Monday Links - Week 223

BERG Cloud DevKit

BERG are making a ‘shield’ board for connecting Arduinos, Raspberry Pis and mbed boards to their ‘cloud’. It looks like ‘BERG Cloud’ performs the same role as my Printer server (which is: taking the all of the hard but boring part of turning a web page into a physical thing), but extends it beyond printing, to any kind of interaction driven by a backend server.

It raises questions for me personally about the future of my Printer project, since a) part of the motivation for me to release it was because it wasn’t clear to what extent BERG would be opening up access to their service for ‘hacking’, and b) the architectures of BERG Cloud and Printer seem very similar. I guess we’ll see. — JA

whytheluckystiff.net is back up…

… and it’s gone again.

You can read some discussion on Hacker News here, but more significantly you can get a PDF of all of the PCL SPOOL files in a collection aptly-titled ‘CLOSURE’. _Why was in the middle of writing his Poignant Guide when I discovered Ruby, and I suspect I will always be nostaglic for the time when he was still writing. — JA

Developing on a Chromebook

Something for Chris here: one strategy for using a Chromebook to do real work (i.e. software development). — JA

Short’s Not Always Sweet: The Case for Long Test Names

Kent Beck gives some interesting insight into why he uses long names for test methods and shorter ones for other methods. — JM

Working with Ruby Threads

I read Working with Unix Processes by Jesse Storimer a while ago and found the explanations very clear. I read Working with Ruby Threads on my train on Friday and had a similar positive experience. — JM

dispatch.vim

In my continuing quest to perfect my vim development environment, I’m really impressed with Tim Pope’s latest offering. I can now run a test and see the full output appear temporarily in a tmux pane, but then have any failures appear in a vim quickfix window which take me to the relevant lines in the file. — JM