We’re nearing the half way point of the Rails Rumble.. 1 day, 2 hours, 24 minutes remaining as I write this. We’ve been taking some photos that I’ve been posting at my .Mac web gallery.

We’re getting prepped for the Rails Rumble. Nancy & I have entered as a team. The kids have been told they’re on their own for the weekend. This is going to be a great bit of fun.

RSpec Autotest now a Rails Plugin:

“Posted by Nick Sieger Wed, 15 Nov 2006 15:46:00 GMT

Inspired by a posting on the RSpec list and recent comments stating that my Auto RSpec hack wasn’t working, I’ve bitten the bullet and upgraded to RSpec 0.7.2, and made rspec_autotest a plugin in the process. So, here are the necessary incantations to auto-rspec your project.”

OK, so I’m a bit behind on RSpec developments. But this plugin makes a world of difference when using rspec.

While Nick mentions rspec 0.7.2 in the post, I’m using it with the latest (pre-trunk) 0.9.0 without any issues.

If you use rspec (with rails or not.. see rspec-autotest-for-standalone-projects) you should be using this plugin!

Nancy and I have begun exploring game development for the Nintendo DS. We found that most of the material available online wasn’t of the greatest quality. So we set up nds-homebrew.net to be a repository of the useful information we find, as well as being home to a blog tracking our efforts and progress.

The blog is there now, and more structured information will follow.

TextMate  Power Editing for the Mac James Edward Gray II

I’ve read a couple of the beta versions of this book from the Pragmatic Press. It’s good. If you are using TextMate, you should have this book. The current documentation for TextMate is pretty lame. This book does an admirable job of filling that void.

The writing style is easy to read, and is quite information dense. Content goes from basic cursor movement all the way to custom language support. It’s a good read, and packed with valuable and useful information.

That said, while I’m impressed with the book, I’ve become less and less impressed with TextMate itself. It’s a wonderful text editor and a sweet Mac app, and will long have a place on my dock. But for serious programming, it doesn’t cut it. I’ve gone back to “old faithful”… my constant companion from from way back.. GNU Emacs. If you’re doing serious programming, there’s nothing like Emacs.

Mike Vizdos has a new SCRUM resource site up: www.implementingscrum.com. It looks good… with ots of useful information. And it has cartoons.

Check it out.

IEEE Software will have a special issue on test-driven development early next summer, edited by Grigori Melnik and Ron Jeffries. I’m a reviewer (as is Brian Marick and likely several others). Check out the Call for Papers and send in submissions. The deadline is December 1.

Nice post by Defiler on RSpec:

RSpec On Rails:

RSpec is mere days away from a new release with greatly improved Rails support.

Since people are currently paying me to write Rails code, rather than plain old standalone Ruby (hint hint), I’ve been waiting for these features before making serious use of RSpec.

As an exercise, I ‘ported’ the acts_as_authenticated controller tests to RSpec. The results were fairly interesting. Subjectively, I find it more readable than the test/unit version. Objectively, one of the test/unit test cases doesn’t get run because there are two methods with the same name.

…

So far, so good. Anyone who thinks that RSpec is ‘only’ about a different set of terminology should give it a serious try first.

(Via ~:caboose.)