Today I took my name back and got Armstrong tests running on Travis CI. Travis CI is the distributed, community run continuous integration server that the Ruby community has put together. It lets you do all manner of fun things, like testing in dozens of different Ruby version configurations. You’re probably wondering what Armstrong is doing there with all of this talk of Ruby. No, I didn’t rewrite Armstrong in Rails last night.

JavaScript catches a lot of flack for it’s “ugliness,” but I’m rather fond of the language. It’s first-class functions make up for any quirks you have to deal with in the language. Consider this test case: {% gist 1308316 output.js %} It generates this output when run with --spec: {% gist 1308316 output.txt %} I’m using test cases like this throughout my upcoming Programming Node.js book to test output of some of the simple scripts.

Shh… Don’t tell my editor I’m blogging. I’m procrastinating by writing this blog post instead of working on Programming Node. I’ll still get to that, but this is on the brain right now. Today marks the 50th straight day of pushing code to GitHub. My work on Armstrong has made a lot of this possible—it’s easy to push code when you’re getting paid to write open source software—but not every day has been Armstrong related code.

We released our first version of Armstrong this past Wednesday. After taking a quick breather, I set out on getting Armstrong setup inside a Vagrant virtual machine to make evaluation easy. I finally got it running. There’s more information about getting started in the README, where it belongs, but I ran into some interesting technical issues while setting it up that I want to document here. Vagrant + Puppet + pip I initially wanted to create a full build-script inside Vagrant that could be used to setup the entire environment.

Had a good week at 2011’s version of tek. Thanks to Marco Tabini and his whole crew for putting together another great conference this year. I haven’t professionally developed in PHP for several years now, but still consider this a must attend conference. This was my 4th year. The people and the content make it worth attending, even though I’m mostly doing Python work these days. I gave two talks this year, both on Git.

Two weekends ago I quietly rolled out a new feature that people have been clamoring for here at TravisSwicegood.com. Feeds for tags. So say you’re only interested in following my personal posts, you can add that tag page to your favorite RSS reader to subscribe to it. Or if you’re geeky, you might want to subscribe to my armstrong feed but don’t like the automagical discovery. In that case, just add /atom/ to the end of the URL and you’ve got your RSS feed.

I’m working on setting up a new (old) MacBook Pro this evening when I came across an oddity. Colors in iTerm2 were working, but not in xterm-256color mode. Both laptops are sitting on the table next to each other, so I started debugging. There’s all manner of bugs that have been reported, but no amount of tweaking my environment variables worked. Some time during the process, Xcode 3 finished installing and all of the sudden things started working.

A few weeks ago, I got a lot of responses to the following tweet: As I write this post, Twitter’s ever-unreliable updates counter is showing that I have 9,999 tweets. It’s time for a Twitter Timeout. Why? I’ve found myself thinking too quickly, without depth, mostly in the form of 140 characters. I want to get back to my place, my blog. I’m tired of playing in other people’s backyards, as it were.

This past November I participated in the PragProWriMo. For those familiar with the NaNoWriMo, the concept is similar. Commit to writing on a technical book every single day for the entire month of November. I had been kicking around the idea of writing a book on Node.js and decided to use this as an opportunity to see what I had to say on the topic. Turns out that I had about a hundred and fifty pages worth of material.

I talk with a lot of people about NoSQL. I’ve been following it pretty closely for about 3 years now. One of the things I often tell people who are trying to wrap their heads around the concepts of NoSQL and what all of the data stores mean is to go search for Justin Sheehy and his NoSQL East Talk. Then it dawned on me, why don’t I just embed the video on my site?