Days 1-4: Cleveland to Ann Arbor

Friends and family met us at Lakewood Park on Sunday to send us off—two days later than we originally planned.

We finally hit the road a little after 3pm, but stopped at Century Cycles in Rocky River for some last minute supplies.

The ride to Oberlin was slow, but we made it. It took us quite a few miles to get used to the weight of the bikes—each carrying about 50 pounds.

There weren’t many people on campus at the time, so we just picked up some Chinese food and started scouting out a good spot to set up for the night. We settled on a hidden clearing next to a chapel and unloaded our gear.

That turned out to be a terrible idea. For one thing, the bells tolled every hour—even at 2am. And the benches around the corner turned out to be a popular late-night hangout for students looking to drink on the down-low. After the second rowdy group left, I gave in and looked up the closest motel. At 3am, we quickly packed it up and rode to the motel in the dark of the night. This turned out to be my favorite few miles of riding so far. The air was cool, there was absolutely nobody on the road, and we could only see as far as the reach of our headlights.

After showers and breakfast at the motel on Monday, we left for Fremont, Ohio.

Unfortunately, we didn’t discover the North Coast Inland Trail until we arrived in Fremont, so the ride could have been faster and easier than it was. While looking for a place to camp, we found the trail and met a new friend: John, a 26-year-old mechanical engineer contracting on a project in Fremont. After sending us off with suggested camping locations, he caught up to us and offered his place for the night. We gladly accepted and ended up having a great time.

The next morning we hopped on the trail and enjoyed another day of perfect weather. We ran into Elmore Cycle & Fitness along the trail and stopped in for some tune-ups on Erin’s bike. The head mechanic, Mike, was interested in the gear we chose to pack and eagerly offered some helpful advice (such as picking up 12oz of heat antifreeze at a gas station to replace the 32oz of denatured alcohol we’re carrying for cooking). Mike posts photos of passing tourers and his ultralight setups on his Flickr stream (photos of us coming soon).

We eventually reached and promptly exited Toledo, which had terrible roads for cycling and the worst drivers. Everyone had some stupid comment for us—none of them demonstrating any knowledge of the actual rules of the road, of course. So we rode until we reached Temperance, Michigan, and found the perfect stealth camping spot behind some trees.

This morning was the earliest we’ve started yet, waking up at 7:00 to make breakfast and pack up, and hitting the road by 9:00. After 15 miles, we took a short break in Dundee, which was home to every imaginable fast-food chain on just a half-mile stretch, but also a cute and clean downtown area.

The remainder of the trip was spent riding directly north on some very sparsely populated roads, singing songs and taking pictures along the way to cure our boredom.

We rolled into Ann Arbor a little after 1pm and met up with our friends, Erin and Bryan (funny, right?) at their apartment. We’re about to leave for the bar to see their band Lake Folk perform. We’ll be taking advantage of these comfy couches tonight and leaving for Kalamazoo after lunch tomorrow!

Bike Adventure Gear, Part 1: Camping

Over the next few days, I’ll be posting all the gear Erin and I are bringing on our bike trip to Seattle. I’m a determined comparison shopper and bargain hunter, so every last item here was meticulously researched, and we got great deals on almost everything. Maybe these posts will save you some time if you’re planning a similar adventure!

Today’s post: our camping gear.

We’ll be spending our nights in The North Face’s Big Fat Frog 2-person tent:

One of the highest rated tents on REI, I bought it there during their big sale earlier this summer, and saved some money by purchasing the footprint from Rock/Creek.

Since our bodies will likely be aching after riding for hours every day, we each have our own REI Trekker 1.75 self-inflating sleeping pad. To save on weight and space, we’re only bringing one sleeping bag, replacing the other with a Cocooon ripstop silk liner. We can always share the sleeping bag if necessary, so I’m betting that this tradeoff is going to be worthwhile.

We’ll be cooking our meals on the road with the Mini Trianga 28-T backpacking stove:

This tiny stove burns denatured alcohol and comes with a pot and pan. While we’ll mostly be using this just to boil water, I’m looking forward to learning how to cook meals as quickly and efficiently as possible with this limited equipment. CampSaver.com had the best deal on this stove.

And why bring along some normal household utensils when we can use the Guyot Designs MicroBites and the Snow Peak titanium spork? If there’s an everyday item that has a fancy backpacking equivalent, I had to have it. :)

For campsite lighting we have the Black Diamond Orbit lantern and the Mammut TR1 headlamp:

Both are super bright. Unfortunately, Steve’s dog chewed up the lantern, which does in fact resemble a dog toy. It still works fine - a testament to its durability, at least. Oregon Mountain Community had the best deal on the headlamp.

Other miscellanous items…

• A couple MSR PackTowl compact and lightweight towels.
• A firesteel, so I can struggle to ignite things until Erin gets frustrated and uses her lighter.
• This coffee pot - Erin’s vice, not mine. You’re responsible for carrying this one, Erin!
• Plates, bowls, stove fuel, soap, and a clothesline.

Think I’m missing something? Help me out in the comments!

In my next post, I’ll write about the most important gear - our bikes and accessories.

The State of the Weblog

My media server is down, so some content may be missing (pictures, linked documents), and I’m using a temporary theme.

My last day of work in Cleveland is one week from today. The week after that I’ll be riding my bicycle to Seattle with my girlfriend, camping and couchsurfing on the way. It’ll take us about five weeks, and I’ll be posting frequent updates here. Hopefully our cycling adventures capture your interest as much as code and Cleveland musings.

Follow if it is adventure that you seek…

Serious Games talk at Case

I’ll be giving a talk on serious games at the next meeting of the CWRU Hacker Society on Wednesday, April 14th, 8pm in Glennan 313.

The scope will be much wider than my previous talks on Unit Testing Achievements. A rough outline:

• What are serious games?
• How can they be applied to software?
• How do they affect behavior?
• What’s out there now?
• What’s left to be explored?

See you there!

Achievement Unlocked

[This post is adapted from a lightning talk I gave at the Testing in Python Birds-of-a-Feather session at PyCon 2010.]

One of those most fun advancements in video games in recent years is not about the improved graphics, or playing with hundreds of people at once. It’s that games have evolved beyond points. While a good point system may be a good indicator of a player’s abilities, it doesn’t tell the whole story. Many modern games, even if they don’t involve points, have introduced the concept of achievements. Achievements are awarded for completing game-specific challenges—essentially, they are merit badges.

Examples

From Team Fortress 2:

From The Beatles: Rock Band:

From foursquare:

These add another level of fun to the games in question. I think it’s about time we stole this idea for software testing.

Testing Achievements

To make this happen, I announced an Achievements plugin for nose, the Python test runner. Here are a few highlights:

Night Shift
Make a failing test suite pass between midnight and 5am.

Punctuality
Make a failing test suite pass at 9am.

Coffee Break
The test suite takes between 5 and 15 minutes to run.

Happy Ending
All tests in the suite fail…except the last.

My God, It’s Full of Dots
The suite has at least 2,001 passing tests.

Sausage Fingers
At least two distinct syntax errors are raised by the test suite.

Are You Mocking Me?
Import a mocking library.

100% Code Coverage, Level x
100% of at least 2^(x+7) statements are executed.

You can view the full list of achievements here. Many of these are working right now.

Next Steps

Announcing unlocked achievements on Twitter or IRC, global or project-specific leaderboards, pluggable achievement expansion packs…

Share your ideas in the comments!

Phaeton by Kevin Cornell & Randy Jones. This typeface really stood out in ILT’s favorites of 2009. Love it!

Emergency party at my place

Dear Reader,

You knew keeping this blog in your RSS reader would pay off one day, didn’t you? You did, right?

Well now you can reap the rewards, my friend. There comes a time.

You are invited over to my house on Friday, November 13 for a party and performances by several talented musicians.

There will be a full bar. Also an actual, physical bar. Celebrated Clevelander Marta “Martender” Lapczynski will be bartending.

We’re getting started at 10 PM; music at 11. Everything is free.

Here’s your invitation with the details:

See you there, Internet lovelies!

“The Cleveland Tourism Board gave me 14 million dollars about 8 months ago to make a promotional video to bring people to Cleveland. As usual, I waited till the last minute and I ended up having to shoot and edit it in about an hour yesterday afternoon.” — bishopvids

Cleveland Code Co-op meeting on Sunday

The fifth meeting of the Cleveland Code Co-op will commence this Sunday, February 22, from 13:00 till 19:00. We’re expecting more participants than usual, and likely projects so far include:

• redit, a text editor in Ruby
• 80sheep, an ADC (peer-to-peer) client in Python
• a Python tutorial for beginners
• your wildest software fantasies

This month’s meeting will take place in the EECS student lounge at Case Western Reserve University, which is located in the Glennan Building. Directions are located on the wiki. You can also join us on IRC in #C3 on irc.freenode.net.

Food and drinks will be provided! Hope to see you there.

Python instance descriptors: when class descriptors aren’t dynamic enough

Python descriptors are great for customizing access to attributes on a class or instance. They are a big win for tasks like mapping Python objects to data from non-Python sources (such as SQL), since mapped attributes will need to be encoded/decoded and connected to other attributes in some way.

Below is a very simple descriptor; as you can see, accessing it from both the class and the instance invoke the descriptor protocol:

class Test(object):
    pass

class Descriptor(object):
    def __get__(self, instance, owner):
        return "Hello, world."

>>> Test.x = Descriptor()
>>> Test.x
'Hello, world.'
>>> test = Test()
>>> test.x
'Hello, world.'

However, in order to add descriptors to an object, they must be added to the object’s class. Descriptors added to an instance do not invoke the descriptor protocol:

>>> test.y = Descriptor()
>>> test.y
<__main__.Descriptor object at 0x16fe810>

This means that creating an instance with dynamic (determined at runtime) descriptors requires either the heavy-handed approach of generating a class just for that object (since adding descriptors to its class will add them to all other instances of the class), or the ad-hoc approach of redefining getattr/setattr behavior (essentially re-implementing your own descriptor protocol).

It turns out the latter approach is not as messy as it first sounds. Below is a class that enables “instance descriptors”:

class InstanceDescriptorMixin(object):
    def __getattribute__(self, name):
        value = object.__getattribute__(self, name)
        if hasattr(value, '__get__'):
            value = value.__get__(self, self.__class__)
        return value

    def __setattr__(self, name, value):
        try:
            obj = object.__getattribute__(self, name)
        except AttributeError:
            pass
        else:
            if hasattr(obj, '__set__'):
                return obj.__set__(self, value)
        return object.__setattr__(self, name, value)

class Test(InstanceDescriptorMixin):
    pass

>>> test = Test()
>>> test.z = Descriptor()
>>> test.z
'Hello, world.'