noizZze

Lately I watched the Rest series of excellent Peepcode screencasts and fell in love with that nice marriage of Autotest and Growl they have on Mac.

If you don’t know what Autotest is, imagine the RSpec tester spinning in the background and watching the files you change. Once it sees something new, it runs corresponding specs and displays all usual “X examples, Y failures, Z pending” in its output. Then it looks for more changes and makes another specs run. Pretty useful.

The integration with Growl I referred to brings it to a next quality level — it lets you continue working and get the results of automated specs run as a Growl balloon. It looks like this: you do some changes in the editor, save a file, continue working and then, a couple of seconds later (when the testing is finished), a nice balloon appears reporting the status of the spec run against your new sources; with cool smiles and color.

We, Unix users, don’t have Growl, but we do have a secret weapon — XOSD — which is almost the same. The only difference is that it’s just a text-over-everything tool: no images, no background fills etc. However, for our purposes it works just fine.

I started by picking a Growl-Autotest integration script from wiki, then installed an xosd_cat console tool that talks to XOSD library (in Ubuntu you need xosd-bin package for this), and changed the script a bit to call this tool instead of Growl notifications.

Now I have very cute reports from the Autotest running in the background too.

Please download the “Autotest + XOSD” script and let me know what you think. Remember to put the “dot_autotest” from the archive into your home directory and rename it to “.autotest”.

Currently I’m in the receiving mode and looking for projects to apply my skills and knowledge. If you have a project for or need any consulting / programing services from an open-minded and communicative guy with more than 10 years of programing and software design experience, please contact me via e-mail or IM, and we’ll see if we could work out a mutually beneficial agreement.

I’m especially interested in the areas below. However, if you have something else in mind, don’t hesitate and drop me a message. It won’t hurt.

• Web 2.0 and Ruby on Rails
• Java: server-side, desktop, libraries
• Ruby: tools and libraries
• Web Scraping

Also, I work with a talented web / graphics designer. She is brilliant at what she does, and you can see it with your own eyes in her portfolio. If you need a site, a redesign, a logotype, a business card or anything else that looks, I’m sure Kate could lend you a hand of help. Let me know and we’ll arrange an introductory meeting.

To learn more about me and my experience you can check my LinkedIn profile or reach directly:

• AIM: agureiev
• ICQ: 118889754
• Skype: spyromus
• E-mail: spyromus@noizeramp.com

Whole last week we spent under the warm sun of Egypt: swam in the Red Sea, traveled a lot, socialized. What I would like to show you is our little photo-report — a Egypt set on Flickr. Almost every image is accompanied with the comment — a story, a history note or just an observation.

Kate and I hope you’ll like this little fraction of the journey and share our joy. Leave comments, ask questions, do amends to history notes.

Everyone is welcome!

P.S. Sheriff, Aladin, Amir, and Ibrahim — you, guys, are the best. We enjoyed your trips and greatly appreciate your help with tea issues. Hope to see you some day again!