My Weekend Without Ruby

This should have been a weekend in which I got a lot of Ruby stuff done. I was motivated (read on for why) and I thought I'd have time (read on for why I didn't). Somehow, the fates conspired against me — I just hope next weekend works out better.

I've written a little about RedGreen — a little hack I tossed together recently. I've gotten a lot of positive feedback about it, including a complete rewrite that turned it into a test runner (and set up colorizing the intermediate results; the 'E's, 'F's, and '.'s). I've also been talking with Eric Hodel about moving it into ZenTest. Needless to say, I was pretty excited about working on incorporating the test runner, and getting the whole thing up to Eric's and zenspider's coding standards.

The only things on my docket for Saturday (the day I'd planned on hacking) was a party for the boys that are joining the Boy Scout Troop I work with. I was going to grill hamburgers and hotdogs, and go over some basic scout skills (knot tying; fire safety, flag etiquette; and reveiwing the Oath, Law, Motto, and Slogan). It turned out that the boys needed a lot more help than I'd thought (and we needed to clear up some requirements for their current Cub Scout advancement before the "bridged" into my troop). My one hour commitment turned into a three hour marathon. I also ended up needing to buy a new video camera for our upcoming vacation and a school assignment my daughter needs to finish by Tuesday — the basic research, comparison shopping, and then picking up needed accessories sucked up most of the rest of the day.

There is a silver lining to my cloud of gloom though. I'm going to be in Seattle next weekend, and I'll be hacking with the Seattle.rb while I'm there. Maybe Eric, zenspider, and I can get several cool new features into RedGreen, then move the whole thing into ZenTest. At least, that's my plan at this point.