Suspect everything

Brad DeLong comments on the 9.5% growth reported in the third quarter, along with a 13.6% growth in productivity and a 7.1% drop in labor costs:

Back in the 1930s there was a Polish Marxist economist, Michel Kalecki, who argued that recessions were functional for the ruling class and for capitalism because they created excess supply of labor, forced workers to work harder to keep their jobs, and so produced a rise in the rate of relative surplus-value.

For thirty years, ever since I got into this business, I have been mocking Michel Kalecki. I have been pointing out that recessions see a much sharper fall in profits than in wages. I have been saying that the pace of work slows in recessions--that employers are more concerned with keeping valuable employees in their value chains than using a temporary high level of unemployment to squeeze greater work effort out of their workers.

I don't think that I can mock Michel Kalecki any more, ever again.

I feel like I'm living in Michel Kalecki's universe nowadays.

I note with amusement that DeLong, who also hosted Shrillblog, where those driven into unholy madness by the malevolence, mendacity, incompetence and disconnection from reality that has characterized the right wing of American politics for the past nine years can ululate in psychotic shrillness at the cold, uncaring stars, has chosen to rename his blog, "Grasping Reality with All Eight Tentacles."

Radicalize THIS, Mofo!

"I want Americans, I want everybody listening, to go out and buy 5 weapons and 5,000 bullets - for your own protection, for self defense. Because I believe that foreign soldiers will come to our houses, to rape our wives and teenage daughters and kill the men right in front of them - and then the women will bear children of an ethnic stock different from what they are, and that's how you alter the course of any society; you change the ethnic stock. Egypt today is not the same ethnic stock it was during the Moses days." — Major James F. Linzey, Chaplain, US Army, April 10 2005

Oh look, a fire. Gasoline, anyone?

Automatic Testing of Facebook Applications

Eddie Sullivan at Chickenwing Software has a fascinating post entitled The Facebook Platform is Dead. I agree with many of his comments. I don’t think there’s anything terrible about the “Facebook Certified Application” program; that’s a business decision, not a software policy decision. But Sullivan says one thing that set me off. He wrote:

The big companies can afford to hire someone full-time to test and re-test their apps against every change to the back-end, but the rest of us cannot.

To which my reaction is: shut up, and don’t be so damned lazy.

Install Celerity, and get headless testing with WATIR in a rapid-response environment. Install Hudson and get fully automated continual integration. Install Git as your repository, and tell Hudson what your master is, and honor it. Install Cucumber so that when it fails, the failure reports are in clear and unambiguous English. Put this all on that archaic hunk of junk PC in your basement, give it a fresh hard drive and install Debian Linux. Give Hudson a mailserver so it can notify you when an automatic test run fails.

None of this, from building your own PC and installing Linux all the way up to installing Ruby, JRuby, Java, and all of the other tools necessary to support your build environment and make it work, ought to be beyond the ken of the average programmer.

Facebook is just a web application.  Treat it as such.  Test against it.  Get a few Facebook Test Accounts, write a few WATIR scripts to automate their Facebook relationships and friend graphs, write more to log in and go to the application, then test the Hell out of your application.

None of this is hard. If you spend one week teaching yourself how to set Hudson and Git up correctly, you’ll benefit forever from Kent Beck’s famous quote, “transmuting fear into boredom.”  Even better, by putting it on Hudson and Git, you get freedom from even the boredom, for the most part.  Instead, you get knowledge that your fixes don’t break anything, and the capability of backing out when they do.

What is hard is being in the habit of testing.  Of writing testing in terms of expectation. I’m fair at it, but I’m getting better.  I aspire to Beck’s mantra: I’m not a great progammer.  I’m a good programmer with great habits.   Test-driven development (and behavior-driven development) are great ideas (although a lot of TDD zealots go overboard, with the predictable backlash), but integrating them with even better, continuous building and continuous testing, should make all web application development better.

Believe me, Facebook apps are in desperate need of two things: automated testing, and better graphic design.  I can at least contribute to one of these.

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

Weird Baking Experiment: Waffle Iron Cookies

I am not a waffle.

Since everyone's doing it, I decided to go ahead and make oat-and-chocolate-chip cookies in the waffle iron.

You can get the recipe at Finecooking.com.

Kouryou-chan loves them, of course. They're huge, they're fluffy, and damn if they aren't a good excuse to eat butter, brown sugar, and chocolate chips with just enough egg and flour to bind them all together, a little baking soda riser, and oats for, well, I guess for volume. Maybe I can pretend they're good for me.