Exactly
Posted by matijs
Daring Fireball quotes Zeldman:
Flash won’t die tomorrow, but plug-in technology is on its way out.
Exactly. And good riddance.
Toxic Elephant
Tab Sweep: Monads
Posted by matijs
Learning about monads is hard, and there seems to be no magic pill. Probably one reason is that they have several different uses. Many articles focus on one of those uses, making it hard to get the whole picture. On the other hand, articles that try to directly explain what monads are leave the reader wandering what they're good for. Some links.
- Brent Yorgey argues that any shortcut by focusing on a particular metaphor (e.g., monads are like burritos) will not work.
- Mark Dominus argues why monads are indeed like burritos.
- [Monads as Containers][cont] fits in nicely by abstracting away from burritos (or space suits) to containers. It goes on to talk about how this relates to IO and other uses for monads. I'm still working on reading through this article.
- sigfpe starts from the other end, showing how certain needs could automatically lead to monads. I haven't finished that one either, but so far it's been very insightful.
- I also found The Continuation Monad in Clojure very insightful. Again, it focuses more in the use and implementation, rather than abstract theory. I'm not yet sure whether the insights I myself got from it are actually correct. More on that later, perhaps.
How to Get Apache and Typo Page Caching to Play Nice
Posted by matijs
The Problem
You have been running a Typo blog since 2005, but you still can’t quite get your Apache configuration right. In particular, you still get the occasional
Not found: http://www.matijs.net/blog/2005/07.html/24/from-bryar-to-typo
Note the weird 07.html part.
The Solution
This particular message turns up if you have turned the MultiViews option
on: The file 07.html was cached earlier, and Apache finds it a good
candidate for the 07 part of the URL. Of course it can’t find a
subdirectory 24 inside that file! I personally consider this behavior
extremely weird, but that doesn’t make it go away.
The solution is to turn off MultiViews and implement a poor man’s version that does no more than what’s needed.
# Turn off MultiViews
<Directory /var/www/www.matijs.net/public>
Options FollowSymLinks -MultiViews
</Directory>
# Rewriting must be on
RewriteEngine on
# Implement simplistic MultiViews in the blog sub-uri
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} "^$"
RewriteRule ^/blog/?$ /blog/index.html [QSA,L]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} "^$"
RewriteRule ^/blog([^.]+)/?$ /blog$1.html [QSA,L]
# Implement simplistic MultiViews elsewhere (static content)
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^([^.]*)$ $1/index.html [QSA,L]
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteRule ^([^.]*)$ $1.html [QSA,L]
That ‘s it.
Some notes:
The mapping to html files is implemented differently in the $/blog$ sub-uri than elsewhere. In the static part of the site, if there’s an URI
/some/where, and and URI/some/where/else, this is stored on disk as/some/where/index.htmland/some/where/else.html, respectively. In the blog part, Rails’ static caching system uses/some/where.htmland/some/where/else.html.Turning on MultiViews for the static part of the site is not possible, since turning it off for the blog then does not seem to work. This may have something to do with the directory layout demanded by Passenger.
It’s easy to get this wrong and cause Apache to never see the cached files. It’s also easy to get this wrong in other ways.
The
QSApart is probably not necessary. Call its presence a case of cargo-cult configuration.If your blog is not in the sub-URL
blogyou’ll have to change things, of course. Good luck.
RSpec Still Sucks
Posted by matijs
I run rake spec and get:
Test::Unit::AssertionFailedError in 'XmlController test_bad_format' Expected response to be a <:missing>, but was <301> /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/actionpack-2.3.4/lib/action_controller/test_case.rb:114:in `clean_backtrace' ./spec/controllers/xml_controller_spec.rb:152:in `test_bad_format'
So, things fail in xml_controller_spec, right? So, I run:
./script/spec spec/controllers/xml_controller_spec.rb
And I get this:
27 examples, 0 failures
WTF??
Yes, this turns out to be due to the fact that the spec in question was in its original form as migrated from Test::Unit. But that’s not really an excuse: Either Test::Unit style tests work in RSpec, or they don’t. They shouldn’t work some of the time. Now I suddenly can’t trust any of the Test::Unit style tests in Typo anymore: Are they passing because the code works, or because of some mystical internal RSpec magic?
I am mass-replacing lines of def test_bla_bla by it "test_bla_bla" do right now.
Very Simple Nautilus Plugin to Show Deletion Date
Posted by matijs
Gnome’s file manager, Nautilus, does not natively support showing the deletion date for trashed items. This has annoyed me, and others, for a very long time.
Long story short, I created a very simple implementation in Python as a Nautilus plugin. You can find it in its github repository.
This solution has one drawback to : Nautilus plugins can only add string columns, so to make it sort right the date is not in a very user-friendly format. I like to think of it more as proof-of-concept.
What’s next? Nautilus has hard-coded support for sorting by each of its possible date columns. It would be nice to make that more generic so as to allow adding arbitrary date columns, or columns with the sort key and user-visible text separated.
The Arc Challenge
Posted by matijs
Hm, so Arc is here, and Paul Graham gives the Arc challenge. The answer in Arc is short indeed. First, let’s see an answer in Rails (loading a framework is allowed according to the challenge), with said_controller.rb:
class SaidController < ApplicationController
def index; end
def click; session[:it] = params['what']; end
def show; end
endand some templates, for the first page, index.html.erb:
<% form_tag '/said/click' do %>
<%= text_field_tag 'what' %>
<%= submit_tag %>
<% end %>second page, click.html.erb:
<%= link_to 'click here', {:action => 'show'} %>third page, show.html.erb:
You said <%= session[:it] %>The Rails answer may be a little longer (although by how much is hard to say due to the different syntax — is end a token?), but it not a case of the same but longer.
First, the Rails version is in temporal order, the Arc version is not. Perhaps there’s a way of reading the Arc version that makes this order natural, but right now, it looks confusing.
But the most striking difference is that it is based on a completely different philosophy of how web applications should be developed. The Arc answer is great if you want a web application based on continuations. The Rails answer is what you would use if you want to use REST.
I’m definitely in the REST camp, which makes this example meaningless as a demonstration of Arc. It shows me that Arc can be used to write a short program that does something I don’t want to do.
The ultimate question of course is whether brevity (in terms of number of tokens, not characters) is the single best metric for language power.
Update: Someone wrote a Ruby version that is about as short as the Arc version, uses the same paradigm, and is in temporal order:
def said
aform(input("foo"), submit) {
w_link("click here") {
"you said: #{arg :foo}"}}
endAaargh!
Posted by matijs
I’m upset. I’m so upset that I was originally going to call this entry “Fuck you, Python”. Now, I realize that’s not a very nice thing to say, and actually, Python can’t really help it anyway. Except by not existing1.
Why, why, why must every other new language created these days have significant indenting? You see a new language, like Cobra, you read the overview of features, and you go, cool, great runtime performance, static and dynamic typing, and contracts, too. So you browse on to the hello world example, and boom! the absence of end-of-block tokens hits you in the face like an iron fist.
Now, in Python’s case you can tell from the reasoning2 and the implementation that somebody actually thought this through, but Cobra has the following rationale for using this method of block structuring:
Cobra uses indentation to denote code structure since adept programmers do this anyway in languages that don’t even require it (C#, Java, C++, etc.)
Wow. I’m going to make a language that uses the comma-space token to separate function arguments, since adept programmers put a space after the comma in languages that don’t even require it.
Look, if you use indenting for block structure because you like Python, just say so already.
Oh wait, there’s more:
In Cobra, one INDENT is accomplished by one TAB or four SPACES.
Huh? Because adept programmers indent four characters anyway even in languages that don’t require it? Because adept programmers use one tab per four spaces anyway even in editors that don’t require it?
Sheesh.
I feel much calmer now.
1 See how reasonable I am. I’m not actually calling for the non-existance of Python.
2 I don’t agree with that reasoning either, but at least it’s, you know, reasonable.
Hello New Year!
Posted by matijs
It’s a new year! Time for more resolutions. I can’t believe that’s actually two years ago.
Yes, my blog has been neglected, but not for want of anything to write about. Oh, there are so many things I have an opinion about. But always, it’s the question, is my opinion interesting, new, well informed, etc? And can I write something sizable about it? Not conductive to writing every monday (recently replaced by sunday, but I bet you hadn’t guessed). Maybe I should try less hard to be reasonable.
Oh yeah, e-mail is getting better, mainly thanks to the Inbox Zero articles.
What I really want to be doing: I still don’t really know, but let’s look at what I might blog about:
- Size is the Enemy, leading to the issue of abstractions in programming languages.
- 80/20, or the problem of getting your average Java/.NET programmer to really learn and use new things (e.g., new methods of abstraction).
- Lots of new languages are popping up, all running on some VM or other (e.g., Scala, Nemerle, Boo). Where’s the development in regular compiled languages?
This surely points in some direction, but some weighted average will have to be taken to find out what that direction is.
I did manage to quit the job that was definitely going in the wrong direction, so there’s a plus.
Oh, you wanted new resolutions? Hm, let’s do some:
- Uncluttered house
- Learn Japanese
- Finish more software so it’s releaseable
The Beauty of Git
Posted by matijs
After my struggles with svk, working with git is a breath of fresh air. It has great support for branching and merging, and putting even the smallest of throwaway projects under version control becomes as simple as:
git init
Gone are the days of the “oh i’ll just make ten copies of this script here because setting up a repository takes too long” style of version control.
I'm Not a Mockist
Posted by matijs
Let’s talk about mocking.
It apparently is the hot new thing in Rails land. And like earlier silver bullets, it’s becoming a religion: Acolytes would rather write ten lines to set up a mock object than one to instantiate an actual one.
Honestly, I have tried to understand the benefits of mocking, but I just don’t see them1. Then I thought I would have to write a long article about how mocking is flawed, and would you people please all see sense already. Luckily, Martin Fowler did it for me, and with a lot more objectivity. Go read his Mocks Aren’t Stubs. In addition to explaining the difference between Mocks and Stubs (a difference often overlooked by the religious), he explains why you might not want to use what he calls “mockist testing”.
So, in the spirit of religious tolerance, I can now say: I’m not a Mockist.
My particular reasons?
- Mockist testing is not DRY: Each class’ behavior is now defined in its code, its unit tests, and each time it is mocked.
- Mockist testing tests a particular implementation of behavior, making refactoring harder.
- Mockist testing makes writing your tests more work, inviting you not to test.
Next time you find yourself complaining that setting up your mock objects is such a lot of work, ask yourself: “Am I a Mockist?”. Maybe you’re not.
1 Well, one minor benifit I can see that you can start writing and testing your views before having written your models. I never seem to want to do that anyway, though.
