When you search:

ocaml “lazy list”

on Google, our Ocaml category comes up #1!

And the Blog Admin sayeth unto the Internets: w00t!

Popularity: 2% [?]

I was recently introduced to Fit (actually, FIT: “Framework for Integrated Testing”), AntFit, and Fitnesse. They’re pretty cool ideas for any kind of business development setting, and the technology is beautifully simple.

Basically, Fit fills a critical communication void: the communication of what the software should do and what it does do. I am a huge advocate of transparancy, since my experience has shown a lack of transparency to be the primary cause of breakdowns in development environments (e.g.: this on “soft deliverables” and other fun). Even better, this is transparency at the level business people are used to dealing with: electronic paperwork. You can take whatever documentation your people like to use, massage it very gently, and then plug it into your automated testing framework by creating a class that (even in Java!) is not even 100 lines.

The up-shot of this technical process is that you can take your state/requirement/story documents, and give them technical updates that are red light/green light in simplicity. Business people are also given an easy way to explore the existent capabilities of a software system, which enables them to make requirements based on changing the status quo (the very concept of iterative development).

AntFit is simply a plug-in to use Fit in Ant, which enables you to perform all of your tests any time you are doing a build. At my current contract, I have plugged this into a part of the continuous integration environment, so every deployment build contains both the code itself and a thorough reporting of the code’s functionality.

Fitnesse takes fit and plugs it into a Wiki. Although editting Wikis is not something I would expect most business people to know how to do, it certainly is something that developers can do. Since a major impedence to collective ownership is the lack of meaningful documentation, and since you can drop whatever you’d like as a link from a Wiki (say, a link to a Visio diagram or to an API homepage), it’s a major win to just have a Wiki in place to begin with. To then follow it up with the ability to execute segments of code on demand to illustrate behvaiors provides a really nice interactive-show-and-tell quality to the documentation.

I only see two things outstanding for improvements on these technologies. First, AntFit needs a way to optionally fail a build if there is a given test that fails — or at least set a property with the number of failures. Second, the core needs to be ported to Ocaml: it’s already been ported to most other modern business languages. I’m taking care of the latter presently: I’ll leave it to the open source community to fix the former.

Popularity: 6% [?]

I went through updating some categories, and realized that we needed another couple of headlines.

If there are any other categories we need to add in, let me know.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Apparently my blog got onto some mailing list, because there’s suddenly 40 new, good posts from people I don’t know, mainly griping at BHurt’s Postgres for the Win! post.

Well, welcome aboard! For those who didn’t see their comment until now, it’s because of mailserver difficulties, and I moderate the first comment from any person. Once I’ve green-lighted one of your posts, you’re good to post to your hearts’ content aftewards.

Edit: Also popular are Brian’s C++/Threading rant and OO/Relational conversations. I guess this blog is going to go technical one way or another!

Edit: Based on Google’s reports, I’ve updated our Google SiteMap to point to those sites, along with the Ocaml programming and politics category. I’m hoping that will help it sort out our #1 Hit to go to the actual article where lazy lists are talked about, instead of just to the Ocaml programming category in general.

Popularity: 3% [?]

When a manufacturer adds “new and improved!” to their advertising, it’s probably a safe bet that it is, in fact, neither. In this sense, McCain is a “new and improved!” Republican. Inside the box, you still have the same old neo-facist- but with different packaging.

Today’s proof of that: McCain has hired a campaign manager.

Nelson was an unindicted co-conspirator in the TRMPAC scandal as a key point of contact between Tom Delay and the RNC. He was James Tobin’s boss during the 2002 New Hampshire phone-jamming scandal, for which Tobin was convicted. He also worked at the head of opposition research for the NRCC this cycle, where robocalls from Republicans pretending to be Democrats were the norm all over the country. Nelson also produced the racist bimbo ad against Harold Ford.

McCain didn’t put his name on the McCain-Feingold act because he was a beleiver in running clean campaigns- he put his name on the McCain-Feingold act because he’d recently had a close call with being one of the Keating Five. If you think he’s going to run a nice, clean campaign, unlike all those other Republicans, think again.

Popularity: 2% [?]