I’m pleased to report that White Rose Speakers experienced great success with our Open Meeting last week!
The agenda finally came together, albeit with only one prepared speech as the other speaker dropped out on the morning of the event and included lots of our regular members returning as well as a visit from our Area Governor Shelagh, who it is always a pleasure to have along.
More importantly however, we signed up two brand new members and one-relapsed member, giving a positive boost to our numbers. We have lots more exciting plans in the works too, so the future for the club is looking bright.
A big warm welcome to Chris and Martin!
No, he hasn’t announced another documentary.
But he has done what some might consider the next best thing – and produced not one, but two lists of documentaries that he thinks are awesome. I haven’t checked any of them out yet, but I plan to. You can find the lists here and here.
Having been struck down with the flu most of last week, I’ve been spending a lot of time in bed, watching Jonathan Creek.
It’s actually not that old, the first episode was broadcast in 1997, but it’s certainly starting to show its age. Floppy disks, VHS cassettes, an age before you could and would look up everything on the internet – it feels like a historial drama now. Not to mention that the first few episodes weren’t even in widescreen.
It also left me with a very torn feeling – I don’t want to move out of the city but at the same time, I now have a strong desire to live in a windmill. Tough call.
I’m also very pleased to see that they are making a brand new episode of Jonathan Creek, that will appear this Easter as a one off feature length episode!
Just need a new Louis Theroux documentary now and it will be the best Easter ever…
Want to use the Validation module in your Symfony2 unit tests? No problem, thanks to the ValidatorFactory, it’s relatively straight forward.
use Symfony\Component\Validator\ValidatorFactory;
class ExampleTest extends \PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase
{
public function testSomething()
{
$validator = ValidatorFactory::buildDefault()->getValidator();
}
}
Simply include the ValidatorFactory namespace and then use the class and it’s default values method to deliver you a validator, which you can then validate your objects against just as if it was in a controller.
Last month, I had the opportunity to take the Toastmaster role at Leeds City, for the third month in a row.
That means that out of the last six meetings Leeds City has held, I’ve been Toastmaster three times, I’ve taken two best speaker ribbons (one each time I gave a prepared speech) and done a timekeeper role to ensure we were finished in time for the Christmas party (that I organised).
So what was my theme for the evening? You get out what you put in!
As I pointed out – most of the other members of the club are currently subsidising my education. We all pay the same monthly dues whether you don’t turn up at all – or whether you turn up every meeting and work your way round all the roles. Toastmasters is about getting stuck in, and if you don’t embrace that, you’re never going to get your full value.
Not enough places have a “gin of the week”.
Today, Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, better known as Pope Benedict XVI, will step down as Pope. I for one, am very disappointed.
As an atheist, I thought having a former member of the Hitler Youth, who personally covered up child abuse during his career at the Catholic Church, made an excellent elected leader for their organisation. As the infallible representative of God here on Earth, it makes it much more difficult for them to sweep such endemic abuse problems under the carpet as a few nutters gone astray (a tactic that has so far worked very well for the Islamists).
So it is with regret that I see Ratzinger quit the post that most people keep for life – and nobody is implying such tradition once again draws the line between religion and cult into question, so lets lay that one to bed right now. I didn’t think the man known as Hitler’s Other Pope would let anything get in his way.
I wonder what kind of retirement package you get as Pope. They probably haven’t put too much thought into this given it hasn’t happened in 600 years, but presumably he is still going to need security and other considerations, above that of the level of a Cardinal.
Also, at what point does he stop being infallible? Is that today? I hope he has squeezed out all the knowledge he can while we still has the chance.
Still, what is done is done. He had a great run – pissing off all the gays, women, non-believers, Anglicans, health workers and many other groups along the way. I only hope that their next leader is such an apt representative of an organisation that is brought an unparalleled amount of evil into the world[1][2][3][4][5].
If you’re using Ant build scripts, there is a good chance that you will want to do some tasks conditionally – for example, if you’re using CI you will want to run your unit tests every time some code is committed – but you might only want to regenerate documentation or update a stakeholders’ preview build every night.
There is a lot of talk about conditional tags, but all these really allow you to do is set even more variables. You can use if/then/else from Ant-Contrib but that involves adding extra libraries and complicating the issue.
Actually, it turns out it is really simple to set up conditional tasks in your build process. All you need to do is call the task, but in the task header use the if attribute.
For example, I have a build task which calls all the other tasks.
<target name="build" depends="clean,checkout,nightly,phpunit,documentation" />
Even though I’m running this every time, I’m calling the “nighty” task. Below shows how I define that.
<target name="nightly" if="${env.NIGHTLY}">
Finally, in my Jenkins CI install, I make the project a parameterised build, and add a boolean called NIGHTLY that defaults to false. I can then also trigger a build by cron that specifies the NIGHTLY parameter as true, so that when it runs on a night, it runs the additional tasks as well.
In celebration of Galileo Day we headed to Browns for the traditional Galileo Day Feast.
