Off in the weeds again…

Sigh.

I’ve just spent the last few hours wandering around the various “open source” analytics programs trying to find the exact right fit for what I want.  I’m not finding it, which means that (headache ahead) I may have to write something myself.  There’s a django-analytics placeholder in GoogleCode, but it’s empty.  I at least have a model!

Basically, I have a distributed subscriber/producer package, and I want to be able to present individual producers with analysis specific to their work.  Because the work is long-form text, I want to be able to tell the viewer that the reader scrolled every paragraph into view (no, really!) and actually read the work, not just scanned it.  Both of these are more or less beyond the province of Piwik, Google Analytics, or OWA.

Time to put the research aside and concentrate on finishing the product.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.com

I have Cucumber working with FacebookConnect!

Ah, the bleeding edge.  It’s a war out there!

This morning, Facebook released fbwatir. I’ve just spent the past few hours knocking it around, and have come to the conclusion that it’s pretty mega-borked but it can be saved.

In fact, I now have it working with Cucumber and Firewatir. There are several major flaws in FBWatir, the biggest of which is that it assumes its own responsibility for the browser object. This is broken, and causes Cucumber to spawn an innumerable number of Firefox windows. Commenting out the browser invocation in FBWatir and putting into cucumber’s own env.rb file is much better.

I also discovered that there’s a bug in Firewatir 1.6.2 that assumes that “window zero” is always broken,  but Javascript indexes the windows starting with zero, so window zero is still a valid window ID.  Annoying as hell, but easily monkeypatched away.

I now have Cucumber working with FacebookConnect…

Given how little I know about Ruby, and given how my Ruby expert says I’m doing “inappropriate things” with the Ruby scope, that’s a freaking miracle.  We’re working together to make it work better.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.com

Encounter with Kyootness!

Art Students

This morning, on the way to work, I stopped by Whole PaycheckFoods to pick up a quart of milk. While I was locking my bike up, these lovely young ladies came up and said, "Excuse me, sir. We're art students from Cornish College of the Arts, and our teacher gave us an assignment to take pictures of people on the streets, and get them to tell us what they're passionate about."

Hmm. I agreed, "But first..." I whipped out my own camera and shot them. And then, because I am a vicious and cruel soul, I wrote on the sheet of paper, "I'm passionate about great design that communicates clearly."

But look! Nascent art students, before they've had the passion beaten out of them by reality. Aren't they kyoot?

Yay! One more!

One more than last time. I made it to 47. Goddess, that hurts. That hurts a lot. Especially the right shoulder. I thought I had the form right, too, but something went wrong. We'll see if I'm still good for Friday, when the target is 53.

Ouch.