Masaru Ishii, a great Japanese Rubyist, died at the rail disaster, where 106 people died. He introduced RubyUnit with the author¹, Suketa-san. It was the predecessor of the current Test::Unit in Ruby 1.8.

I love unit testing. I pay his last respects. I don’t know what to say in English. I hope I don’t use incorrect words. I learned RubyUnit from Suketa-san’s book.

¹ According to this blog, Ishii-san asked Suketa-san to create a Ruby implementation of xUnit.

If you’ve read Joe Gregorio’s Sparklines in data: URIs in Python, then you know that he’s presented us with an incredibly compelling use for data: URIs. Namely, this is not an external file: But we don’t have Python’s image library, so what are we to do?

What if I offered you a handful of code that could generate inline sparkgraphs without library code? Presenting Bumpspark.

 def bumpspark( results )
     white, red, grey = [0xFF,0xFF,0xFF], [0,0,0xFF], [0x99,0x99,0x99]
     ibmp = results.inject([]) do |ary, r|
         ary << [white]*15 << [white]*15
         ary.last[r/9,4] = [(r > 50 and red or grey)]*4
         ary
     end.transpose.map do |px|
         px.flatten!.pack("C#{px.length}x#{px.length%4}")
     end.join
     ["BM", ibmp.length + 54, 0, 0, 54, 40, 
       results.length * 2, 15, 1, 24, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0].
       pack("A2ISSIIiiSSIIiiII") + ibmp
 end

It’s got one known bug: graphs built from 16-element arrays get staticky. Free inky duck drawing to first patcher. (Keep reading.)

How to parse tab separated values, values of which may be omitted and they should be recognized as nil—that was discussed at ruby-list.

For instance each row has three values: float, integer and string; “1\t2\t3” should be 1.0, 2, “3”. When values are omitted they should be parsed as nil, not zero nor empty string; “1\t\t3” should be 1.0, nil, “3”.

Following is a solution of Rubikichi-san¹.

class TextData < Struct.new(:float, :int, :str)
  CONVERTER = [:to_f, :to_i, :to_s]
  def self.[](input)
    obj = new
    input.chomp.split(/\t/).each_with_index do |x, i|
      obj[i] = (x && x.__send__(CONVERTER[i]))
    end
    obj
  end
end

p TextData["1\t2\t3"]
p TextData["1.0\t2\t"] 
p TextData["1\t2\tfoo"] 

# <struct TextData float=1.0, int=2, str="3">
# <struct TextData float=1.0, int=2, str=nil>
# <struct TextData float=1.0, int=2, str="foo">

Inherit an anonymous structure class!

¹ He is a pioneer of Ruby. I learned Ruby techniques from his book and home page. “Rubikichi” is his alias.

There is extra functionality in the original question, which I skip here; converting the string value is required.