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A very good article on writing test plans in the IEEE Software magazine, 10-Minute Test Plan.  I can get behind this, it is a size and scale appropriate to the software I write, non-life critical, small to medium size organizations.  Too much of what is advocated is appropriate for life or health critical, enterprise systems.

My IEEE card came in the mail today—Senior Member, valued member for 42 years.  Huh.  That’s a while.  Maybe it’s not time to join a startup.  The song playing in the coffee house is older than most people here.  And I heard it when it was first out.

There are people in the startup scene with naturally gray hair.  But they are mentors and angels.  And there’s the rub, I don’t feel up to these either.

I have taught and mentored people across two decades and at least two subject areas.  But now?  I’m stumbling about in Ruby on Rails for seven years and am still decidedly non-fluent.  I hack and slash the code until it doesn’t break so often.  It’s ugly and after a few months I can’t read it.  Where is the deep knowledge and simple elegance I once had?  I stopped caring enough to learn deep.  And maybe there is too much for one person to learn it all.  It shows in my work.  And in my workplace—it’s a mess of things to be completed stacked on top of tasks long past due.  If I missed a turnoff, it’s so far  back I can’t retrace my (mis)steps.

As Dante said, “At mid-life, I came again to a dark place in the woods where there was no road.”

Lately I have been moving away from programming, a career I’ve been doing for over forty years. It’s been my only career, so it’s not easy. In fact, it’s bewildering. Yesterday I wrote an little rant for myself about why. Today I encountered Do You Really Want to be Doing This When You’re 50?. The writer just lays out the reasons why he isn’t programming much any more. Huh, I thought it was just me.

Tomorrow I’ll put my more poetical and less conscious take on the subject into this blog.

In my previous post on Non-Interactive RVM Installation, I described a problem (RVM in a script prompting for input) and a solution (redirect output to the null device).  It wasn’t elegant, but it worked.  To quote the TV detective Columbo, “This bothers me.”  It’s ugly and ugly solutions are often brittle.  In the RVM IRC channel, mpapis worked with me.  It required some reading, learning more about Bash, and understanding what I was being told to find a more elegant solution.

First, some jargon.  “rvm as a function” means a Bash function named rvm is defined and when Bash processes a line that starts with “rvm” the rest of the line is passed to the function, not to an executable named rvm.  To check which, type “type rvm | head -1“.  Typical responses are:

• rvm is a function
• rvm is /home/jeff/.rvm/bin/rvm
• -bash: type: rvm: not found

The first two cases behave similarly, but not identically.  In my case, I want to force the second.  Bash has a built-in to do this, command.  So the solution is the following line:

command rvm install 1.9.2 -C \
--with-openssl-dir=$rvm_path/usr

According to the documentation, it should behave the same without the “-C” option, but doesn’t.  This solution doesn’t involve any hacks and will likely not be broken by rvm updates.

The Obama and Romney campaigns’ technology teams are interesting reflections of the candidates themselves. I’m not sure they were the difference between winning and losing, but I am sure they contributed to the margin of victory.

The Obama tech campaign was modeled on the Lean Startup and Agile Development technologies and drew people from the biggest of the Internet companies: Google, Twitter, and Facebook.

• Built to win: Deep inside Obama’s campaign tech — How Obama’s tech team built a “force multiplier” with Amazon and a narwhal.
• AWS in Action – Behind the Scenes of a Presidential Campaign — the view from Obama’s cloud provider, Amazon.
• 40 Engineers Worked 14-Hour Days, 7 Days A Week To Get Obama Reelected—Here Is Their Story — a detailed look at a core team (the full team was over 1000 people), their problems and successes, and lessons learned.

The Obama team worked hard and smart.  They already knew how to scale. They and their massive product were prepared for Election Day.  Hip talent at its best.

The Romney campaign described Orca, their get-out-the-vote app, as a Narwhal-killer. But as one observer said, “That’s like calling the iPad a Facebook killer.” Orca is an app. The Obama team built an enterprise class ecosystem of apps, databases, and analysis tools. Orca was a “secret” weapon, but detail are emerging from campaign finance records.

• The Romney Campaign’s Ground Game Fiasco — the view from the results.
• Who built ORCA? That’s the wrong question — the view of a tech savvy pollworker. Short story, app with mild flaws and awful deployment that did not scale.
• Romney campaign got its IT from Best Buy, Staples, and friends — the details from campaign records.

Orca automated an existing, paper process.  It was a mild improvement, not a gamechanger.  It did not scale. And it was like Romney, crony capitalism.

I’m setting up scripts to start up a Web app on an Amazon Web Services instance in the cloud. I’m starting with the latest Ubuntu image. Ideally, I could just launch an instance with the proper user data and it would start, install the necessary packages, and start the server. I’ve spent several weeks getting to the point where this works. The big stumbling block turned out to be installing Ruby with the Ruby Version Manager (RVM). RVM is a wonderful package that allows installing specific versions of Ruby. The Web app I’m installing needs Ruby 1.9.2. Ruby 1.9.1 does not work. Ubuntu defaults to Ruby 1.8 with incomplete support for 1.9. Hence the need for RVM.

The install instructions for RVM work beautifully. I’m very impressed. But on the first install of a Ruby, it spits out several pages of requirements and notes. Bash politely pages it (like more or less programs) and waits for you to read it and hit ‘q‘. Fine at the terminal and it doesn’t work from an unattended script. I tried using echo pass ‘q‘ to the standard input of rvm. Doesn’t work. I asked on the freenode.net #rvm IRC channel. Received some suggestions, mostly updating to newer versions. Didn’t work.

So I used the source, RVM is mostly Bash scripts. First I tried to figure out how RVM knows that a Ruby has already been installed. I didn’t succeed, there is just too much unfamiliar code. But I did note that the various notes and requirements printouts are from printf(), a Bash function. Nothing in the Bash man pages mentions the paging behavior, but only the requirements, the longest printout, is paged. So something knows how big the terminal is. What if there was no terminal? Redirecting standard error and standard output to /dev/null seemed a possibility. I tried it and it worked. So this is the line from the script that works:

rvm install 1.9.2 &> /dev/null