Today I finally got my feet wet with something I’ve been meaning to try on for size ever since reading Clean Code, during my trip to Vienna last autumn; wow has it really been that long already, where’d winter and spring hide?

Anyway, so at about midnight last night I finally embarked on the process of coding up a new feature for Twitulater, or at least its server-side bits, after some prep work. Now since this is a rather mission critical system that I’d very much like to be somewhat reliable and rock-solid, unit testing seemed to be the way to go.

Downloading PHPUnit gave me some headaches, because ubuntu’s package managers fucked something up. Why is it I can’t install Pear if there are broken packages for something completely different? Then came the figuring out of how to actually do unit testing and I must say, it was incredibly simple. Of course I did have eight months’ time for the principles grokked from Clean Code to seep in, but still.

Mostly I was suprised to finally confirm that I have been doing test driven development (TDD for you acronym junkies) for a long while. Just in reverse. Whereas now, with automated unit tests, I first write a test, then the code, I used to write the code then test the hell out of it. With PHPUnit testing has become much less of a hassle – run a command, make sure everything works. Nice!

However, unit testing has one large drawback. It took me a solid six hours of coding to produce … nothing. I have in my possession now 200 lines of real code that doesn’t implement much other than making sure users exist and authenticating them, and a bunch of tests taking up a full … 170 lines of code. This is of course after some refactoring and whatnot, the original ratio was always that there were twice as many tests as there was actual code. Yummie.

Now I’m sure many of you will bash me for being such a dirty little blasphemer, but fuck it. Despite all the headaches saved with testing, despite making testing a lot simpler and quicker. It still took me SIX BLOODY HOURS to create some functionality that never used to take more than two hours to code and debug.  This is quite horrible.

And to top it all off, I can’t even be certain there are no bugs in my code! I’ve reached the exact same level of debugged code as I normally would, except that now I can automatically test for everything I could think of going wrong, whereas before I had to invest a bit of elbow grease.

Then again, I probably won’t be abandoning unit testing for mission-critical things any time soon. There is a sense of gratification seeing the tests pass, there is also a sense of “oh my god that was easier than eating a pie” when you run 20 tests and it takes ten seconds instead of ten minutes.

Perhaps most importantly, however, is that with automated unit tests you never forget to run a test. So I guess, in the end, it’s worth it spending those extra long hours to have code you can prove works like you think it should any time. Without spending a bunch of effort on making sure it does.

Unit testing is here to stay, even if it’s a bit of a pain in the arse.

Be advised, I am currently fighting a deathly battle with a nasty cold so the rest of this entry might feel a bit foggy and poorly phrased. You were warned.

Burlesque, for those who don’t know, is a type of performance art much like striptease and other “exotic” dances, but on a far more refined level. Now I can’t say this for certain having only seen the regular sleazy striptease in person, but burlesque seems to be a far more enjoyable viewing experience than pretty much anything one could imagine.

What I love about burlesque is that a lot of it doesn’t even necessarily involve nudity, much of it is just damsels hopping about on stage in fancy dress with a supporting cast of burly men in drag. And there’s a lot of music, good music.

Striptease on the other hand is a bit of a meh, sure the broad gets naked, but it’s all so distasteful, so sleazy and rotten it’s nigh on unenjoyable …

Therefore I propose that we need to have more burlesque shows in Slovenia, especially because traveling to the US or London or whatnot just for a show of such nature can hardly be justified. I’m told that there have already been certain occasions of burlesque shows, but I’d be very glad if someone could point me to more such things … especially, you know, like before the event? Can do? Please do. The closest I’d ever seen to burlesque was Cabaret in MGL and in London, but it’s just not quite what I’m looking for despite being a supremely awesome show.

Now just for a quick taste, here’s some Miss Meow Meow, whom I’ve just discovered today and instantly fell in love with almost as much as with Amanda Palmer.

And since no post about burlesque can be complete without mentioning Dita von Teese. There. Dita von Teese. Hope you’re happy now.

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Some of you probably realise that I’m a bit of a steampunk and have been even since before I realised steampunk was what I was a fan of. Think I called it historical sci-fi back then. Even as a little child I was a fan of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells‘ Time Machine – now known as the epithome of steampunk.

Interestingly enough, though, is that neither of those actually are steampunk. They’re both just turn-of-the-century science fiction. It was only later, in the 1970’s I believe, that they were made steampunk with movie interpretations of their works. Something about intentionally being made to look as if they were believe to be invisioned by the original authors. Brilliant! The birth of steampunk.

It was around that time, as well, that somebody came up with the term steampunk and created a whole literary movement around it. Unfortunately I have no idea who this was, but it’s all described well and properly in Steampunk Magazine issue no. 5. If you’re even a bit of a steampunk you should totally buy this magazine. It costs about 5 euro for us europeans because it has to be shipped from the US, but it’s well worth it. Amazing stuff in there.

Actually, it’s even better than amazing, one of the stories cites me (pseudonym Dr. Richard von Tropp) from issue three as an inspiration for their writing. Felt I should mention that.

Anyhow, a few days ago I received by steamboat (more likely by an evil aeroplane) two new fashionable items to add to my somewhat steampunkish attire. A magnificent silver pocket watch, which I have to have a clockmaker have a look at since it’s acting a bit funny and I feel reluctant to sending it back to the US and waiting for it once more, and a lovely silver plated cane. Both were purchased from The Gentleman’s Emporium – suggest you give them a look if you want to see some pretty clothes and stuff.

Edit: apparently the watch works a lot better when wound the proper way

Been listening to the llama song a lot lately and was reminded of all the brilliant memes that existed on the internets long before there was youtube or anything like web2.0. It was quite a different time in our lives and accordingly the humor was much different as well.

Enjoy these old classics, do hope you still remember them.

… accord to a personality test I just took. Wow, groundbreaking AND a thinker. I’ll take it even though the very first question I was given had me thinking for a while which option I should pick. The rest were simple dead on choices. Woot!

But I’ll let the test do the talking savvy?

Groundbreaking Thinkers are charming, enthusiastic persons. They really bubble over with energy and like to take centre stage. They love variety both professionally and privately. Groundbreaking Thinkers tackle changes consistently with their optimism and firm belief in their own abilities; they are always on the look-out for improvement possibilities. Their excellent communication skills are of great advantage to them here. They approach the world with curiosity and openness and master new situations with a great deal of talent for improvising and with resourcefulness. Their spare time is taken up with a large number of hobbies; most Groundbreaking Thinkers like to travel in order to gather as many different impressions as possible. This personality type is unbeatable at discovering new possibilities.

Their sociability and enterprise ensure that Groundbreaking Thinkers always have a large circle of friends and acquaintances in which activity plays an important role. As they are mostly in a good mood, they are popular and very welcome guests. Grumbling and peevishness are unknown to them. However, they do tend to be a little erratic and unstable when it comes to obligations and this makes them appear to be unreliable to some. Groundbreaking Thinkers are very critical and demanding when it comes to picking a partner because they look for the ideal relationship and have a very concrete picture of this ideal relationship. Mutual aims in life are very important to them. They do not like compromising and would rather remain alone. For the partner, it is often a challenge to have a long-term relationship with a Groundbreaking Thinker. Groundbreaking Thinkers need a lot of space and diversity or otherwise they become bored and feel cramped. Types who are rather more traditionalistic often have problems with the willingness of Groundbreaking Thinkers to take risks and their often crazy, spontaneous actions. However, if one can summon up sufficient flexibility and tolerance for them, one will never be bored in their presence and will always have a loyal and faithful partner. Learn more about the Groundbreaking Thinker in love …

I’d be hard pressed to label this as good or bad, but I’m sure I get on a lot of people’s nerves.

10:16 Today was horrible walking weather. Groggily stumbling to IJS felt a bit like trying to swim through a sauna. I don’t even know how late I was getting here, but I somehow managed to snatch the very last energy drink. Yay! Shame I’m in last row this time … think we’re listening to @markostamcar talking about … something. Is this the “code snippets that saved my life” talk?

Oh and before anyone asks again, yes, I’m the guy in a black bowler and no that card is not an Ace. Never an Ace.

10:29 @markostamcar just admited to being a dirty dirty pirate thief. Wonder if anyone from the MAFIAA is here or we’re all just a bunch of dirty swashbucklers? Interesting code bit, think it calculates a foreign TV guide into local time for torrent browsing.

10:34 Interesting thing I just noticed. Trying to make fancy <?phpconference in a blog title makes wordpress do funny things like simply cutting everything ahead of <? off. Couldn’t you please just escape it? It felt lovely having it there and now my url is all funky.

10:51 Miha Hribat made a refreshing commercial break for igrajmo.se, whatever that is. Looks interesting, but the talk will be about caching dynamic content. Hopefully we’ll all learn something new even though most of us have probably dealt with this before.

10:58 MogileFS is an opensource filesystem written in perl that runs on the application level and, apparently, uses everything from the DB, disk system and some other funky stuff to keep data safe and bloody quick to access. Sounds very nice. And now the more interesting part about memory caching – the really important thing when it comes to cache. Oh hey, I just noticed a corporate-approved dry joke. Well done!

11:03 Yes memcached! The greatest thing since caching was invented and of course, all the big names are using it. Been a while since I played around with this thing, should probably try it again. Miha says the biggest object you can store is 1MB in size and since Twitter complained about having a problem with one of their important objects exceeding 1MB I’m concluding twitter uses memcached as well … oh hey I didn’t know memcached will only keep things for at most 30 days.

11:35 Anze Znidarsic will be talking about abusing flash+php to make rich internet applications. And he just received a raging applause for giving us a 15 minute break Win.

11:54 Anze is talking about Flash on the internets, what we can and what we cannot do. Personally I hope flash dies a quick death and we shouldn’t be abusing it to do new things like we did with pdf. Sure it’s difficult to make things work the same in every browser, but we don’t HAVE TO. What we need to do is teach users that things won’t look the same everywhere, even native desktop applications don’t look the same on everyone’s computer.

12:01 According to what is being said I’m really going to need to look into this Flex Builder thing. It’s quite ama

zing how, apparently, you can just design something in Photoshop, export and then just add some working logic and you’re done. Looks incredibly simple and like a very fast workflow. Lovely bit is how I can abuse this lecture to pretty much deal away with half the things I could have said on my talk in a few hours. Brilliant! Thanks Anze.

12:11 That is a wonderfully brilliant sample app. Basically a project managment tool for girls. Stores girl_id and her status that is one of “Done”, “to-do” or “in progress”. Today is definitely much better than yesterday was.

14:06 We’re back from lunch and Mr. Somebody, didn’t catch his name, is talking about Comet, which is apparently a method for pushing data from server to client and doing it live. This is something I’ve always wondered about so I’m about to have my wet dream answered.

14:12 Comet is interesting. Apparently it’s some sort of reverse Ajax and once more isn’t a technology in and of itself (just like Ajax) but an architecture design. HTTP/1.1 allows us to do this crap and even though all of this is starting to make a little sense it’s quite odd. It’s polling, but not polling, or is it polling? Damn, can’t wait for the practical demo. (Oh the guy is Mitja Kramberger, cool guy)

14:20 There almost seems to be more problems with Comet than it provides solutions. Interesting. Since I’m not actually

understanding a whole lot of this (thanks @robertbasic for giving that wikipedia link) there isn’t much summation I can do for you blog readers. Sorry. Or maybe I’m just not paying enough attention since nervousity is building up ’cause I’m up next. Whose stupid idea was it anyway to get over public talking anxiety by talking publicly a lot? Idiot.

14:31 Comet on the server is where it gets really interesting. Traditional server software is #fail because you need man concurrent connections and they’re made to quickly close everything and get on with their lives. Someone should implement an event-based IO, but nobody’s really done anything yet, working on it, just not done. So when somebody DOES make something, will the web be all buzzy and broken and fubar and odd as it was when Ajax first became popular?

14:35 I was wrong. There are many implementations … makes me wonder why not everyone is doing this just yet like they did with Ajax? Poor gecko browser support? Developer ignorance? What?

16:00 Wow, I’ve never had so much fun talking in front of a large crowd for 45 minutes before. Not sure what it was, but I simply blabbed my mouth off. There were even questions when I finished! Yay. Anyhow, seems we’ll be listening to Tomaž Muraus talking about the CodeIgniter framework. @anze_znidarsic was right, we should have a large discussion over frameworks and slug it out in the mud.

16:15 Blahblahblah CodeIgniter, blahblah, use frameworks, blahblah, MVC is awesome, blahblah, frameworks are fast

or slow … this talk shouldn’t take place as last because it’s going to stick with us too much and it’s quite probably one of the less great we’ve seen these two days. Too bad the organisers can’t tell in advance how interesting someone will be as a presenter. Not everyone of us is Gašper Kozak.

16:35 Let me give you some quotes from the twitter stream of what’s going on right now.

@janhancic zzzzzz

@alesf: I want to know why should I use CodeIgniter not how.

@anzerobida: Codelgniter prezentation is really not interasting:( Just waiting for Android!

@deveti: lahko bi bli kaki praktični “live” primeri uporabe codeigniterja … preveč teorije :/

and so on. Really, really is a shame this will be last. Those five minute quick persentations better be good and interesting.

16:55 Lightning talks now, hope they’re as interesting as the barcamp ones usually are. First one … no idea, looks marginally interesting. I like the zen-like slides. Nice and clean, just like my very own barcamp lightning talk a while ago.

17:04 Apparently at the party last night were two gym trainer people and now they’re here talking about http://www.ls-trenerstvo.si, and by god that’s one hot chick on their frontpage. Since I see one of those guys at the gym all the time, and they happen to be aksing about SEO, would be nice if they could be my trainers and I could be their SEO guy. Hmmm … (that chick is really good SEO by the way)

17:09 talcho.com is a webservice thingy for chatting and even for gameplaying. They’re supposedly also developing an integrated client for embedding in any website and whatnot. Wonder if they use Comet, should ask when he’s done talking.

17:13 sweetsurveys.com five minute talk feels a bit silent. Must say I’m choked to see the guy can’t type on a mac keyboard, funny. And I am very impressed they have a certificate that actually shows up as green in firefox! Bravo! But a good pitch this isn’t. Oh well, still seems like a cool enough service I guess.

17:19 This guy is young, very young. But by god he’s great at just pushing and pushing and pushing his stuff on us. There isn’t a barcamp he doesn’t talk at, there isn’t a conference he doesn’t talk at. He’s gotten better and more fluent too, bravo Jan! Bravo! Anyway he’s talking about ig33k.si whatever that is. Looks pretty.

I think a few years down the road a shrewd businessman will come out of this curly-haired little dude.

17:32 Awww, I didn’t win an Android G1.

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Wet, late and hungry I arrived at the IJS venue where I’ll be staying all day listening to odd people talking about interesting stuff – very interesting I hope. Just so you know, I have a valid excuse for being late and missing the event’s introduction and everything, but let’s not get into that now (just so you know, I didn’t oversleep).

Right now I’m listening to Dusan Omercevic, I believe, talking about openID. Don’t really know what’s going on since I missed about half his lecture

10:23 Currently we’re discussing what the biggest problem of openID is and why it will never be used as a service but rather as a technology. Apparently the crux of the matter is that users like simplicity and corporations want huge databases of their users. Personally I think this will effectively kill openID, because every site or group of sites will have their own openID and users will still end up having twenty different usernames and passwords … except they’ll be called openID’s.

10:45 We’ve reached the other portion of this openID talk and it’s … not very interesting. A lot of technical stuff, which is just discouraging me from using this protocol. I still don’t exactly understand why I should. Coding a regular login system is easy as hell, this just seems needlessly complex for probably around 90% web devs out there.

11:28 Very interesting invitation to try along this guy’s hacking techniques on our websites. Should be useful to test Chlorine Boards. Hope I don’t do too much damage, ’cause I don’t have anywhere else to test than production websites.

12:12 Wow I think I need a new pair of trousers ’cause I just shat brix! The methods for doing crazy fun things on other people’s websites that Gašper Kozak is talking about are downright frightening. The websites I’m making are very rarely protected against this I must say. Really should pay more attention to security when I’m doing stuff, yeah sure I’m s

afe against most php-based problems. But I never even paid attention to these frontend stuffs.

12:27 Lesson learned. Don’t try to be friendly to users because hackers can easily abuse it and rape you from behind.

14:17 “Sad je trenutak velikih odluka! Bolje zivjesti sto godina kao milijunas nego sedam dana u bijedi!” Yes we’ve just finished lunch and this is on big screen. BlackBerry won’t give pictures to mac, will keep trying @gandalfar

14:20 Seems I wasn’t paying attention to the introduction because I have no idea who’s talking. They look like a tad older gent with graying hair and sexy spectacles. Interesting shoes too … well he’s talking about starting companies and whatnot. Can we really not get through a networking event anymore without listening about entrepreneurship (no matter how interesting the topic, it gets old). Recession ™ ?

And yes, still no pictures, the blackberry and laptop aren’t playing along.

14:30 Switched from Opera to Firefox to keep blogging. Zemanta, did you know drag&drop image adding doesn’t work in Opera? Anyway, the guy described before is Robert Šefman, very suiting name for the topic. Think we’ve stumbled into the more boring parts of starting a company. I mean, it’s an interesting topic, but this is minutiae, I’d much rather listen about the interesting parts. About the guts and the glory if you will.

14:45 To be honest, all this talk about taxes and how bloody confusing all of this is … hell, I’d almost rather become a topology mathematician than an entrepreneur. It does make _some_ sense, but very little. Not Robert’s fault of course, he’s doing his best to explain this stuff to us noobs, but it’s just one large brainfuck.

15:05 Back to more technical stuff apparently. Denis Arh will be talking about php cli but unfortunately I have to leave for my midterm. No more live blogging. Buh bye guys, see you at the party.

Day2 live blog

It’s been a while since I last did any game development, think I was about 12 when I made my last game, and to be honest I have no idea what on earth prompted me to stop doing this because it’s a blast.

Yesterday I took part in IPSC 2009 and was the one solving problem H, which was a game of 10 wolves under your control hunting a flock of 60 sheep. Each turn you could make ten moves and the game’s servers then made ten moves of sheep (I think). It was very fun to play and we managed to win the easy round by catching ten sheep, but ran out of time to eat all sixty.

Fast forward a few hours and it’s the middle of the night with the internets down. I couldn’t work on Twitulater so I decided to make a game of Wolf Hunt because I needed a sample app for the lecture this Saturday anyway.

I had a blast making the game, but it was quickly apparent that one wolf alone isn’t enough to catch the sheep because they keep running away. The solution to this problem turned out to be simple – I invented the Quantum Wolf Hunt.

The way this solved the problem is that it introduces other wolves onto the gaming board to spook the sheep. However there is a twist – no ability to make a coordinated attack because each wolf is hunting their own sheep on a different quantum plane and depending on connection speeds and server load, the other wolves’ motion could be non-linear.

Haven’t managed to test this in practice, but that’s why I’m putting it out a week in advance. To iron out any kinks.

Have fun guys

Even though talking about Coraline feels a bit old and redundant now that it’s four days after the fact, but what the hell, I was busy and blogging over the weekends has always seem a tad bit dirty … almost like I was poking people in the eyes saying “Hey you, yes you, you’re being lazy!”

Anyhow, in an unprecedented feat of being social I assembled my posse this friday to go see Coraline in an actual cinema. Wow! I haven’t done this since … well I’ve never done it to be honest. The reason why I did it is even more mindbogglingly strange – I wanted to go see the movie solely because I used to read Neil Gaiman’s blog and he seemed like a cool cat and talked a lot about how Coraline the movie is being made after one of his stories.

It did not disappoint.

Sure I haven’t read the book, but the movie was absolutely wonderful and its wikipedia page says there aren’t many distinctions from the book. Perhaps the most notable is the invention of a Wyborne character who seemed quite crucial to the plot in the movie so I have no idea how Neil managed without him …

Deciding to watch Coraline in XpanD and the lovely three dimensional thingamagic also turned out to be a stroke of genius. All of the effects were tasteful done and I could identify only two or three scenes that were 3-D porn. This, to me, is something that really sets Coraline apart from all the other 3D movies I’d seen, which were thin on the plot, empty on the characters and drowning on 3D porn.

There really isn’t anything I can find to criticise about this movie,the art was awesome, the story was great and the characters were spectacular. Even the soundtrack was bloody magnificent …

… ah yes, but there is one thing. There is a scene with dancing mice that purports to be stop-motion animation done with 64 or so figures moving simultaneously on stage and thus being a magnificent exampleof just how much awesome this movie is. However, watching the scene gave me an uneasy sensation of CGI repetition. They just moved too unanimously to look real and even their movement seemed rushed. Looked like frames kept being skipped.

All in all though, the movie is bloody awesome and I think everyone even remotely interested in proper cinematography should go see it.

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