The perils in trusting syntax highlighting

Today after upgrading RSpec I ran a user story that I had just written and received a wonderful error: You have a nil object when you didn't expect it! (NoMethodError). The error occurred while evaluating nil.add_scenario. I didn’t even think to check my user story because the syntax highlighting looked fine and it made sense to me:

  Scenario: areas have different types
    As an administrator
    I want to assign different types to the areas
    So that I can structure the home page

    Scenario: footer shows page links
      Given an area
      And area has 5 pages
      And area is of type footer
      When I view the home page
      Then I should see the home page
      And I should see the footer section
      And the list section should contain 0 areas
      And the footer section should contain 5 links

Of course, if I actually bothered to read it properly then I would have seen that the first line should have read:

  Story: areas have different types

Moral of the story: even if the code that you have to write is small, always assume that you are capable of making silly mistakes!

Site design

I do think that it is about time that I changed the theme of this website. I don’t know if anyone remembers the original hand-crufted theme but luckily archive.org is able to help me out:

The main problem that I have with the current design is the list of pages that is just too long and distracting. I know that I could use some sort of list folding plugin, but I was hoping that there was a better alternative—perhaps even a redesign of the website rather than just choosing a different theme.

Important features are:

• News/blog posts
• Static pages with subpages—-I might have posts that talk about BeOS software, but there is a specific page for each piece of software
• Flickr photos!
• Spam plugin—-I hardly get any comments any more, but akismet has blocked over 45,000 spam

Quiz poll results for December

I think it is now time to discuss the quiz poll results. Thank you everyone who spent some time voting and especially those that left comments. The current results can be seen in the graph below:

The comments that I received were as follows:

• …should show results at end of quiz…
• …ask real words…
• …optional real words…
• …keyboard shortcuts…
• …show correct answers at end of quiz…

Some notes from the graph and comments:

• more than half of you requested that you be tested with real words;
• repetitive questions appears to be a problem;
• an equal number of you wanted to be able to check your progress and also have the questions adapting automatically to your progress.

Real words I believe have been requested by people that have already learnt quite a bit of the hiragana or katakana and now want to be tested on words that are actually useful. When I try to learn things I tend to focus on one group at a time so I think it would be difficult to find a list of words that only contain ka, ki, ku, ke, ko for example.

Repetitive questions could either be the result of selecting too few character groups so that the questions are always formed from the same 10 characters, or instead the same characters are shown regardless of how many character groups are selected.

Progress tracking and automatically adapting questions can allow the software to automatically suggest which groups/characters need testing and when. However, if the on-screen results are not clear then there is the risk that the users are not aware of their progress and perhaps even the mistakes they have made and need to concentrate on.

I will post on this again later, but if people do have any more comments or want to open up a discussion then please use the comment form below.

Hiragana and Katakana quiz survey

I have decided that it my hiragana and katakana quiz are in need of some attention, but I don’t know where to start. What better way than a little survey? Do you think that it keeps asking you the same character over and over again (even though you have selected lots of rows) or perhaps it should realise that you have learnt a specific character and that there is no point asking you it again (not today anyway)? I am sure that the following choices don’t cover all cases so please leave a comment instead.

Thank you!

Haiku under VMWare Fusion

Interesting times indeed as I am finally able to run Haiku at a decent speed under OSX (does that make it Haiku.app?). The network works too which is very useful if I am ever going to do anything with my projects.