I’ve just received the following SMS:

Msg from Vic Police:Extreme weather in Vic expected Mon night and Tues.High wind & fire risk.Listen to local ABC Radio for emergency updates.Do not reply to this

According to The Age, another two million similar messages will be sent.

Speaking of The Police, I recommend this Mashup of Watching the Detectives + Walking on the Moon.

Stay safe.

Before I joined my current employer about two years ago I had heard of both Python and TDD but used neither. Now Python is the first language I reach for whenever I want to write a utility and I naturally start by writing a failing unit test. It’s a fun way in which to program, but more than that… Today I was telling a friend (and former colleague) why I prefer test-driven development as a way of writing code. Here are some of the reasons I enumerated:

• TDD helps me think.
• TDD helps me design.
• TDD helps me create clean interfaces.
• TDD helps me focus on developing just what needs to be developed.
• TDD helps me clean up my code.
• TDD tells me that my code does exactly what it is supposed to.
• TDD lets me test my code as often as I like at the press of a single key.

That last point is more an artefact of unit-testing, but is still valid.

If you’re a programmer and you want to learn about TDD, you could do worse than reading Ron Jeffries’ bowling game examples, first the C# object-oriented example and then procedural version.

My first post of 2009 was on doing TDD in Python using Vim. Unfortunately, not all of the Python code owned by ${PETES_EMPLOYER} was written using the same editor or coding standards. I love the fact that Python uses indentation to determine code blocks and has no need for ugly braces everywhere but it doesn’t do anything to enforce discipline in this area. Occasionally, when working with Other People’s Code, I’ve encountered problems where a mixture of indentation styles have been employed and Python hasn’t behaved. Recently I discovered that Python can throw an error when this happens by supplying the switch ‘-tt’ to the interpreter. This is why all Python code that I write now begins with the following shebang line…

#!/usr/bin/env python -tt -Wall

I hope that is of some use to somebody.

Dear all,

You are quick, and generous. You are kind but brutal. I thought that calls for me to have my legs waxed were harsh, but you’ve quickly rallied together and raised the extra $500 I suggested would be enough for this to happen. And now it must. I have to say that I am dreading this.

Now there are calls for a "BSC". I’m sorry to have to disappoint but despite my hirsuteness, for reasons unbeknownst to me, I don’t have a hairy back. And since neither the ‘sack’ nor the ‘crack’ will be photographed in the name of good taste, this would be a pointless (yet painful, I imagine) exercise.

Since you have reached the $1,000 target I feel duty bound to offer more so that you might do the same. This time I am doubling the target to in return for my shaven arms and chest.

I feel I should mention that this is not an event that I am undertaking lightly. I really, really don’t like shaving my face in the morning. To shave more than that is a huge ask, so please drop by my profile page, give generously and help me help the Leukaemia Foundation in World’s Greatest Shave.

As ever, I’m deeply thankful for your support, be it financial or emotional!

Much love;

–paj

P.S: If there are any Olympic cyclists, swimmers or cross-dressers out there, I have a burning question: Do you use the same shaving products for your face as your body hair or do you use a products aimed at women?

I don’t like sending out emails to large lists of people, but sometimes needs must and yesterday I sent out two mass emails to people in order to gain more sponsorship monies for the Leukaemia Foundation.

Those emails are clearly paying off. Rather generously, you have taken my total past the $500 target and two three things must now happen. One, when the time comes I must shave my legs as well as my bonce. Two, I have to raise my fundraising target. Three, I have to provide you with some incentive to keep giving. Five, you must continue to sponsor me!

It is with great trepidation that I announce that if you help me raise $1000, I shall answer your repeated calls to not only shave my legs, but wax them too. What have I let myself in for?

So please now pop by my profile page and show your support by leaving words of encouragement, advice on how to wax(!) and most importantly a donation. Every single dollar counts. Once you have done this, please pass on the message to one friend or family member.

Deep thanks to all of you.

I forget if I mentioned that I’m taking part in the Leukaemia Foundation World’s Greatest Shave on 14 March 2009, but I am, so there and I’m looking at ways to raise more money.

Yesterday my delightful wife asked me if I was going to just shave at home or if I’m going to have an event to mark the occasion. To be honest, I’m yet to decide.

Please take a moment to pop over to my profile page and leave a message as to how you think I should execute the shave. Perhaps you’d pay good money to use the clippers?

While you’re over at my profile page, I encourage you to drop some coins in the collection tin.

Many thanks to all that have already donated and to those still to donate.

I have been delighted, so far, with the generosity of those of you who have donated to the Leukaemia Foundation World’s Greatest Shave, that I mentioned recently, am mentioning now, and shall continue to mention until I’ve extracted every penny that you can afford to give!

My friend B left the following comment on my profile page:

There are many people out there who would pay good money for you to shave your legs. But I’d hope you’d wax too….?

If those many people are reading this, perhaps they would pay that good money of which B speaks and sponsor me?

As for waxing… how much is that worth to you?

Heartfelt thanks to those who have sponsored me and to those of you who will sponsor me!

On a different note, I have been asked to note that things aren’t rosy over at Facebook. Frankly, I can’t stand the site, as I demonstrated by deleting my Facebook account last month.

Dear treasured blog reader,

I really need a haircut! But I’m putting it off for another month, because I’m taking part in the Leukaemia Foundation World’s Greatest Shave on 14 March 2009.

Please take a moment to look at my Profile Page. While you’re there, I’d like you to support me by making a secure online donation using your credit card. Or whomsoever’s you have to hand!

I’m told that every hour of every day, at least one person in Australia is diagnosed with leukaemia, lymphoma or myeloma and that every two hours, someone loses their life to blood cancer. So, please help me raise as much as I can for the Leukaemia Foundation. Their vital work provides patients with practical support during their long and tough treatment, as well as funding important research.

Photographic evidence shall be shared.

Many, many thanks in advance!

I understand that reports of the local bushfires has reached the international news.

Thank you to those from overseas who have been concerned for us. We’re fine, thankfully.

It’s hard to know what to say. It’s devastating that so many properties and livelihoods are being destroyed and people are dying essentially due to the weather. Some of the fires have been started deliberately, which I’m still finding incredibly hard to comprehend.

Some of our friends have been affected who have families and properties out in Country Victoria. Here in the suburbs we can’t even smell the smoke, which is very fortunate.

For those wondering what they can do to help those affected by these horrendous fires, please visit the Australian Red Cross website and make a donation. If you can, Donate Blood (we cannot, because we’re POMs and may have Mad Cow Disease).

This weekend I’ve re-started on a website that I was meant to have finished ages ago. Now that I have all of those extra minutes per day having extracted myself from Facebook’s clutches, I’ve resolved to get it finished and get it finished I shall.

Rather than re-inventing wheels, like I did with my own website, I’ve opted to build this site using Textpattern. So far it seems pretty straightforward. This is ideal as I don’t intend to maintain the new website (another good reason not to hand-crafting my own Perl, PHP or Python).

One thing that did take a while to get working, however, is getting ‘Clean URLs’, those without question marks and ampersands all over the place, to work. Thankfully like so many things, this is a solved problem. For future reference, the solution was easy for the virtual host on my MacBook Pro, with just one AllowOverride line needed in /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf…

<Directory "/path/to/website">
    Order Deny,Allow 
    Allow from all 
    AllowOverride FileInfo
</Directory>

Incidentally, I’m keeping both /path/to/website and /private/etc/apache2 under source control with Git, as I am doing with pretty much everything I do these days. Git is version control done correctly. Thank you, Linus!

Happy new year, folks!

Here’s a little utility I knocked together yesterday to decrease the number of key-presses needed to switch between unit test and production code:

toggle_unit_tests : plug-in for toggling between source and unit test files

I’ve tested it with C++ and Python and it works nicely, but should work well with other languages too.

If you find yourself doing TDD in Python using Vim, you may find the following page useful:

Integration with PyUnit testing framework.

That is all.