Wes Maldonado: Data Junkie

Hark.com now offers mixing up some sounds with your favorite photos. Check out this photo originally from http://nullpoint.imgur.com/be_mario#P0Siy mixed up with the coin sound from Mario Brothers

Go check it out!

Super Mario Bros. Coin Block

REE-cpu-memory-annotated
Originally uploaded by devinbenhur

Monthly graph showing elimination of memory leak and dramatic reduction in cpu use deploying rails app on Ruby Enterprise at my current employer instead of Ubuntu Hardy’s ruby-1.8.6.111.

From flickr, uploaded by devinbenhur on 18 Aug 10, 2010.

SR-410 MP 107 10-11-2009
Originally uploaded by Washington State Dept of Transportation

It takes a giant landslide to destroy a quarter mile of road way. It’s the end of summer, it hasn’t rained yet here… what was the tipping point for it?

Lately I’ve been working on mailing out wedding invitations. The easiest way to print address labels on OS X is to select contacts or a group in Address Book, hit print and change the Page option to “Avery Standard” then select the label type. Easy. The hard part is getting all those addresses in there in the first place and then organizing them. My problem was that I imported things incorrectly a number of times and filled my address book with 1500 or so broken contacts. That made it really hard to call someone because I had 15 very similar looking entries for each person. Fortunately all the addresses I imported were missing phone numbers, so I knew I could group them together easily (with a smart group) but how could I script the name edits like “Add ‘& Guest’ if the name doesn’t include an &”? Not to mention I didn’t want to end up with contacts like “Joe Smith” next to one named “Joe Smith & Guest”!

First I tried to do this with AppleScript and 25 minutes into it had something working, but working with AppleScript is so strange, I needed ruby! In 10 minutes I had the following script written and now I could also use ruby to push/pull/stretch and tweak all the data I have in Address Book already, yay.

Here is the AppleScript version of the same script:

Here is a great reference for how to work with Address Book from AppleScript that you can combine with the rb-appscript guide on commands to add new contacts, etc. Now I’ll leave it up to you to go write a script to update your contacts picture in Address Book from their facebook, linked in, gravatar or other photo. Or perhaps see if they have a DandyID and add all their associated accounts to their contact entry.

I gave a talk at Seattle Code Camp on testing Javascript about TDD (test driven development) in Javascript using jsunit, JSSpec and Screw.Unit. One thing to come out of this is a github project that is setup to allow you to test your javascript against all three frameworks in one package:

http://github.com/wesmaldonado/test-driven-javascript-example-application/tree/master

Just want to see what the same tests look like between the frameworks? Here you go! A jsunit example, JSSpec example, Screw.Unit example.

The presentation was a walk through the code, so there aren’t slides yet, contact me if you’re interested in having me present at your company or to your group.

Many thanks to Nick Kallen for Screw.Unit and other various Javascript hackery. Brian Takita for JSSpec/Screw.Unit servers , Edward Hieatt for JsUnit and the blog posts about testing javascript. Finally, I want to thank all all the people at Pivotal Labs for the countless hours of pair programing that led to me learning these libraries and testing techniques.