Theodicius

Good. Evil. Bratwurst.

What I Did To The Jasmine Phantom

Filed under: General,Technology,Web Design— arlen@ 12:14 pm

Being a continuation of the saga began in Jasmine And The Headless Webkit.

OK, after the last installment I had a working in-browser test runner (standalone Jasmine) and a working command-line test runner (phantom-jasmine). But they were different files, meaning if anything significant changed, I was going to have to duplicate the changes in two different testing files. This, while workable short-term, is not an acceptable solution.

So I dug in to the files.
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The story of Jasmine and the Headless Webkit

Filed under: General,Technology,Web Design— arlen@ 3:10 pm

No, I’m not hitting Halloween early. There’s nothing about pumpkins involved here. I’m talking about testing your javascript.

I’m talking sane development practice, not ghost stories.

I’d been using jsTestDriver for a while, but got tired of the way it would take off and go navel-gazing without warning, so I looked for something else and found Jasmine. This was working well for me (I was using the standalone version of Jasmine, which required me to refresh the browser whenever I wanted to test in it) but I missed the convenience of kicking off the tests automagically, from a command line.

Then I found the Phantom.
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Anatomy of a Surprise

Filed under: General— arlen@ 2:48 pm

So, here I was, working WorldCon (Chicon7) as usual when this nugget gets dropped on me. “Ron Donachie is here and wants to help. Where can you use him?”

This is interesting. Ron Donachie played Ser Rodrik Cassel on Game Of Thrones, the hot HBO series from the series of books by George R. R. Martin. as well as the heroic Steward from “Tooth and Claw”, the episode of Doctor Who that gave birth to Torchwood. He’s definitely got the cred for WorldCon.

But, as our Programming Head observed, there isn’t always a good place to fit an actor in. (WorldCon, I should explain for those of you unfamiliar with that land, is a gathering focused on the literary works of science fiction and fantasy. Media properties are welcome, and there are program items for fans to discuss them, but largely WorldCon is a place where Author, not Actor, nor even Director/Producer, is King.)
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The Meaning Of Words

Filed under: General— arlen@ 1:56 pm

Sometimes, words mean much more than we might think to the person we speak them to. And last far longer. This one’s for you, Lee.

It was nearing the end of the arrival day at a large convention some years back. The identity of the convention is irrelevant to my point, so I’ll neither name it nor explain it.

This thing had started going pear-shaped before I ever got to the office. I didn’t know how I was going to manage things, if I even could. I’d been making a few changes here and there, but nothing seemed to help. I was on the point of just giving up.
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Choose Your Own Coding Adventure?

Filed under: General,Technology— arlen@ 1:01 pm

You remember the Choose Your Own Adventure series? You’d read a paragraph or two, then be presented with a question, the answer determining which of several pages you’d turn to in order to continue the story.

I may be giving too much credit to Mike Stackpole, Rick Loomis and the rest of the crew at Flying Buffalo for inventing the genre, but I give them credit for coming up with an interesting way of bringing interactivity to paper.

Creative as it was, the resulting stories were difficult to read. Continue reading

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