From the Google Testing Blog: We're unveiling the public release of "Testing on the Toilet": one of Google's little secrets that has helped us to inspire our developers to write well-tested code. And the first one is TotT: Better Stubbing in Python.

Milestones when valid Atom was supposed to be supported by WordPress: milestone: 1.6 set on 7/21/05 milestone: 2.1 set on 11/10/05 milestone: 2.0 set on 11/18/05 milestone: 2.1 set on 11/18/05 milestone: 2.0 set on 12/08/05 milestone: 2.1 set on 12/12/05 milestone: 2.2 set on 11/29/06 Did I mention that WordPress 2.1 shipped yesterday? To add support for Atom 1.0 you will have to follow the directions here. Frustrating. Posted by Geof F.

Joel reviews Dreaming in Code. Now, it would be shockingly presumptuous of me to try to guess what happened on the Chandler team, and why it’s taken them millions of dollars and several years to get to where they are now, which is, they have a pretty buggy and incomplete calendar application that’s not very impressive compared to the 58 me-too Web 2.0 calendars that came out last year, each of which was developed by two college kids in their spare time, one of whom really mostly just drew mascots.

I've been reading The Chubby Lock Service for Loosely-Coupled Distributed Systems by Mike Burrows. It describes Chubby, which is used at Google by both GFS and BigTable. Out of the whole fascinating paper I think Section 4, "Use, surprises and design errors" was far and away the best part. Some example quotes: Chubby’s C++ client library is 7000 lines (comparable with the server), and the client protocol is delicate. To maintain the library in Java would require care and expense, while an implementation without caching would burden the Chubby servers.

The last little bit I needed to add to bring 1812 up to par with the old blogging code base was archives. The inspiration for this design came from Ole. Isn't reading every file in the Collection for your blog entries a little slow? Posted by Neil Dunn on 2007-01-21 Neil Completely non-scientific timings on my part puts it at less than 500ms, which is completely acceptable for a page that won't be accessed very often.

I've added a comments page that lists the most recent comments to the site. I used to have a page like this in the old system, but I'm trying a different format. The problem with the old view was that the straight list of all comments and their content made it hard to follow a conversation. This new view uses the :hover CSS Selector to make the comment appear to the right as you hover your mouse over each link.

[DHH] REST, and general HTTP appreciation, is the star of Rails 1.2. The bulk of these features were originally introduced to the general public in my RailsConf keynote on the subject. Give that a play to get into the mindset of why REST matters for Rails.

You certainly heard when Ruby book sales were growing 1500%, and 700%, but I thought I'd bring it to your attention that it has quietly dropped to 53%. I don't bring this up to poke fun at the Ruby folks, but as supporting evidence for my own thesis that there is no 'next' Java and there is no 'next' framework. Yeah, that would be a sucky business to be in, when your growth rate is ONLY 53%/year.

There are days where I want to chuck it all and take up music. I'd like to play the cannon. I realize that would severly limit my repertoire to just two songs; "The 1812 Overture", and AC/DC's "For those about to rock", but I'm ok with that. Hyperspecialization is the new black. I always assumed Simon and Garfunkel's "The Boxer" had cannon shots following its refrain. ("lie-la-lie *BOOM* lie-la-lie-lie, lie-la-lie"

[TDWTF]But I will leave you with this bit of advice: the next time you find yourself designing software, be wary of The Complicators; take a good, hard look at your first revision and just say to yourself, "gloves." I loved this too. Very poignant. Posted by Noah Slater on 2007-01-17

After a long hiatus comments are now re-enabled for BitWorking. The main reason they were removed was my inability to manage all the spam, and the introduction of 1812 has given me nice platform to build a control panel for managing my comments. Another spam handling strategy is that comments will only be accepted for five days after an entry had been published or updated. One aspect of the old commenting system that has survived into the new incarnation has been editable comments, but unlike the old system which allowed you to edit your comments forever, this new system has been limited to just five minutes.

In Chapter 10 of Douglas Adam's Life, the Universe, and Everything we meet the people of Krikkit whose home planet and sun are surrounded by a dust cloud that blocks their view of the rest of the universe, and in this scene they are flying their first spaceship out past the cloud: History was gathering itself to deliver another blow. Still the darkness thrummed at them, the blank enclosing darkess.

We uncovered this river frog while digging trenches around our half-completed shed. Don't mind the half-completed, or the digging trenches, or the fact that there was enough water to support a River Frog. Let's just focus on the frog.

Simon Willison is leaving Yahoo! and going freelance, for all the right reasons. Congrats and best of luck.

A University of Calgary professor has recently published his magnum opus on procrastination, which includes, among other findings: Most people’s New Year’s resolutions are doomed to failure Not suprising since I see this every year at the YMCA. For the first month the Y is crowded with 'Resolvers' - people who made it their new year resolution to work out more or to get in shape. By the end of February every one of them will be gone and we'll be back to the 'regulars'.

There is now a proposal to use URI Templates in HTML 5.

This is a screen shot of my logfiles, recording here for all posterity the sparklines web service crossing the auspicious milestone of one million hits a week. That's a web service, written in Python, running as a CGI application, under Apache, shelling out a million hits a week, on a shared host, and in no way even causing the server to breath hard.

[Simon Willison]: I added a colophon to my about page a few weeks ago; I’ve updated it and added a feed of the last few changelog messages checked in to Bazaar. Bazaar is written in Python, so I can pull data from it using the bzrlib module directly in my Django view ... Neat.

The source for 1812, the code that now runs this blog is now available. Note that I don't expect you to use it, the code is highly customized to my needs, but there may be cool bits you want to borrow. First the name: 1812. I listened to the 1812 Overture, repeatedly, while coding, so thus the name. Store Format The underlying datastore in 1812 is a flat file database that has one file per entry.

My lovely wife Lynne finally has a blog. After hearing "you should blog about [blank]" for the Nth time I gently mentioned that if she had her own blog, she wouldn't have to wait for me to write about [blank]. So now she's up and running on Blogger and has a bunch of posts up already, including reviews of Spoofee, Slingbox, Nintendo Wii , and ViaTalk. What she fails to mention in the Slingbox review is that it requires an ethernet connection.