www.ian.dees.name

The baby is teaching me how to speak Robinese. This is a greater intellectual challenge, she reasons, than merely learning English would be (which she’s also doing). Old dogs, new tricks, and all that.

From what I’ve been able to gather, Robinese is more of an analytic language than English. She changes the meanings of words not by gluing on prefixes or suffixes, but by adding more words. For example, I would stick together two concepts and a suffix in one word to refer to my absentmindedness. She would express the same sentiment using separate words: “silly Daddy.” We intensify a word by adding “-er” or “-est.” She does so by repeating the word: “shoo shoo bad bad,” she says to the cats or anyone else who crosses her.

Her most creative use of this technique so far has to be “water monkey balls,” her term for “museum” (don’t all museums have a giant monkey and an aquatic play room?).

Other linguistic highlights:

Normally we don’t modify pronouns: we can say “red car,” but not “red it.” Robinese has no such restriction: “my this” is a frequent utterance when she has no idea what to call something, but knows she wants it.

“All right” is not just a response to cajoling (as in, “all right, I’ll do it, quit bugging me”); it is also an expression of cajoling. Can you imagine waking up to a baby standing next to your bed, pulling on your arm and saying, “All right, all right, all right?”

Word meanings are extremely dependent on context. The single-word sentence, “Hold,” can mean, “I want to play with the cups that are on that table,” or “If you value your eardrums, you’ll pick me up right now.”

Next lesson starts today. Can’t wait.

We have a drawer at the house we call the “oh, shit” drawer. It has chargers for long-discontinued phones (hey, Nokia might start making the 2120 again!). It has enough paperclips and safety pins to melt down and make, say, a medium-sized bicycle. It’s got crap I don’t even know what to call.

Welcome to the verbal equivalent of that drawer. What’s left to write about here? Flash-pan, off-the-cuff insights go on Twitter. Code goes on GitHub, thanks to hg-git. Prose, if I’m excited enough to feel compelled to type it in no matter where I am, gets e-mailed straight to Posterous. And if I’m not excited to write it? Well, you’re lookin’ at it, bub.

Weird that just a couple of years ago, a domain was a one-stop shop to put everything you cared about: reading, writing, code, life, photos, essays, quips, everything. Now, our identities are so sharded. (No, not sharted.) Not a bad thing, necessarily. A bunch of people I know get way more eyeballs on their tweets than they ever did on their blog posts. And one gal uses the Internet as kind of a fault-embracing distributed backup of her brain. Why worry about meticulously finding room on your computer to put stuff, the reasoning goes, when you can blast it out into the ether?

Tempting.

Still, though, the retro-2000s curmudgeon in me says that www.yourname.com is better than facebook.com/yourname plus twitter.com/yourname. Not that these are mutually exclusive, but realistically, how much time do we all have to be de-facto system admins of ten different websites? In our spare time, no less?

And what’s left to put on your own domain when you’ve already said everything elsewhere? Just an aggregation of crud that lives elsewhere?

I dunno, maybe I’m overthinking this (shocker!). Probably best just to let all those other (a)venues be breeding grounds for ideas, and use good ol’ Ctrl-C plus Ctrl-V to bring the greatest hits into one place.

Not that there won’t always be that little monkey voice saying, “Wouldn’t it be cool to have a little script to tie this all together? C’mon, let’s fire up Emacs….”

Dammit, scooped by Giles. I hint tantalizingly at an upcoming article on Bacon and Cucumber, and he goes and writes the damn thing. I was even gonna raid Flickr for an appropriate picture, just like he did (this one’s courtesy of user nicubunu):

Ah well. It turns out we have different things to say on the matter, anyway. Read on.

Ah, technology. Write a book with a chapter on testing programs in plain English, and they go and change the software the next morning. It would be enough to make a more timorous developer tip the entire bookshelf into the dustbin and give up on testing altogether.

But not us. You and I, we’re going strap Aslak’s guide to our side, wade in, and see just what it takes to whip a bunch of RSpec stories into shape for Cucumber. Read on….

Ah, the iPhone. Darling of the geeks. All these shiny new applications running on it. How will we test them all? What software test framework is simple enough, elegant enough, trendy enough to suit the device?

Why, Cucumber, of course.

Read on to hear the story of how it was all done, or go straight to the code to try it.

Do you remember the Rocky’s Boots video game from the eighties? Of course you do. While the rest of us were struggling to survive to the end of the Oregon Trail, you were building rudimentary Rube Goldberg devices out of simple “and” and “or” operations to make Rocky the Raccoon kick the right sequence of little colored squares.

Primitive recursive functions in mathematics are kind of like that. Most simple calculations you can think of — testing whether or not a number is prime, say — can be built out of a few really basic functional pieces.

It may seem like a tenuous leap from a dancing raccoon to one of the most crucial insights into modern computing. Bear with me here….

A quine is a program that prints its own source code as output, without using any dirty tricks like “go find the file this source code lives in, and spit out the contents.”

Most programmers cut their baby teeth on neat tricks like quines. Others spend their undergrad years using electrons as the fundamental unit of computation, and don’t get to programming-language tomfoolery until much further on.

So, better late than never….

With an intelligently rambunctious second-grader, a trouble-seeking one-year-old, a full-time job, a book to promote, and another book to write, I’d have to be stupid to take on anything else, right?

Heh.

Now I’m a fuzzy grad student, too. (The terminology comes from my old undergrad days, when we’d universally refer to all the masters / doctoral crowd, regardless of facial hair situation or even gender, as “fuzzy grad students.”) How did this happen?

Read on to find out.

Hard to believe it’s been a whole year. Back then, all she could do was eat, sleep, and poop. Now, she can walk. And talk! She knows I’m “Daddy” (actually, sometimes anything bigger than her is “Dajjy”), Mommy is “Baba,” sister is “Adeeeeee,” and a cat or anything else you have to be gentle with is “Sof’.”

Some parents teach their children a simplified sign language. In our case, Robin taught us her own signs. A tug of the ear means, “I’m hungry.” Slapping the knees simultaneously means, “Yes, very amusing.” Slapping the knees alternately means, “You’ve got about three seconds to pick me up or I start shrieking.” And when she grabs her bare belly at bath time, we’re pretty sure she’s saying, “I appear not to be wearing a shirt any more. I find this hilarious for some reason.”

We did manage to get a couple of our signs to sink in with her. The standard stuff you’d expect: point at the mouth for “Eat,” touch the hands together for “More,” and reach out one-handed to say, “Give me that.” But my favorite sign that she picked up from us is this: when we do our best Homer Simpson and say, Don’t stop a-rockin’! she grins wildly and shakes her head from side to side.

Another months-overdue post. Catching up on my posting backlog, though, which is is more than I can say for nearly every other sector of my life. This one’s about my summer vacation.

Well, I say vacation. But it wasn’t quite that, since my family came along, too. Har, har.

We’d been trying to find something to please everybody. Big sister wanted a pool. Little sister wanted an endless supply of booboo. Mommy wanted a spa. And Daddy wanted something bucolic and Northwest-y, so that (har, har) I could hole up and write—my idea of a break from writing stuff I have to is writing stuff I want to.

So we found Kah-Nee-Ta, a mysteriously-named casino slash resort on reservation land. Perfect! A little something for everyone, including my dad, who was in town from Texas.

Read on to find out what happened.