Eric Pierce's blog

Social code project resume networking with Ohloh

Ohloh is a site I've bumped into before, but never really explored it or created an account. Today I signed up and tried it out, and I'm very glad I did. Project tracking meets resume building meets social networking--I've originated or contributed to quite a few open source projects, and this site gives me an easy overview of the work I've done, what languages I've used, and who else is contributing to or using my software.

Cover your nose

Python has some great features for testing. One of my favorites has always been doctest, which allows you to embed executable tests right in the documentation of your modules, classes, and functions. There are some practical limits to what you can do with doctests, and that's where unit testing comes in.

A better way to document

Okay, I admit it; I'm not ashamed. I love to write documentation. Most of the time, I would rather write docs than code. That's one of the reasons I was thrilled to discover Read the Docs, a new website that makes it easy for developers to build and publish documentation. You can create quick one-off docs, or link up to existing docs you may have in a public Git, Mercurial, Subversion, or Bazaar repository.

How to learn a new language

Throughout my software development career, I've tried to be open to the prospect of learning new programming languages--not just to accomplish a job or pad my resume, but for my own edification and consciousness-expansion. While I haven't learned as many as I would like, I have picked up a few; most recently, I've been endeavouring to learn Haskell.

Automating procedures using Sikuli

A few days ago, I came across an interesting open-source GUI testing application called Sikuli. This tool promises to automate just about any procedure involving graphical elements displayed on the screen, using a vision engine to intelligently match regions of your GUI display to widgets where you might click, drag, or type things. Sikuli is distributed under the permissive MIT License.

Internet Explorer 31-stylesheet limit

After half an hour of editing ie6.css and wondering why the heck my customizations weren't actually showing up in MSIE, I came across a bit of CSS trivia that I'd forgotten, if I ever knew it at all: Internet Explorer can only load 31 stylesheets. Maybe this is due to the stylesheets being indexed by a 5-bit number? I can't imagine a logical reason for such an arbitrary limit.

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