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Piers Cawley just posted about Martin Fowler’s attempt to write a book about DSL’s actually, “internal DSLs”. Piers calls these “Pidgins” and I think it’s a pretty good term for them.

These are the sorts of languages where you don’t write a lexer or parser but instead build a family of objects, methods, functions or whatever other bits and pieces your host language provides in order to create a part of your program that, while it is directly interpreted by the host language, feels like it’s written in some new dialect. - Piers Cawley

[EDIT] Odiogo is now some sort of Japanese Car site. As such, this page has been obsoleted by yet another cool proprietary product disappearing.

Odiogo will take your blog’s rss feed and run it through a text-to-speech converter so that people can subscribe to it as a podcast. It’ll, obviously, have the same quirks as any other text-to-speech converter and is, probably, limited to English but it’s a pretty nifty idea, even if their name is a total rip-off (Odiogo makes rss into podcasts Odeo manages rss feeds of podcasts). Also, they seem to have done a really good job with the intonation of the computer voice.

I learned this many years ago from my first love, and she, I suspect, from her mother. It’s a simple and fun thing that’s always better with friends and family. In the end everyone will have a collage to help them to not loose sight of their dreams through the coming year.

**Step one:**Gather up all the magazines in your house. If you don’t have many / any get everyone who will be participating down to your local news-stand and have them all grab some magazine that reflect their interests in life.

_why suggested that

…chaos is an essential component of writing code. The system is too big for you to fathom. So you are always finding yourself in unfamiliar territory. And once you fathom the system, it becomes too boring and tedious to pay attention to details…

…Unit testing, in particular, is designed to reel in spontaneous hacking. It is like framing a picture before it has been painted. Hacking, at heart, will continue to be something of spontaneous order, something of anarchy, and the landscape of hacking is something which comes from human action but is not of human design.

The other day I posted a rant about “Alphabetical != ASCIIbetical”, which, much to my surprise, got picked up in a couple places and brought thousands of readers. As with any post that gets thousands of readers, some of them are going to call you an idiot.

…I don’t know what you call this sorting order, but it most definitely is not alphabetical. Maybe you should make sure you aren’t being a dumbass before you climb atop your own soapbox of delusional self-importance. - Dave G.

[BEGIN RANT]

Partially this is a case of Java community being populated by idiots, but people seem to be wholly ignorant on this issue in other languages too. Google for java alphabetical sorting capitalization or any combination of words you can think of that might get you an algorithm that sorts a collection alphabetically. You will find hundreds of wrong responses and no correct ones. Most of them say to use the Arrays.sort(..) or Collections.sort(..) methods. But both of those use natural order (or ASCIIbetical as I like to call it) not alphabetical order so 1 is followed by 10 not 2 and things starting with a capital letter aren’t beside things with the lowercase version of the same letter.

The Word Game

I don’t remember the exact origins of The Word Game. I just remember that John was involved. The word game is great for passing time on long road trips, seeing how your friends brains work, and enhancing a child’s vocabulary. You can also play it by yourself. It’s an association game, but the rules are subtle.

The rules I can tell you: Phrases and short sentences are allowed, but words and names are preferred. All words are legal, especially interesting ones. You continue until you either can’t come up with an “acceptable” response. Then you start over. Any response that no-one complains about is “acceptable”. It should be fairly obvious when a response isn’t satisfactory. Associations can be based on the sound of the word, the meaning of the word, things associated with the word. Cooler words are better.

Some of you may be interested to know that SSCM v 0.4 has been released. Notable changes: supports move operations, fixed a bug with perforce support, allows you to live dangerously and just accept all detected changes into the repo without asking.

The two things I’d like to get in there now are branching and merging all the known repos with one command each. Should be relatively trivial for the distributed clients, but the centralized ones will be a little work. Anyone feel like pitching in?

Testing as a process of discovery

The other day a coworker said,

Some times you get situations where the specification for the unit or module you are writing just are not available. The code writing is a discovery process as much as anything else. Moreover, some of the packages and methods being called don’t have predictable or documented behavior. That’s ugly and horrible, and I don’t know how that’s allowed, but nonetheless, from the perspective of someone who wants to do unit testing in such an environment, can you give any tips? I mean, do you mock up approximations to what you think these external things should be doing if you really don’t know what they are doing? Do you do your best, updating mocks and tests, “in the face of adversity”?

This projects has been rolling around in my brain for a while but I haven’t tackled it yet because I have too damn many other projects in process. So I’m putting it here in the hopes that maybe someone will pick it up and run with it.

I want to put together a collection of javascript based graphing tools that generate pretty SVG graphs of your data in a way that’s fun to look at for people who have to work with it every day but not necessarily something you’d ever want to try and explain to a customer. I want to do this because we deal with a crapload of really interesting data at work, but a lot of it is just internal and only of interest to geeks. Also I’d like a visually interesting way to keep an eye on the status of our systems and the data flowing through them. Stacked bar charts and line graphs get old fast.