Metaphors are used extensively in technical fields. I was pondering some basic questions about them, such as: What is a metaphor? What is a metaphor not? How does metaphor aid in understanding unfamiliar concepts? What is the value of metaphor in human communication? What are the limitations and risks of metaphor? Metaphors that have become […]

The original working title of this post was A teleological perspective on the reconciliation of antinomies in interpersonal interactions and the implications of reconciling ambiguities for clarity of communication and improved understanding, because I wanted something bright and punchy, but ultimately it ended up different. Hope it’s okay. TL;DR Version Notwithstanding the wide range of […]

Previously in this series, we’ve discussed the value of unit testing shell scripts and explored how to roll our own test script, how to use the shunit2 library, how to use bash-spec for a behavioral-style approach, and how to use Pester to test-drive a Powershell script. Now we’ll look at two unit test frameworks for […]

So far, in this series of posts on unit testing shell scripts, we’ve covered several tools for unit testing scripts written in common *nix shell languages like bash, korn, and zsh. The same concepts and methods apply to any shell. The tools covered so far are general-purpose test frameworks for shell languages on *nix systems: […]

This is the third in a series of posts about unit testing shell scripts. So far, we’ve rolled our own test script and used an Open Source testing framework, shunit2, to test script that checks disk usage on a system and sends a notification email when usage exceeds a threshold. This time, we’ll try out […]