Alieniloquent

So I was browsing a company’s website today, and out of curiosity I clicked on their map to show where all their locations are. I was expecting to see lots of little dots representing their offices, but what I saw was so much more.

This company has gotten the scoop on all of the major news services. It has a map of the contiguous 51 states.

Here you can see a cutout of the Northwest area of the country. If you look closely you’ll see the new borders between East and West Idaho and East and West Montana. Rumor has it that Idaho has split over whether or not to put a potato on the back of their commemorative quarter, and nobody knows what’s up with Montana.

This other section shows the fifty-third, and newest state: Floridabama. Nobody’s quite sure why they formed. They don’t even have their own constitution. Almost all of the land has been sold to development companies to build retirement communities and casinos. That’s right: retirement casinos.

Note: I did not make these images. I have altered them to protect the innocent, but I really did find this while surfing.

While Brian and I were pairing today, we also found an offensive bit of code.

This was a public property on a class. It had no meaningful name, and was of the least-specific type in the system. (I’m prefer dynamic languages, but if you’re going to use a type system, use it.)

Some quick grepping revealed that the property was never used, and deleting it and doing a build all confirmed it. We felt much better.

But, simply deleting it was not enough. We had to find out who had put this terrible code into our codebase. Using svn blame to track back the revisions, we discovered it was put in on revision 3 back in 1996 when the file was first added to Visual Source Safe.

We were no longer very surprised at the naming of the variable. The department’s naming standards were not the same ten years ago. What we were surprised to discover is that the property (well, it was a public field back then) wasn’t ever used in revision 3.

The field had never been used.

You know you have a big ball of mud when a public field named P survives for ten years on a class that is a vital part of your system even though it is never used anywhere in the code.

So Brian and I were pairing today, and we were refactoring some legacy code.  The method we were looking at was over 200 lines long, and it had comments sprinkled throughout to make it semi-readable.

We highlighted a huge block of this method and hit the magic keystrokes to Extract Method using Delphi 2006’s automated refactoring tools.  It extracted all of the code just fine, but it also removed some of the comments.

Note that I say some of the comments were removed.  Some of them were not.  There was no pattern that I could discern as to which comments were removed or which were left alone.  It’s almost as if the refactoring tools read the name of the new methodl, read the content of the comment and said, “Nah, you don’t need the comment any more, the name is enough.”

That’s definitely not the kind of thing I want my computer doing for me.  Bad Delphi!

I’ve been waffling about trying Typo as my blogging engine. But, I ended up coming to the same conclusion I came last time I switched away from Wordpress.

I don’t care enough about my blog to code for it. So I don’t need to blog with Ruby, because I’m not going to be coding for my blog. So, I’ve done what I should have done a long time ago: I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress.

The posting interface certainly is sexy. It also comes with a plugin for spam filtering out of the box, so I don’t need the one I was using any more. The primary reason I did this, though, is that I’m going to be getting into making a new template for my blog to integrate with the rest of the site, and I wanted to be on the latest version for the templating stuff.

Hey all. I have a story to tell you about Subversion and firewalls, but it will have to wait for tomorrow as I am dead tired.

But, I did want to share with you the fruits of my last thirty minutes or so. I have produced a new main page for www.alieniloquent.com. This is going to grow into place for me to put all sorts of things I want to share with the internet.

I moved my lisp talk materials under a new directory where I will be putting all of my presentation materials.

I also created a place to put code. In there I’ve put J3TestCase: a wrapper arount OCUnit . It makes it behave more like the xUnit frameworks I’m accustomed to, ObjcUnit in particular. Just drop the two files into your project where ever you want, and you can use the class to descend your test cases from.

I’ve completed the migration of my website from the www host to the blog host. Now I’ll be using the namespace under www for hosting other things. I did not put in the fancy 404 handler like I had thought I might. It turns out that just a handful of rewrite rules caught all the links I cared to preserve.

I was making sure everything was in order for my talk tomorrow for ODYNUG, and I discovered that the venue has changed.

Apparently Cafe Gelato, where ODYNUG has been having its meetings, went out of business. So my talk will be at the Panera at 132nd and Maple.

Right now I’m in my hotel room in Minneapolis. I’m here for Agile 2006 because my work sent me. Joe went into how we are all lucky bastards. I may blog more about the conference, but maybe not.

I’ve been spending most of the week writing lisp code. I’m giving a talk next Tuesday (August 1st) at the ODYNUG meeting. It’s an introductory course on lisp. I’ll be covering some history of lisp, a programmer’s guide to the language, and then some practical examples. We’ll even write some code together.

The location and time is at the link above. If you have a laptop with wireless, bring it. There is no projector, but I will be sharing my desktop via VNC. I will also post all of my code up here on my website after the talk.

Well, don’t I just suck at the internet?

I’m thinking about moving my blog over to Typo but first I needed to delete the 11,000 some odd spam comments that I had. It was too hefty a task to do manually, so I dipped into the database. I, of course, was confident that I could do it safely. So, why would I back up the comment table? Naturally, I did not do it safely and deleted all of my comments instead.

So, I didn’t mean to delete all of your comments on purpose. I’m sorry. But, they’re all gone.

I recently decided to throw together simple little Firefox extension. It’s pretty neat how XUL works. However, setting everything up can be a bit disorienting. Fortunately I found a good guide. Between the content on that page, and the content that it links to, I figured out everything I needed to know in order to get my extension working.