It's hot.
DTLA as shown in a 1954 Thomas Guide kept at the Petersen Museum. I live a block or so beneath that green box in the upper left-hand corner!
Last last Friday, Justin and I went to a free outdoor concert by Mashrou Leila. Early in the show, there was a moment of silence for the victims of the Orlando shooting. A guy in the audience brought a large Lebanese flag, which was alternately draped around his shoulders and waved to the beat as he danced.
Last last Saturday, we met friends to lunch on food truck fare and visit the Petersen Museum. The next afternoon was spent in Monterey Park, with Father’s Day lunch at a Cantonese seafood restaurant, followed by icy sweet drinks at Half & Half Tea Express, followed by badgering from my mom for being gluttonous spendthrifts, eventually followed by more badgering for being unmarried and childless.
With last Monday came the hottest temperatures of the year so far, 38ºC (100ºF) in our neck of downtown LA. I saw temperatures as high as 50ºC (122ºF) in the part of Hollywood where I used to work! Peak temperatures have since dipped to 28º-33ºC (82º-91ºF) in our neighborhood – a less apocalyptic range.
On Wednesday morning I got a phone call and a couple of emails from my dad in regards to a NY Times article that I’d sent to him. I grew up hearing him refer to the mandatory military service he underwent in Quemoy, but I never knew anything about the place. Turns out he was indeed in Lieyu, which is profiled in the article! My parents attended Chengchi University in Taipei but I guess my dad’s military service took him around the island (and beyond). He described spending 3 months of one summer in a Taichung basic training bootcamp, and 2 months of another summer in Kaohsiung for infantry training, eventually becoming 2nd Lieutenant and deploying to Quemoy in 1967. For six months that year, he and his fellow soldiers were on the frontlines of the Cold War with China, “fighting Communists”, terrified. It was a huge relief for him to finally return to the main island at the end of that service. Maybe someday we’ll revisit Quemoy together.
I wanted to squeeze in some more writing on Homebrew before CodeConf gobbles up much of this week. To pick up where I left off with my previous post, I shifted focus to brew desc after buffing up the test coverage for brew home. When run without any options, brew desc returns Homebrew’s one-line description for a given formula. For example, brew desc ack yields:
ack: Search tool like grep, but optimized for programmers
Like brew home, it can be called on more than one formula (when no options are passed). When run with an option (either --search, --name, or --description), it searches the Taps on your computer for the given search term or regular expression.
Adding test coverage for this command involved verifying the expected output (as usual), but with the added twist of having to account for a cached file that shows up whenever brew desc is invoked with a single flag and a single argument. The cached file unceremoniously made itself known when it sprang a file leak. Thankfully, Martin suggested an easy way forward – instead of focusing on the expected output, verify that the cached file (desc_cache.json) is created at all, and then remove it at the end of the test.
Test coverage for brew home was formerly at 80%, and for brew desc it was formerly at 66.67%. But now both commands have 100% coverage, yay! These are minor feats that added only a couple drops to the bucket, even when combined with the test coverage I later added for brew log and brew search. And coverage for the entire codebase still hovers around 50%. But each merged pull request brings a small thrill, as does each brew update that results in seeing my changes applied to a program that many people are using around the world.