Monthly Archives: July 2009

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Pomodoro, AppleScript and Adium

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I downloaded this Pomodoro Timer from the Apple website.
It has support for AppleScript events, so I created a script that automatically sets my Adium status to away (with an auto-reply) while I am working on a Pomodoro and automatically sets it to Available when I have finished.

After much messing around, trying to work out just how the AppleScript pseudo-natural-language works, I ended up with this to set the away status:

-- This goes on one line in Pomodoro Setup -> AppleScript -> Start
tell application "Adium" 
  to set the status of every account whose status type is available 
  to the first status whose title is "Pomodoro In Progress"

and this to set it back to available:

-- This goes on one line in Pomodoro Setup -> AppleScript -> Reset and End
tell application "Adium" 
  to set the status of every account whose status type is away 
  to the first status whose title is "Available"
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Tiny Types

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Mark Needham’s post on micro types sparked an idea in my head that recently came to fruition.
I was pondering on the Narrative Fixture code, and the fact that, although most of the internals are sensibly typed objects, at the FitNesse layer, we do a lot of passing of strings.
The idea (at least, my interpretation) with Tiny Types is that the string obviously means something, and that we can probably classify what that meaning is (we have a sensibly named variable for it, after all) , and so why not convert it to that meaningful thing as soon as possible.
This has the nice effect of making some vague things (such as typing on collections) much more explicit.

As an example, in the Casting Director we have:

Map<String, ActorPlayingThe<?>> dressingRoom = new HashMap<String, ActorPlayingThe<?>>();

and, after a little bit of refactoring, we end up with:

Map<CharacterName, ActorPlayingThe<?>> dressingRoom = new HashMap<CharacterName, ActorPlayingThe<?>>();

Personally, I’m a fan of low ceremony, high essence languages, but while working in a high ceremony environment, we can leverage that ceremony to provide us with a nice summary of our thinking, ready for the next time we return to the code.