Monthly Archives: September 2006

29th Sep, 2006

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Quotes On Your Phone

Make iheartquotes your Twitter friend and get quotes messaged to your phone every day at 10am, 3pm, and 8pm.

If you’re not ready for daily updates but find yourself alone with your cell phone jonesing for a quote you can also text iheartquotes to MOZES (66937).

This latest I Heart Quotes integration is a mashup of the I Heart Quotes API and the Twitter API. The Twitter API is new but there’s already been some cool uses, like update Twitter with your IChat status. I’m sure there will be more, because 1. Twitter is awesome, 2. the API is dead simple.

BTW, I Heart the quote that Biz dug up for his post about this on the Twitter blog.

28th Sep, 2006

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Personal Finance Private Alpha

Despite my recent postings, I’m actually working on something that matters: a personal finance website called Wesabe. We’ve got a rough version up and we’re looking for a few more friends to test it out. If you’re interested email me.

I was recently in the hospital under heavy sedation (long story). Apparently the drugs made me extremely chatty and I began to explain to all of the doctors how I was building something that was going to change the world and then questioning them on how they managed their finances (the anesthesiologist used Excel). Even sober, I still believe that.

Most people go through life not knowing where their money goes, not knowing wether they’re getting good value from the people they give their money to, and too guilty to do anything about it. They say they’re too lazy to enter their spending in to a program like Quicken, blaming themselves when they should really be blaming Quicken for being such a crummy product. Meanwhile corporations are gathering more and more data on you so that they can come up with new and more sophisticated ways to part you from your money.

Wesabe thinks organizing your finances shouldn’t be a chore and that you should be keeping tabs on the people you give your money to so that you can find the good merchants and avoid the cheats. For the most part we’ve built something that does this. And we’re getting closer to those goals every day.

The rest of the company are Marc Hedlund and Jason Knight, founders, who write the Wesabe blog, Brad Greenlee and Coda Hale, rails gurus, and Jeff Fassnacht, designer.

I hope this explains why financial tips randomly started showing up on my blog.

23rd Sep, 2006

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Get Quotes On Your Phone

Text iheartquotes to MOZES (66937) and you’ll get a random quote text-messaged back to you.

Mozes is a text messaging company that offers hosted keywords. They provide the text messaging service and the dedicated number. You provide the content. There’s a bunch of options for providing dynamic content using their API. At the easy end, which is what I did, you just need to provide a URL that responds with the content inside an XML packet.

The first keyword is free and you don’t actually need to be a programmer to use it. In fact the service seems to be mostly used by bands to provide tour information.

iheartquotes.com is a quote database that I built a few weeks ago so that I’d have better access to my favorite quotes (mostly drawn from the Unix fortune program). It as its own API so that you can add quotes to your programs or websites (I use it to get a random quote whenever I login and also to show a random quote on my website).

19th Sep, 2006

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Agile Testing

(WARNING: This is another bloglines link dump surrounded by poorly disguised context!)

Traditional software development usually calls for dedicated QA. When I went to Odeo I knew that the engineers there wanted to work in an agile environment. But Odeo had also just hired a traditional QA person coming from a big-software QA group. I’d never heard how people integrated dedicated QA into an agile group so I went hunting for relevant blogs. One that I liked was Agile Testing by Grig Gheorghiu.

Grig’s writing is skewed toward Python but there’s still plenty of gems for the rest of us. Here were the links I had bookmarked in blogines:

Useful tools for writing Selenium tests
Discussion of tools that make it much easier to work with Selenium, a program for writing GUI-based testing for web apps.

Extreme Programming and QA With Kent Beck
A pointer to this QA Podcast interview.

Xooglers – A Blog By Ex-Googlers
Not testing related, but sometimes it’s good to see how and how far a person strays from their blog subject. These are ex-google guys commenting on google on a google-owned blogging platform.

I’m still not entirely sure what the role of dedicated testing is for an agile group. When you’re iterating the product design quickly I think the testing you want is all automated, so that you know quickly if you’ve broken something important (quickly being within 5 minutes). But after you’ve gone through several months of quick product iteration I think you want a thorough QA pass to mark all the rough edges. So either the engineeers the write automated tests as they go and then you bring in contract QA at the end or you hire someone who can do both.

This might be a good time to mention that Rabble, formerly of Odeo, is writing a Testing Rails blog (as well as a testing rails book for O’Reilly).

17th Sep, 2006

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Blaine’s Odeo Extractions

I fixed the update mechanism for gemjack and now you can see two ruby gems that Blaine Cook extracted from the Odeo code base.

FakeWeb
A test helper that makes it simple to test HTTP interaction

WeightedSelection
A simple library for obtaining weighted randomized selections (like for web AB testing perhaps).

10th Sep, 2006

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Tribute to the Unix Fortune Program

Introducing I Heart Quotes.

Unix used to have a lot of personality. RedHat would let you go through the entire installation in the language of ‘Redneck.’
And every server had a program called ‘fortune’ that would greet you with some manner of quote, joke, epigram, or other pithy comment. Things like this gave personality to an otherwise pretty nerdy hobby.

At some point the source of those quotes, the fortune program, stopped showing up on servers. A combination of Linux trying to compete in the corporate world and my leaving college to also compete in the corporate world led to working on servers with less personality. The fortune program still exists, but just isn’t as prevalent. I think that’s sad.

So what’s a man to do? Build a web service on top of every fortune file I could find on the internet (if you know of any that I missed, please email me). Now I (you) can get your fortune regardless of what’s installed on the server.

(I also built a digg-style website and ratings for the data, but that’s really beside the point.)

Here’s what I put in my .bash_profile to get a fortune every time I login:


alias getfortune='wget --timeout=3 -O - -q'
alias fortune='getfortune http://www.iheartquotes.com/api/v1/random'
alias myfortune='getfortune http://www.iheartquotes.com/api/v1/random?source=joel_on_software+paul_graham+prog_style
myfortune

If you’re on a Mac you probably have curl installed instead of wget. If so use this line:

alias getfortune='curl -m 3'

There’s more options on the official API page, the most important is that you can choose which sources the API pulls from (make sure you include Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons: simpsons_cbg). The available sources are below.

From geek:

esr
humorix_misc
humorix_stories
joel_on_software
macintosh
math
mav_flame
osp_rules
paul_graham
prog_style
subversion

From general:

codehappy
fortune
liberty
literature
misc
murphy
oneliners
riddles
rkba
shlomif
shlomif_fav
stephen_wright

From pop:

calvin
forrestgump
friends
futurama
holygrail
powerpuff
simon_garfunkel
simpsons_cbg
simpsons_chalkboard
simpsons_homer
simpsons_ralph
south_park
starwars
xfiles

From religious:

bible
contentions
osho

From scifi:

cryptonomicon
discworld
dune
hitchhiker