[kumo.it] » notes

The perils in trusting syntax highlighting

kumo — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 10:45:42 +0000

Today after upgrading RSpec I ran a user story that I had just written and received a wonderful error: You have a nil object when you didn't expect it! (NoMethodError). The error occurred while evaluating nil.add_scenario. I didn’t even think to check my user story because the syntax highlighting looked fine and it made sense to me:

  Scenario: areas have different types
    As an administrator
    I want to assign different types to the areas
    So that I can structure the home page

    Scenario: footer shows page links
      Given an area
      And area has 5 pages
      And area is of type footer
      When I view the home page
      Then I should see the home page
      And I should see the footer section
      And the list section should contain 0 areas
      And the footer section should contain 5 links

Of course, if I actually bothered to read it properly then I would have seen that the first line should have read:

  Story: areas have different types

Moral of the story: even if the code that you have to write is small, always assume that you are capable of making silly mistakes!

Unzipping palm apps on a nintendo ds

kumo — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 15:07:36 +0000

Yesterday we wanted to play 3D tictactoe on my palm, but we didn’t have any such game. Now I could have used OnBoardC or plua to ‘quickly’ write a game but I didn’t have 2 weeks or a collection of icons at hand. Instead I found myself using Opera on my Nintendo DS to browse the internet but I couldn’t download the zip file.

So, rebooting into DSLinux (using a supercard and sd card) I could use wget to download file to the memory card and then unzip it.

All I needed to do then was put the memory card in the palm and copy it … after playing the game I wished that I could write the game for the Nintendo DS.

Childrens TV in the UK

kumo — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 09:28:26 +0000

This is more of a note to myself, but when I was a lad at lot of the children’s drama that was shown on childrens tv was Australian or from New Zealand. Thinking back it was quite impressive as there was (as far as I can remember):

(all links point to wikipedia)

Does anyone remember anything else?

rubyonrails – beware of similarly named relationships

kumo — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 10:26:00 +0000

I recently developed a “rubyonrails”:http://www.rubyonrails.org application in which a user had a province (as part of their address) and also a collection of selected provinces.

class Users
  belongs_to :province
  has_and_belongs_to_many :selected_provinces, :class_name => "Province"
end

I could very easily find out which provinces a user had selected and also which users had selected a specific province. However I didn’t realise that if I accessed a user via the province then the province_id which previously pointed the user’s address province was replaced by the id of the selected province.

province = Province.find_first
province.users.each do |user|
  # do something
  # however user.province_id now points to province
end

I assume the province_id is added by the habtm join so that we can understand which selected_province object this user object comes from however in my case it meant that I lost the original province_id and so if I saved that user then I would end up changing the address province.

This is probably not a bug as such but something that should be watched out for as it took me a while to discover this problem with my application.

Tim and Tobias ~ Magic in the Wind

kumo — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 09:59:00 +0000

I remember reading a book when I was in Infant/Junior School but all I could recall were certain elements: a boy living by a canal with his uncle or aunt, a key that was a black cat, a mountain, and a kitten being thrown in the canal.

I searched and I searched and I found a forum with someone looking for the same thing as me, but they were told that it was perhaps “Magic Mountain”.

Somehow though, I managed to find the book and so I place this information in the google archives just in case someone else is searching for it

The author was Sheila K. McCullagh and the first book was called *Tim and Tobias ~ Magic in the Wind*. I also discovered a website called “Tim and the Hidden People” (which is where I probably found this missing book) and can be found at “www.timandthehiddenpeople.moonfruit.com”:http://www.timandthehiddenpeople.moonfruit.com/