I thought you might be interested to see the fruits of my new hobby: stand up comedy.

It should be running in “HD” for 20% more laughs. Video taken by Greg Fairbrother, my awesome Mocra Off Railers co-driver.

I discovered a local Stand Up Comedy Course which started 6 weeks ago. The final “night” of the course was for the 8 of us to do a show for family and friends. I don’t remember reading about that on the sales brochure.

Nonetheless, knowing you had a 5 minute set to perform in front of your family and friends sets the expectation in your mind from day one that you don’t want to be shit. So we listened up, wrote as many jokes as we could think of, and hoped desperately we wouldn’t be a blubbering mess on the night.

It’s not all left to chance. Each week, the funny woman who ran the course, Fiona McGary, made us use the microphone on the stage. Either talk about our week, or list all the funny things you can think of about frogs. Or any other European people.

Each week we boldly attempted to make our other classmates laugh. At the start, they don’t. So I quickly learned to edit and then how to present comedy on stage. I tried to learn it fast because it’s weird telling a punch line, waiting for the laughs, and only being rewarded with a uncomfortable shared silence.

All my jokes started out crappy. So I attempted to edit them into “setup-punchline format”. Another phrase for “edit” is “delete half”. I’m a verbose writer. This turns out to suck awfully for stand up comedy. Or perhaps I should be a concise writer too. Oh the novelty of the idea.

Another way to edit a joke so it is ready for an audience is to delete all of it. Turns out, just because I thought of something funny doesn’t mean anyone else thinks it’s funny. Ewwww, that was an uncomfortable life lesson.

I don’t know anything else and the above is probably wrong too. The last six weeks have been a blur. Lots of practise, lots of editing, lots of writing, lots of testing ideas on Mocra staff when they aren’t expecting it, and weekly doses of disturbing reality at the Tuesday workshops when I realise I still have 10 years of more practise to go before David Letterman might ask me to come on his show. He’ll only be 112 years old by then, so fingers crossed.

I’m very appreciative of the 20+ family and friends who came along for the show. All the comedians were very appreciative of especially Lucas and Chendo who sat at the front and giggled like little girls all night.

Spending the last six weeks with the other noob comedians has been wonderful. It will be fun seeing everyone around the Open Mic rooms in Brisbane.

Finally, and most importantly, thanks to Fiona for running the course, and bumping us forward each week with the subtle phrase “that’s good; though it will need more editing.”

Here’s the problem: I install OS X Firefox 3.6b2 along side Firefox 3.5. They are both in my dock. Their icons are the same. Um, which is which?

How about a sexy Firefox Beta icon to separate what’s-what in the dock, Quicksilver, Spotlight etc?

This post shows how to create a “beta Firefox” icon, install it into the Firefox 3.6b2 OS X application, and live long and prosperously.

Installing Firefox 3.6b2 along side Firefox 3.5

I think these are the instructions for having two Firefoxes:

Download the Beta DMG. Open it. Don’t just drag the Firefox icon into the provided Application symlink folder.

Create in your Applications folder, create “beta” folder for all things beta (your you could rename the Firefox beta application or whatever). From the DMG window, drag the Firefox application icon into your “beta” folder.

To run it, close down Firefox if it’s running, and launch the new one. Done.

Creating new Application icons

iConMerge is a nice OS X tool to create composite application icons and install them. It is freeware from Mocra.

You drag images or existing Applications into the two left slots and it automatically creates a composite icon. Press the <--> arrow to switch them.

See the project home page for instructions.

The “beta” sub-icon I used is below. Download it OR try dragging it directly from the browser into iConMerge.

Applying new icon to Firefox Beta

Click “Export” and select the Firefox beta Application. Done.

When you restart Firefox beta, you’ll see it’s Dock icon has changed.

Right click on the Dock icon, select “Keep in Dock” and them drag the icon next to your existing Firefox 3.5 application. Two Firefoxes, two different icons, happy times.

Formats: Video/Screencast (410 Mb, torrent) | Video only (vimeo)

Writing tests are great for helping you design and think out your code, and the bonus is you end up with a test suite to aide in fighting against regressions. Why? It’s embarrassing when your JavaScript doesn’t work in production.

But how do you get started with testing JavaScript? How do you make it easy? I mean, so easy that you’d feel stupid to not write tests?

And how do you know if your designer/HTML-chopper has broken your JavaScript? How do you find out if JavaScript is broken in CI builds? And what is the appropriate punishment for designers who break JavaScript?

Finally, it is now uber easy to get started: the blue-ridge plugin for Rails. (I previously discussed it near the bottom)

To spread the word, I travelled to London, England for the Rails Underground conference a few months ago. The presentation is now online (recorded and published by SkillsMatter).

I was also recording the screen during the presentation and we’ve composited the two together (a la confreaks) and it’s available via BitTorrent. If you can seed for the next few days, that would be greatly appreciated too.

The talk is 45 minutes and questions are 6 mins. (I sadly don’t repeat into the microphone some of the questions because the room acoustics were good and everyone could hear everyone else’s questions. Sorry.)

Go get it now.

Why Blue Ridge?

This recording was done in July 2009, a few months ago. Is Blue Ridge still the bees-knees? I think so. It has issues, edge cases and bugs, but I don’t think there is a similar nor better Rails extension that includes (out of the box) a headless test runner, a bundle of test libraries (Screw.Unit, Smoke, etc), Rails generators, and automated discovery of “the designer broke our JavaScript!” lynch-mobbing (see my branch below).

These are the things I want. If there’s a better testing environment (say on HTMLUnit instead of env.js), then I think the killer packaging is to bundle it all up, with the features above, so it is drop-in, dead simple to use.

My history with JavaScript testing

In the introduction I talk about my life with JavaScript and testing. Here is the extended summary if it’s interesting to you at all:

• 2005:
  • ASP.NET + Ajax == “crapola”
  • Rails promo: “easier to do Ajax than not to”
  • Inline JavaScript helpers
• 2006:
  • RJS to generate JavaScript
• 2007:
  • JavaScript only in its own files
  • Unobtrusive JavaScript
  • Got myself into terrible mess with MyConfPlan
  • How to test JavaScript?
• 2008:
  • Figured out how to test it
  • Write a PeepCode but never published it
  • Wrote newjs and jsunittest
• 2009:
  • Found BlueRidge plugin for Rails
  • Headless test runner
  • BDD tests via Screw.Unit
  • Generators

Miscellaneous

I mention a couple of miscellaneous things. Here’s a summary.

My fork of blue-ridge has the feature to render sample HTML from your templates. It wasn’t accepted into the primary blue-ridge library because it was rspec only. Perhaps someone can make it work for test/unit etc.

I alias the script/generate command:

alias gen="script/generate"

I’m extending TextMate with Ciarán Walsh’s ProjectPlus plug-in (source). It’s sweet.

Thanks

Thanks to Mark Coleman for organising Rails Underground, inviting me over, and having the sessions recorded. And to SkillsMatter for recording and publishing the raw footage.

Thanks to Bo Jeanes for helping to get Final Cut Pro to mash the screencast and the SkillsMatter video into one video.

Thanks to Jack Chen for hacking some code to push the video up to s3 (when Transmit and BaconDrop were failing me)

Ever used a rubygem, found a bug, and just wanted to quickly bust out the big guns and fix it quickly?

The gem command doesn’t come packed with a way to find the original source repository for a gem. At best, most gems at least come bundled with the complete source, tests and documentation. Some gems don’t. Fair enough, since having access to the complete source via the gem still doesn’t allow you to fix a bug and share it with the world.

For that you access to the repo, a quick way to fork it, and a post-github way to share a gem version from yours truly.

The github gem and gemcutter are the modern day tools of master hackermanship.

Instant forking fun

Let’s say you find a bug in a gem, say rails, and you want to go to town on its source.

You know the gem is called rails but you’ve no idea what the github repo is called. Never fear.

$ gem sources -a http://gemcutter.org
$ sudo gem install github
$ gh clone --search rails
Select a repository to clone:
1.  rails/rails                         # Ruby on Rails
2.  technoweenie/restful-authentication # Generates common user ...
3.  justinfrench/formtastic             # A Rails form builder plugin ...
?

Press 1 and you’ll get a clone of rails/rails.

Alternately, if you want a fork or you know the exact user/repo already:

$ gh clone rails/rails

Now, fork your own version:

$ cd rails
$ gh fork

You now have your own fork. The origin remote also now points to your fork rather than the rails/rails repository:

$ git remote show origin
* remote origin
  Fetch URL: git@github.com:drnic/rails.git
  Push  URL: git@github.com:drnic/rails.git

So, make your changes, push them. Send a pull request or github issue or lighthouse ticket or what have you.

Want to get to the github project home page for your fork?

$ gh home

Instant gem sharing

Let’s say you patched the rails gem itself but you want to share your changes via your own gem.

In the olden days, github did this for you. Now you use gemcutter, and a little manual effort to do your own renaming.

First, install the gems locally, use them, and make sure all is good.

For rails, you install the edge gems (3.0.pre) with:

$ rake install

You can’t see ‘rake install’ in the rake -T list (hence my patch), but I think the following expression displays all tasks regardless if they have a description or not:

$ rake -P | grep "^r"

Rails is composed of several gems, unlike most projects that are distributed as a single gem. Here we want to share our commit within a new drnic-rails gem, but not touch the others.

Edit the railties/rails.gemspec file from:

Gem::Specification.new do |s|
  s.platform = Gem::Platform::RUBY
  s.name = 'rails'
  s.version = '3.0.pre'
...

and give your personal gem a new name:

Gem::Specification.new do |s|
  s.platform = Gem::Platform::RUBY
  s.name = 'drnic-rails'
  s.version = '3.0.pre'

To build and distribute the new gem:

$ gem build railties/rails.gemspec
$ sudo gem install gemcutter
$ gem push drnic-rails-3.0.pre.gem
  Pushing gem to Gemcutter...
  Successfully registered gem: drnic-rails (3.0.pre)

Follow any first-time gemcutter instructions and SUCCESS! Now I have my own drnic-rails gem.

Summary

To find, clone, and fork any rubygem that is hosted on github:

$ sudo gem install drnic-github
$ gh clone --search rails
$ gh fork

To personalise the gem and share it on gemcutter:

> edit the project.gemspec to have a unique name, e.g. yourname-project
$ gem build project.gemspec
$ sudo gem install gemcutter
$ gem push yourname-project-1.0.0.gem

I think this makes it much easier, faster and more fun to hack other people’s stuff.

Today I had my first look at rails 3.0.pre and below are the sequence of steps I had to take to create a rails 3.0.pre application, and get it’s generators to work.

Why was I looking at the top-secret, yet open-source Rails 3.0? Their generators are being migrated over to Thor and I wanted to see them in action. I was thinking I might migrate newgem to use Thor too.

Here’s a quick poke around of getting started and interesting things I found. Any hiccups and workarounds are meant as a guide to pre-pre-3.0 users/developers and not as a criticism of rails-core. Rails 3.0 is looking shiny and awesome.

NOTE: Since this is a “how to install and use” rails 3.0 edge, which is still in heavy development, this set of instructions might break. Let’s hope not.

Getting Started

As of today, you cannot install 3.0.pre from rubygems [1]. So, let’s install them from source. Which is handy, you might like to patch something.

$ cd ~/gems
$ git clone git://github.com/rails/rails.git
use_ruby_191 *

[*] If you are on OS X Snow Leopard I think you can ignore this. Otherwise, since you don’t have the 3.0.pre gems installed, you’re about to hit bump #1. Ruby 1.8.6 doesn’t have Symbol#to_proc but it’s required to create a rails app. This means you’ll need to be able to switch to another version of ruby temporarily if you’re on ruby 1.8.6 [2].

cd ~/Sites
ruby ~/gems/rails/railties/bin/rails

Oooh, look at all the new options! Some new ones are:

-F, [--freeze]             # Freeze Rails in vendor/rails from the gems
-O, [--skip-activerecord]  # Skip ActiveRecord files
-T, [--skip-testunit]      # Skip TestUnit files
-J, [--skip-prototype]     # Skip Prototype files

The -D, --with-dispatchers flags have been removed. --freeze isn’t new, but -F is.

So, to create an app, I dutifully used:

ruby ~/gems/rails/railties/bin/rails edgerailsapp -F

BAM! Fail. The -F option to freeze/vendor rails fails without the gems installed. So don’t use it.

ruby ~/gems/rails/railties/bin/rails edgerailsapp
ln -s ~/gems/rails vendor/rails

If you’re on Windows without the symlink command ln, then copy the downloaded rails source into vendor/rails.

Fetch Rails’ dependencies

Rails 3.0 source uses the new bundler project to describe its own dependencies. From Nick Quaranto’s article on bundler, get the latest:

cd ~/gems
git clone git://github.com/wycats/bundler
cd bundler
sudo rake install

Now, back in your app, you need to install some rails dependencies here too. It’s a good chance to see how you’ll bundle gem dependencies in the future.

$ cd ~/Sites/edgerailsapp

Change the Gemfile in your project to the following:

gem "rack",          "1.0.1"
gem "rack-mount",    :git => "git://github.com/rails/rack-mount.git"
gem "rack-test",     "~> 0.5.0"
gem "erubis",        "~> 2.6.0"
gem "arel",          :git => "git://github.com/rails/arel.git"
gem "sqlite3-ruby"
gem "rails", "3.0.pre", :git => "git://github.com/rails/rails.git"

Welcome to the future of gem dependencies for rails apps. Ultimately you won’t need to manually add these lines yourself. When rails is distributed as gems it will automatically install these for you, I assume/hope/guess. But for today, you seem to need them.

Now locally (within your app) install these gems:

$ gem bundle

If you get “can’t convert Pathname into String” then revert to ruby 1.8.X and reinstall bundler into your 1.8 gem cache.

Phew. Ooh, my god. Phew. Only now will script/generate work.

$ script/generate

For me, this outputs:

Please select a generator.
Builtin: app, controller, generator, helper, integration_test, mailer, metal, migration, model, model_subclass, observer, performance_test, plugin, resource, scaffold, scaffold_controller, session_migration, stylesheets.
Others: app_layout:app_layout, check_migration_version:check_migration_version, home_route:home_route.

The “Builtin” generators are the latest and greatest in Thor technology. Rails 3.0 no longer uses its own generator but is built upon Thor.

For example, our old favourite model generator works thusly:

$ script/generate model Post title:string --no-fixture
    invoke  active_record
    create    db/migrate/20091103030824_create_posts.rb
    create    app/models/post.rb
    invoke    test_unit
    create      test/unit/post_test.rb

Interestingly, --no-fixture isn’t mentioned in the usage information for script/generate model. It mentions the --fixture flag, but I had to guess that --no-fixture was also supported.

Hmm, I want to use rspec. So, let’s destroy these files:

$ script/destroy model Post title:string
      invoke  active_record
.../vendor/gems/dirs/rails/railties/lib/rails/generators/active_record.rb:14:in
  `next_migration_number': uninitialized constant ActiveRecord::Base (NameError)

Oh well.

What if I wanted to run rspec and cucumber generators, for example, against an edge rails app?

Rails 2 generators

The “Others” generators are my own local generators from ~/.rails/generators. Amusingly, instead of app_layout it is called app_layout:app_layout. Not surprisingly at all, if I try to run the rails 2 generator it fails:

$ script/generate app_layout:app_layout
[WARNING] Could not load generator at "/Users/drnic/.rails/generators/app_layout/app_layout_generator.rb". Error: uninitialized constant Rails::Generator
Could not find generator app_layout:app_layout.

Poop.

Note, I have rspec, rspec-rails and cucumber gems installed locally but I cannot see their rails generators above. Rails 3 doesn’t look for generators in the same way and old Rails 2 generators don’t work anymore.

That’s the news: every rails 2 generator is broken.

When I start to migrate some of mine I’ll post about it. In the meantime, José Valim has written some introduction thoughts on using Thor as a generator.

You can also probably learn about how to write rails 3.0 generators by looking at the source code for the new generators like rails, model (see main and test_unit), and scaffold/resource.

Finally, José Valim has a sample Rails 3 app with some vendored generators in it.

These are the things I’m researching now.

Summary

This article is long, mostly because rails 3.0.pre hasn’t been released as a set of RubyGems. If it had, then all the dependencies would be installed automatically.

It also introduces gem/plugin writers to the first upgrade issue: your current generators are neither discovered nor work by a rails 3.0 app. We’re all clever cookies, so here’s hoping we can figure out the upgrade path and that it’s simple enough to not be the topic of Dan Brown’s next book.

Footnotes

[1] Two portions of rails 3.0.pre are available as pre-release gems: activesupport (which is now very modularised and only loads up the parts that you require) and activemodel (which is shiny and new and hence completely safe for rails-core to release).

[2] There are two popular ways to have easy, non-intrusive access to alternate versions of ruby: rvm and ruby_switcher.sh.