Bank Holiday thoughts

There was quite a surge of people looking for opening times over the bank holiday, as you might well expect. Unfortunately Opening Times doesn't deal well with this at the moment. I've done a few experiments and should be working on this shortly. The plan is to override any standard opening times for a given day. I considered have a bank holiday standard opening time, and just displaying that when appropriate, but I know that even big chain stores vary their openings quite often so I thought it best to enter them each time.

On the technical side on Saturday I rebuilt the server with Ubuntu Hardy Heron and this time compiled Nginx from source. I also switched to use Thin as the ruby web server. Apologies for any downtime suffered during this upgrade, hopefully this should keep things smooth for a while now.

I went to Hack Day last year and it was good fun and I met loads of very clever and interesting people. I've signed up for Mashed this year. I don't know anyone else who is going, so get in touch in you have a great idea I can work on when I get there.

A long way still to go

I noticed that a few ASDA opening times didn't make sense in that they closed before they opened. I was just about to write a validation when I decided to do it the proper way and write a rspec test first, I was quite pleased with this until I found that some other very simple test is inexplicably failing.

Later on the train my wife's umbrella was knocked off the overhead shelf, fell and broke the space bar on my keyboard. I tried not to interpret this as a sign of the pain I will have to endure to learning proper test driven development.

I then gradually tore apart my ASDA parsing code looking for the source of the problem, but got thoroughly confused, until I finally realised the outputs I was using for diagnosis were entirely unsuitable as they were designed for users and totally muddled up the information I was looking for.

My latest deployment seemed to go ok, very minimal changes, but I'm starting to trust my Capistrano script now.