ruby

An interesting thing about developing software to work with an FTP server is that for some tests you need files to be uploaded to the FTP server very slowly. Usually you want software to run as fast as possible, but in my case I needed to be able to throttle the FTP upload speed to test portions of my code. (Specifically, I'm writing code to listen to Proftpd FTP server events, and I needed this to make sure all the STOR, DELE, RNFR, and RNTO events work as advertised (making sure the event notifications aren't sent until the event is complete.)

Here's a quick example of using Ruby ActiveRecord outside of Rails. In this case I'm saving a new record to an employees table in a MySQL database.

In the latest release of Dr. Dobbs, Michael Swaine reports that "after two years trying to make Ruby on Rails do what he wanted, Derek Sivers went back to PHP and finished the job in two months." Actually, here's a direct link to Derek Sivers' post, including his seven reasons he switched back from Rails to PHP, and what he learned from Rails.

Here's a simple Ruby program that opens a text file, then uses a series of simple algorithms to look for hidden words in the text. For instance, it looks at only odd words, only even words, then looks at Nth characters, Nth words, and also Fibonacci words and characters.

As I mentioned in a previous blog entry (eXtreme GUI Testing, Part 1) I've been motivated to work on a project in my spare time, and I'd like to start leaking the details here.

For lack of a better name I'm currently calling this project eXtreme GUI Tester, or XGT for short. As its name implies, this is an application (actually a suite of applications) that hopes to make automated GUI testing a little more of a reality.