Jay McGavren's Journal

2007-07-18

Cerberus

Been hearing various speakers sing the praises of “continuous integration” testing (automated builds, tests, and reporting on your project at regular intervals) at the Java users’ group.  Seems like a way of keeping score, which I like.  But of course my company is a bit behind the curve on such things.  (I know a couple projects with no tests at all.)  So if I want experience, it’s gonna be up to me.

Cerberus seems to be the most likely framework to use for Ruby.  My existing tests for Zyps included some stuff that launches a GUI window for a human to check visually, though, which isn’t compatible with an automated build.  That’s now been moved to a “demo” script.  Hopefully that’s the only dumb nonstandard thing I’ve done.

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2007-07-10

Ergh...

I’m reduced to a secretary today.  3 different groups want to know why their pet hotel’s records haven’t reached the database.  And while my predecessor may have been happy to trip through database tables and log files to hunt this kind of stuff down, I am not.

We need proper reports, proper documentation, and proper user access to both.  And short of a massive refactoring project, we won’t be getting any of the above.

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2007-07-10

Eat your heart out, LiveJournal.

The cron job to back up my WordPress database, including the attachments, is in place and working.  I can breathe a lot easier now.

The impracticality of backups was one of the reasons I wasn’t happy with any of the SixApart offerings.  I hope they’ll take note.

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2007-07-08

Nostalgia Part 2...

I can only find the remnants of the site I had in the mid-90s at Novia.net in Omaha. The original was even grosser-looking, with tiling water drops rendered in POV-Ray as a background. Maybe it’s burned to a CD somewhere. If I can ever find it I’ll post it here, as a warning to my children not to code HTML by hand.

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2007-07-03

... Awkward.

In addition to everyone I’ve e-mailed, we also have two Christian congregations and one Asatru kindred praying for Jeremy and for us.  :P

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