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I had an exit interview at my old employer. It started with a question from a HR person about what I liked and – maybe, even – disliked about the company. After that, it consisted mainly of me telling the HR person “what I really disliked was X”, and the HR person responding that without…

Playing with NoFlo a bit, currently. It’s a flow-based programming environment in JavaScript. It might not be apparent from this post but I do quite like it. Data-flow programming is probably not much of an improvement if you start with a sane language. But since JavaScript is a rotten piece of shit all the way…

It’s hard to argue against TDD because that is often construed as arguing against software testing itself. I guess there are actually people who think that all testing is bollocks, but I am not one of them. I think that there’s value in regression and acceptance testing. Yet I still think that TDD is absolutely…

Gherkin is a hack. Gherkin is the “language” (I’ll justify the use of scare-quotes in a minute) used by the Cucumber test framework. Or, if you’re using PHP, the language behind the PHP port behat. Tests usually look something like this (example lifted straight from cucumber’s docs): Which is very nice. Having tests that are…

So I looked at ownCloud this week. The install was pretty much hassle-free, as you would expect from a PHP application. And the web frontend is pretty nice (though extremely slow, at least on my AMD Sempron server). There’s a photo gallery, and direct media streaming, and zip downloads, and generally a lot of good…

Racket Appreciation Day was today, for me. I tried writing a small script that reads from Github’s API and displays a list of “@mentions” in Guile. (Why Guile? Well, the short version of the story is that I’d like to run this program on my [Ben NanoNote](http://en.qi-hardware.com/wiki/Ben_NanoNote) since I have that machine lying around for…

Playing with node.js currently, and I don’t grok it. I’m passable (not “good”, just passable) in JavaScript but I don’t get why anyone would ever want to program in the style node.js dictates. It’s async, yeah. Only async. And async without language-level promises, or channels, or a select. Or multi-processing. Or anything really. They basically…

Here’s a small raycaster in CoffeeScript. I wrote that just to see how it would look. (There’s also a small rant at the end, if that’s what you’re looking for.) Result (click through from your RSS reader if you can’t see a canvas): Not bad, certainly more succinct than JavaScript, but …well – maybe I’ve…

Just some short notes about CoffeeScript, after maybe 5 hours of playing with it. This is mostly about the syntax – but then again, CoffeeScript is mostly about the syntax. I like it, overall, it’s definitely a step up from JavaScript. Though it is a bit of a “works 90% of the time” design: it…

Another entry without any ranting – what is this blog coming to? In order to not entirely slip into the realms of factual boringness this one is only useful for people who use wmii as their window manager: The wmii status bar doesn’t interpret ANSI escape codes for colors, but one can set the colors…