Noel Rappin Writes Here

So. Um. I really didn’t intend to be off the blog for quite this long. But, well, one thing leads to another, and sometimes the easiest thing in the world to do is Not Blog.

Some things that are going on:

Rails Test Prescriptions is through it’s full technical review. Comments were mostly positive, with a nice dusting of “why didn’t I think of that”, and “Oops”, and “I should fix that”, plus the occasional “We’re just going to have to agree to disagree”.

As far as timing goes, the plan is to respond to all outstanding comments and give the thing a good read-thru by this Friday. I’d expect that we’ll put out a beta at that point (for one thing, the factories chapter has been updated to factory_girl 2, and I’d like to get that out). After that, I’m not sure how long the copyedit part of the process will take. The Pragmatic web site has mid-January as the publish date at the moment, while Amazon is about a week or two more pessimistic.

In other news, loosely defined, Scrivener 2 is out with handy sync to external folder support, meaning I can easily round-trip between Scrivener on the Mac and, say, PlainText on the iPad. Nifty, and I can’t wait for iaWriter to support sub-folders so I can round-trip with that, too. Also, I’d love it if MarsEdit had the same kind of round-trip sync, not that anybody is asking.

In a slightly related story, I’m doing a kind of half-assed NaNoWriMo, half-assed because I haven’t been able to do it anything near every day. But I’m picking up something I wrote and got pretty far with a few years a go before stopping, and I really would like to get it all the way to The End.

I also just obtained the new Making Software book, which is a collection of empirical software engineering research. I’d expect to see a blog post or two on that, based on what I’ve read so far, I think I’ll have opinions on this.