adams.co.tt blog

Canon TS-E 45mm f/2.8 Time Lapse Test

2012-11-06

I have just purchased a Canon TS-E 45mm f/2.8 for use during time lapse filming. Here is an initial test.

Namespacing in JavaScript

2012-05-30

JavaScript’s global variables are evil, and namespacing is a good thing. However, as I regularly move from project to project, I find myself rewriting the code to help manage namespaces again and again. Every time I search for something reusable, I find conventions that require unpleasant boilerplate.

I started a little personal project, and ended up writing this. Hopefully somebody might find it useful.

Grab the source here.

Include it in your document like so:

<script src="/path/to/n.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

n('foo.bar.baz', function(s) {
  s.Person = function () {
    this.greet = function () {
      alert('hello');
    };
  };
});

Reference registered objects and classes like so:

var myPerson = new foo.bar.baz.Person();
myPerson.greet();

That’s all there is to it!

UPDATE: A minified version can now be found here. Thanks Scott Hamper!

iPhone Time Lapse

2012-05-04

As an experiment, I decided to create, edit and publish a time lapse video using just my iPhone 4S. Here are the results:

I used iMotion HD and iMovie. This would not be possible without the ability for applications to share content between them. I would encourage iOS developers to take this into consideration when building apps, rather trying to bolt in every possible piece of functionality into a given app.

Rendering partials in toto

2012-04-19

toto is a fantastic lightweight blogging engine. In fact, at the time of writing, this very blog is running on it. By looking at dorothy you can see how it uses a layout and templates to render content. However, by default, it does not provide support for template partials.

However, that’s easily solved with a little monkey patching:

module Toto
  class Site
    class Context
      def to_partial(page)
        to_html page, @config
      end
    end
  end
end

Now you can include partials in your templates like this:

<%= render 'sidebar', :partial %>

Now, I’m not a fan of monkey patching for a number reasons, not least of which is the fact that a good monkey patch is often a missed opportunity to improve an open source project. With that in mind, here is the pull request to have this functionality added to toto itself.

Stunning landscape photography by Peter Zeglis

2012-04-16

These images, reminiscent of work by Ansel Adams, were taken in Iceland by Peter Zeglis.

More of his Iceland project can be seen here.

Duplicate Active Model validation errors

2012-04-12

When attempting to test a model using Active Model validations, I came across a rather odd problem.

require 'active_model'

class Person
  include ActiveModel::Validations
  validates_length_of :name, :maximum => 40, :message => 'name too long'
  attr_reader :name
  def initialize(attrs)
    @name = attrs[:name]
  end
end

I was seeing duplicate 'name too long' error messages in the errors hash.

describe Person do
  describe 'validation' do
    it 'should be invalid if name is too long' do
      person = Person.new(:name => 'a' * 41)
      person.should_not be_valid
      person.errors[:name].should == ['name too long']
    end
  end
end

The above spec failed with the following message:

Failures:

  1) Person validation should be invalid if name is too long
     Failure/Error: person.errors[:name].should == ['name too long']
       expected: ["name too long"]
            got: ["name too long", "name too long"] (using ==)
     # ./spec/person_spec.rb:17

Some further digging revealed that the Person was being loaded twice by the require method. require was being called twice with two different paths, which both resolved to the file containing Person. Removing the extra call to require fixed the issue. This seems to be a problem particular to ruby 1.8.7.

The runnable code examples reproducing this issue can be found here.

Updated jasmine-underscore

2012-03-14

Last year jasmine-underscore was released. Since then, some issues have been fixed, and two new matchers have also been included:

allToSatisfy

expect([2, 4, 6]).allToSatisfy(function (val) { return val%2 == 0; });
expect([1, 4, 6]).not.allToSatisfy(function (val) { return val%2 == 0; });

anyToSatisfy

expect([2, 3, 5]).anyToSatisfy(function (val) { return val%2 == 0; });
expect([1, 3, 5]).not.anyToSatisfy(function (val) { return val%2 == 0; });

These matchers allow any predicate to be applied to element of a collection, with the test only passing if all/any of the elements in collection satisfy the predicate.

Get version 1.1 here. Enjoy!

Introducing mailcrate

2012-03-12

Often when I’m working near the top of the test automation pyramid, I find myself needing to test interactions with outside services such as SMTP servers.

On projects in the past, I’ve been able to leverage java tools such as greenmail, which lets me have logic like this.

public class MailerTest {

  private Greenmail greenmail

  @Before
  public void startGreenmail() {
    greenMail = new GreenMail();
    greenMail.start();
  }

  @After
  public void stopGreenmail() {
    greenMail.stop();
  }

  @Test
  public void testYourSendingCode() throws Exception {    
    new Mailer().send("to@localhost.com", "body");

    assertEquals("body", GreenMailUtil.getBody(greenMail.getReceivedMessages()[0]));
  }

}

This library is particularly useful as it allows interrogation of sent mails directly from the test. However, I have had trouble finding an equivalent gem for ruby development. However, there is the fantastic command line tool, mailtrap. Mailtrap is written in ruby and:

Mailtrap waits on your chosen port for a client to connect and talks just enough SMTP protocol for ActionMailer to successfully deliver its message.

Unfortunately, mailtrap does not play nicely with automated tests. It writes out captured emails to the filesystem, and there is no easy way to start, stop or interrogate a server in memory. However, mailtrap and greenmail have acted as the inspiration for mailcrate. Mailcrate is designed to be run from your test code and allows interrogation of sent mails from the test itself. For example:

require 'mailcrate'

describe Mailer do

  before do
    @mailcrate = Mailcrate.new(2525)
    @mailcrate.start
  end

  after do
    @mailcrate.stop
  end

  it 'should use Mailcrate to send mails' do
    mail = Mailer.welcome_email('a@b.com')
    mail.deliver

    @mailcrate.mails[0][:from].should == 'from@example.com'
    @mailcrate.mails[0][:to_list].should include 'a@b.com'
    @mailcrate.mails[0][:body].should include 'Full of awesomeness.'
  end

end

Mailcrate has been published as a gem and can be used by running:

gem install mailcrate

Mailcrate is still rather immature. Any feedback would be welcomed, both here on this blog or its github page.

Random Excellence - Kevin O'Mara

2012-01-20

I came across Kevin’s work on a small social networking site. I found myself enjoying a great deal, because his work always stands out for it’s creative composition and attention to detail. His work does not employ heavy post processing, nor does it rely on gimmicky filters or techniques. It stands out for itself, and as a result I keep coming back to it.

A month of black and white

2012-01-18

For the past month I have set myself the challenge of shooting primarily in black and white. The purpose of this was to change my way of thinking while shooting, and rather than happening upon compositions that work well in monochrome. These are the results: