Command Line Ubuntu Upgrades

I've tried to track this info down a few times in the past and failed. Now that I've found it I figured I'd leave myself a bread crumb trail to find it next time.

http://www.ubuntusolutions.org/2009/04/upgrading-ubuntu-from-the-command-line.html

Google, Go, and Native Client

I may have been a bit slow getting to the party but the obviousness of it really hit me this morning. Google has exposed a few early stage projects that could work together to provide some really interesting options in the future.

Specifically I'm looking at Native Client and Go. Initially I really didn't get Native Client, but when you combine it with a language like Go which is specifically designed to be sand-boxable and have fast compile times you start to get some interesting options.

Google could choose to incorporate the Go language tool chain inside the browser along with Native Client. This would mean that developers wouldn't need to build binaries for every CPU they wanted to target. Instead users could simply visit a web page that would pull down the source and compile it on the fly.

It'll be interesting to see where all of this goes.

The Details of Javascript

I've recently been reading JavaScript: The Good Parts and have found it to be an excellent look at the details of the language itself while ignoring the DOM (which is exactly what I wanted). Then today I ran across this Google Tech Talk by the author, Doug Crockford.

Something Different

Moving forward I'm going to be focusing on the techniques necessary to develop AJAX rich client apps tied to RESTful rails backends for internal business use. In all likely hood I will be providing these applications to users as (single site browser) via Google Chromes application short cuts but my intention is to write code that works on any browser; IE8, Firefox, Safari and Chrome.

And now for something different....

Onion News Network Has Fun With Star Trek Movie

I haven't seen the movie but I stumbled across this and got a good laugh.


Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'

Writing the Reader's Stories for the First BDD Blog Release

I continue with my plan to write user stories for my first release. In this post I'll cover features from the readers perspective.

1. Must be able to Create, Edit and View posts.
2. Must support per post permanent URLs

Here's the first draft of the readers browsing feature. We'll see where it evolves to in the future.

Feature: browsing
As a reader
I want to browse the site
So that I can read it's content


#
# scenarios that involve the reader navigating to the
# home page as the number of available posts vary
#
Scenario: 0 of 0
    Given that 0 posts exist
    When I go to the home page
    Then I should be on the error page
    And I should see "page not found"

Scenario: 1 of 1
    Given that 1 post exists
    When I go to the home page
    Then I should be on post page 1
    And I should not see a link to the next post
    And I should not see a link to the previous post

Scenario: 2 of 2
    Given that 2 posts exist
    When I go to the home page
    Then I should be on post page 2
    And I should see a link to the previous post
    And I should not see a link to the next post


#
# Scenarios that involve the reader navigating to a specific
# post; the first, middle and last.  These primarily demonstrate
# the behavior of the navigation links to previous and next
# post pages
#
Scenario: 1 of 2
    Given that 2 posts exist
    When I go to post page 1
    Then I should not see a link to the previous post
    And I should see a lnk to the next post

Scenario: 2 of 3
    Given that 3 posts exist
    When I go to post page 2
    Then I should see a link to the previous post
    And I should see a link to the next post


#
# navigation to specific posts is done through post
# page permalinks.  The permalinks are derived from
# the title of the post
#
Scenario: navigate to an non-existant post
    Given that no posts have been created
    When I go to the path /posts/get-rich-overnight
    Then I should be on the error page
    And I should see "page not found"
    And I should see a link to the home page

Scenario: navigate to an existing post
    Given that post 1 exists
    And that post 1 has the title "Get Rich Overnight"
    And that post 1 has the body lorem ispum
    When I go to /posts/get-rich-overnight
    Then I should see "Get Rich Overnight"
    And I should see lorem ipsum

Writing User Stories for the First BDDBlog Release

In a previous post I shared the basics of my release plan, crude as it was. Next I'm going to create user stories for the entire first release once that's done I'll plan and execute regular weekly iterations to complete all the release stories. The one thing I'm going to do a bit different is that I'm going to rough out my user stories directly to cucumber features then I will maintain a list of uncompleted features that can be prioritized as I burn it down.

The first task at hand is to turn my first release's outline into Cucumber features. As I do this I'm not going to get overly concerned about the wording of my features. I expect that I'll be massaging them as I implement them.

With all that out of the way It's time to burn down the items on my release list and create some features. The first two items in the list is the most basic;

1. Must be able to Create, Edit and View posts.
2. Must support per post permanent URLs

Next I'll look at this from each type of users role; Reader, Author and Admin but I'm going to do that in seperate posts.

My First BDDBlog Design Decisions

Website navigation should just work from the users perspective. It should seem simple and intuitive they should never have to think about it. That of course means the burden to 'think about it' is on the developer. Today I spent some time trying to decide how I wanted navigation to work in my new blog. It wasn't as easy to make these decisions as I would have expected before hand.

Specifically I was trying to figure out exactly what a reader expects to see when they navigate to the home page and where they expect to find older posts. I spent a fair bit of time looking at other blogs and in the end I found two basic approaches.

In one case the blogs tend to provide some number of recent posts one below the next on the home page. Typically the posts are separated by dates as appropriate. This style seems to be more appropriate for blogs with frequent small posts.

The other common approach was to only display the most recent post on the homepage and to provide navigation links to previous posts. This style seems to be more appropriate for blogs with longer posts.

This left me a bit unsure at first. Quite a few of my posts are much to big for Blogger's format. On the other hand It's not entirely uncommon for me to do micro posts. What to do?

Well after spending quite a bit of time thinking about it, for now, my decision is that I'll use the latter style. My blog will feature a single post per page and provide links to older or newer posts as appropriate but this means I can't easily roll a twitter or delicious summary into my blog without it displacing the most recent post.

After spending some time pondering that problem I decided that I may not be able to roll those other feeds into my blog but it most certianly doesn't prevent me from splicing them into my feed.

So it looks like I've already stumbled on to another requirement; the ability to splice multiple RSS/Atom feeds into one. Feature creep already =(

On the other hand maybe I've stumbled on to a useful service? Atom/RSS Feed splicing with format conversion? Does anyone already offer that? Hmmm... I'll have to think about that one.

Planning Features for the First BDDBlog Release

In a previous post I talked a bit about my motivations and just what I was up to. In this post I'm going to start to define some specifics for the inner blog project.

I'm planning on making at least three releases. The first release is intended to replicate the basic functionality of Blogger. The second release will expand on the first, provide better tools for managing multi-part articles and some wiki like editing features. The third release, which is being developed for a different domain and not this blog, will incorporate the shopping cart functionality.

Here's my laundry list of functionality in the order I intend to implement it in the first release:

1. Must be able to Create, Edit and View posts


2. Must support per post permanent URLs


3. Must allow posts to be tagged


4. Must support monthly archiving


5. Must support authenticated admin/author logins


6. Must have admin editing of site title and description


7. Must have admin editing of site CSS and HTML header/footers


8. Must have admin editing of side panel html/javascript


9. Must be able to import Blogger's exported content


10. Must provide full text search functionality


11. Must provide tag search functionality


12. Must provide an Atom 1.0 full content feed


13. Must be able to ping blog search engines

Now on to the coding....

Dissident Movments Of The Future

Anonymous' target may be Scientology but it's interesting to think about how these tactics maybe applied more broadly in the future by other interests.