So, things are staying busy as usual. The boys are doing well and getting big! Work has been a bit hectic as we were acquired by Barracuda Networks. It’s been exciting but fast. It is definitely good news for the customers as we will have more resources to both do fixes and push new features.
So we will see how things go and if they calm down soon :)
We had some fun last week while the bosses were out of the office for a few days.
Let’s just say that we have lots of old backup tapes, a chair, a willing office-mate, a camera, a flash (with grid), and too much time on a Friday afternoon.
Oh yeah, and don’t forget the duct tape. Never forget the duct tape!
I am selling a ton of infrequently used things on Craigslist to finance my new camera purchase. There is a lot of good stuff, especially for musicians, photogs and geeks.
Go ahead, make me an offer, punk.
UPDATE: My new camera has arrived, so I have put my Nikon D50 Outfit up for sale too. Also, I forgot I had a set of triggers for flashes that I don’t require anymore.
Update: Welcome fellow Daring Fireball readers. If you wish to get right to the actual code, feel free to skip to it.
I recently took up the challenge from John Gruber and Dan Benjamin to port John’s TitleCase.pl Perl script to an equivalent Ruby version. It seemed to me that converting someone’s script to another language would be a fun experiment to help learn any language. I was right.
I set up a git repository at GitHub.
I decided to write an extension to the String class in Ruby, as that would allow you to use this String#titlecase method anywhere and you could therefore write a standard input processing script trivially with this library included via a gem. Writing the extension also gave me a great excuse to learn more about RSpec, a nice Ruby testing library. I wrote the tests in RSpec, but I admit my tests were a quick hack to get them working at 3 in the morning, not good spec tests. Maybe someday I will convert them into real sentences of intent, as they should be. Either way, it was fun to try out Test Driven Development, and using the autotest function of the ZenTest gem to watch the tests start to pass as the script came along.
So after a few hours of learning about RSpec, ZenTest, all the tests from Gruber pass, even the one he lists as not working with his script. I took a different approach in how to process the titles, so there are not as many gotchas to fix up after processing either.
If you find it useful, let me know. And of course, fork the repo and send back some more test examples and any bugs you find.
P.S. Daniel also converted my Ruby version to PHP. We are going to use it at BitLeap for various things. He had also said about seeing about making a WordPress plugin out of it. So, I will prod Daniel to see if he will setup a public repository for it.
We destroyed the cap tower in our old office at work. It was great, Andy gave it a good swat with a wiffle ball bat. I put together a video so you can see it in slow-motion too. Check out the video on the BitLeap Blog.
Update: And BitLeap has decided to do a free contest: Whoever comes closest to guessing the number of caps that make up the tower by February 1st, gets a $50 gift card to either Amazon, Starbucks, Apple or Barnes
