C# => Ruby Culture Shock #1: ‘Private’ Methods Ain’t So Private

This is the first in what I hope to be a series of little posts about the little flashes of ‘culture shock’ that I experience as I start to move from C# to Ruby as my day-to-day programming language. Here we’re going to look at the subtle yet significant difference in how method access modifiers …

DataMapper: A Better ORM for Ruby

One of the things that’s always irritated my about rails’ ActiveRecord framework is the way that the domain model lives in the database.Don’t get me wrong: it’s very clever, and a great showcase for ruby’s metaprogramming features, which will blow average C# / Java mind the mind when they first see it. In rails, you …

Fetch and Parse HTML Web Page Content From Bash. Wow.

Okay, this is another one of those linux newbie posts where I tried to figure out how to do something that’s probably really obvious to all you seasoned hackers out there. Anyway here I go clogging up the internet with a post that somebody, somewhere will hopefully find useful. Are you that person? Well… have …

Browser History That Doesn’t Suck?

I just came across this post from Kevin Lim about a cool new tool for the (Apple-based) Safari browser called SafariStand. A bit like HistoryHound, this plug-in allows you to quickly search your browser history, review it as thumbnails, and has a killer, iTunes-style cover-flow view of your history called History Flow: Like Kevin, I’m …

WatiN Goes Cross-Browser

The WatiN (Web Application Testing In .Net) framework, a port of the popular watir framework in ruby, has recently announced support for Firefox. This should make it a compelling alternative to selenium, especially as it looks to be a good deal quicker. Sweet. Now if only I had a way to serve up an ASP.NET …

Automating Javascript Unit Tests / Specs – Part 1

I’m building an Adobe Air application at the moment, which basically means loads of javascript development. We’re building it pure test-first, and have kicked off using jsUnit to get us started with something simple, flipping to the browser when we make a change and hitting the ‘run’ button in the jsTest testrunner HTML page. I’m …