue one?

That last statistic is one I think might be interesting. If you were to plot a histogram of the number of sequences of red blobs of length one, length two, length three, and so on, what would it look like? If it is heavily weighted to the low end, then you’re looking at a team that fixes broken windows.

I’m sure that there’s a lot more cool stuff in these pictures, but I’m impressed at how quickly things jump out at you, and just how much tacit information they convey. Maybe project tea-leaf reading will become a sought-after discipline…

Spam Volume

Spam in a Can

I'm sure I'm just in the minor leagues here, but for the last month or so I've been averaging 50Mb of incoming spam a day. All but a handful of messages die before reaching my inbox, but it makes me wonder. I'm lucky enough to have fiber to the house, with some pretty decent bandwidth both up and down. But two months ago I was on DSL, and only a few years ago I was on ISDN, with dial-up before that. As the connection speed increased, so did the volume of junk that found its way down the pipe.

Maybe we're seeing a kind of Parkinson's Law in action here: trash expands to fit the bandwidth available to it.

Preview Goodness

Having noted some problems with Tiger’s Preview application in a previous note, it’s time to redress the balance. Preview under Tiger has got some great features. Some have been available in Acrobat reader for a while, but in Preview I get to use them faster!

• The automatic resize option resizes the PDF pages as I change the size of Preview’s window (just like Acrobat reader). No more guessing as I resize and hit zoom to fit.
• Preview now sports two side-by side views: one is two-up, the other emulates a book, ensuring recto pages actually appear on the right. This is critical for doing the layout work for a book.
• The Revert option on the file menu is presumably intended to undo bad changes you’ve made to a file. But is has a great side effect: if you’re looking at a PDF in Preview and update it on disk, hitting Revert loads the new PDF. No more closing and reopening to see the results of an edit.
• Slideshow mode makes the most of screen real estate on the Powerbook. It’s too early to say, but it looks like this could be very useful for reading.

And that’s just the changes I’ve been using while working on the layout for Chad's new book. So thanks to the team at Apple for adding stuff from my wish list. (And if you’re listening, Preview team, I’d really love an overlay-revisions mode, where I could put pages from revisions of a document on top of each other…)

Preview Problems

We’re hearing some isolated reports that Preview on OSX sometimes does strange things with the Rails book PDF. Two people have reported that our italic code font is invisible. One person reports that the navigation panel doesn’t show the chapters and sections. But here’s the scary thing. Reboot your Mac, and the problems go away. And there aren’t any problems with Acrobat reader.

I can’t reproduce this here on my Macs: the book was developed exclusively in an OSX environment and I’ve never seen the problem. So I’m wondering if anyone out there has any ideas on how to attack this. It’d be easy to shrug and say it’s a bug in Preview, but I’d rather find a workaround than inconvenience folks using the One True Operating System. (dave at pragprog . com)

Rails Podcast

I must be hip, because I’m on a Podcast. Scott Barron interviewed me for the second edition of his Ruby on Rails Podcast. Learn more than you ever wanted to know about why I’m in Texas, how the book source is maintained, and get a sneak-peak at some new ideas we’re pursuing…

The ServerSide Interview

I give a couple of talks at a ServerSide symposium a long time ago. Dion Almaer took the opportunity to interview me, and they just put the video online. (Boy, do I hate the picture they chose as the key frame.)

I suspect the business about package scoping might be misinterpreted by some: what I was trying to say was that Java’s lack of an explicit keyword for package scoping leads many developers not to use it as much as they should. I think I’ll blog about those ideas separately.

Knee Testing

I still occasionally bump into folks who claim that all testing can (and should) be automated. For those optimistic souls, I offer this tale, by way of Brian Marick's blog.

Automated tests are necessary, and automated unit tests in particular are a wonderful design aid. But ultimately they only test the things you know to test. It’s the other things that get your knees wobbling (you’ll have to read the story).

RDoc in an OS X Dashboard Widget

Now this is neat.

Putting Code in Python Documentation

To continue the thread, Rod Morehead gave me this link to Python doctest, a utility that performs what are almost unit tests on the code fragments in your Python docstrings.

Anyone in the Ruby community feel inspired?

Putting Code in JavaDoc

A couple of Ant tasks let you embed both code and sample output in your Javadoc.

The Wiki Way of Writing

Leaving dangling cross references when writing a book is like leaving dangling hyperlinks in a Wiki—they’re both a promise and a question.

Subversion and 403 Errors

If you get 403 errors with Subversion, it might be because mod_dosevasive has decided you’re an attacker.

A Tale of Two ISPs

Customer service is driving us from a dinosaur of an ISP to one that "gots it."

Thanks to all my Fans

There’s a whole lot of work being done on monitoring the health and status of systems using differing patterns of background sound. Perhaps your server farm sounds like a rain forest, and a cricket chirps every time someone portscans you.

It turns out I have one of these set up for free. I run continuous builds for our books in production on my office G5, and the G5 fans are very responsive to processor load. So whenever the build system decides to rebuild a book (because an author has checked in changes), the fans kick in, and I can wander over and see what’s cooking. It’s surprisingly useful feedback.

It's Oscar Season...

…and over on his blog, Mike Clark has his candidate all ready to go. The Cruise Control Action Movie is a rollicking yarn of tests and betrayal, elation and misery. And, of course, there’s the scene with the hot lava. It’ll have you on the edge of your Herman Miller.

Or, it’ll be a good introduction to the power of automation for anyone not currently using CruiseControl.

I’ll let the Academy decide.

Transparent Inversion of Control

The dynamic nature of languages such as Ruby make integrating facilities such as Inversion of Control both painless and transparent (and not a line of XML in sight).

The "Dear Manager" Series

Over on his personal blog, Mike Clark just posted the first in what promises to be a series of Dear Manager articles.

Sometimes we developers just know that something is right, but have a hard time convincing the powers that be to believe us. Mike tackles this issue directly in a series of open letters to those holding the pocket book. This first article is all about the benefits of continuous integration and the economics of having a build machine.

CVS Log Messages to RSS

I’m increasingly finding RSS the best way to organize all the various streams of data that I have to digest every day. I already talked about converting my ToDo list to RSS. Mike Clark finally shamed me into simplifying another thing that was bugging me.

I manage a fair number of CVS repositories, and I like to track the activity in each. At the same time, I really don’t want to receive yet more e-mail. The answer was 50 lines of Ruby that take CVS loginfo messages and publish them back as an RSS file. Now I get a summary of all CVS activity in one place, and NetNewsWire updates it hourly. More details are over on Mike’s Project Automation site.

Weeding out Bugs

If programming is like gardening, then weeding has much to teach us about debugging.

The New LaTeX Companion

I love the output produced by TeX, and I love the flexibility I get typesetting from plain text input. However, TeX isn’t trivial. The new edition of The Latex Companion is a godsend.