I like Ruby, but I don’t like its performance, so I’m really anticipating Ruby 2.0. Meanwhile, I’ve been dabbling in Python. Learning a new language and comparing and contrasting them, really helps with determining each language’s strengths and weaknesses. For example, you can easily update all your Ruby gems. Unfortunately, python doesn’t have a direct way of doing this using easy_install. Very odd. I tried using the shell script method, but for whatever reason it just didn’t work as advertised. So I wrote a bash alias to take care of it.
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MyGoogleCal2 no longer works 100% in Internet Explorer. A runtime error occurs when navigating month-to-month or when switching to Agenda mode. The workaround is to simply hide the navigation interface. Now, I don’t know if this bug was introduced when Google updated the code last month, or if it’s always been there and I just never noticed. In any case, the runtime error occurs when //"+a.host+"/calendar is replaced by //www.google.com/calendar. Given the poor debugging available in IE, I didn’t get very far with figuring out why IE breaks. I suspect that when IE makes an XmlHttpRequest, it’s double checking that the request URL matches up with the server host, or something to that effect. Since Google obfuscates the Javascript code, it’s just way too hard to try and fix it. Instead, I’ve opted to create a new version of MyGoogleCal that uses the original technique for IE but uses the technique from MyGoogleCal2 for all other browsers.
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One of my readers asked for a step-by-step set of instructions to install MyGoogleCal2.php. My original posts for restyling Google Calendar did assume a certain level of expertise. This should hopefully help those who are still confused.
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After many false starts, I decided that I really needed to wrap my head around unit testing when writing Rails applications. I more or less completed a Rails 1.2.3 application without any formal tests, and I would like to upgrade it to 2.0.2 and make it RESTful in the process. At the same time, I’ve moved from a Windows development environment to a *nix one after installing Xubuntu on my laptop (an old Compaq Presario). I’ve also switched from Cream to Emacs. Despite my Windows desktop being more than twice as fast as my laptop, I just could not stand not being in a true *nix environment. Too much of the Windows idiosyncrasies got on my nerves. And my switch from Cream to Emacs was because I just didn’t like the instability of the hacks required to make Vim less of a modal editor. If I tire of Emacs, I may try pure Vim instead, but I remember installing Cream simply because I didn’t like pure Vim to start with. So with these various changes going on with my Rails programming environment, I figured it was an ideal time to learn to formally test my applications. Of course the first part is setting up the testing environment so that it is easy to use, stays out of your way, and is informative.
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