I’ve been playing around with Cypress for end-to-end testing ever since I heard Paul Gilzow’s talk on the subject (“Introduction to Automated End-to-End Testing”) at the 2024 WPCampus conference. We did a pilot ten years ago to implement some limited E2E testing using Behat but it didn’t get very far. Building your own Behat suite without core support was a heavy lift (our Moodle plugins are a different matter).

We did build out some functional testing for our Microsite, which is a static copy of our WordPress theme, implemented in Twig. I took the opportunity of yet another chromium/selenium issue to reimplement our tests in Cypress, and to add visual regression testing for our components. An added complexity is that the tests need to work cross-platform: in developer local environments and in our continuous integration environment. It’s working, but there were a few challenges.

First, I got started by installing the Cypress Visual Regression package. Unsurprisingly, you’ll need the virtual framebuffer (xvfb) package installed. You’ll also want a consistent headless browser across all systems. Chrome is an easy answer, but I’m sure others would have worked. This is what my CI configuration looked like on a Debian-derived container:

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I maintain a project that still uses PHP 7.4 (long story) so I need to build out my local environment with that version. Sourcing a Nix package for PHP 7.4 isn’t an issue; the nix-phps repository maintains PHP 5.6-PHP 8.4. The tricky part was adding that package to my local devenv.sh environment. Devenv supports PHP, but by default the PHP versions are limited to what’s in the devenv-nixpkgs repository, which starts at PHP 8.0.

I went down a few blind alleys, followed some outdated documentation, and generally overthought this. Devenv has awareness of older PHP versions; they’re simply not enabled by default. The first thing you need to do is enable the nix-phps repository. You can do that with this command:

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devenv inputs add phps github:fossar/nix-phps --follows nixpkgs

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I have a Moodle development project coming up and this is a good a time as any to experiment with setting up a Moodle environment in devenv.sh. One immediate issue is that Moodle depends on background tasks running almost constantly. Devenv has a set of supported services and cron isn’t one of them. Devenv does support the concept of processes, which are just background tasks. Can I apply that Techmint article on How to Schedule a Linux Job Without Cron?

Sure can:

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processes.cron.exec = "while true; do php public/admin/cli/cron.php ; sleep 60 ; done";

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Like many railfans (including the great E. M. Frimbo) I keep track of my mileage. I have a spreadsheet with the trains and routes I’ve been on, including dates and most importantly distances. I can tell you that I passed 100,000 miles on Amtrak on January 7, 2020, on the Capitol Limited, roughly 163 miles west of Washington, DC. This means I can I get a little obsessive about determining mileage, and can send me down a rabbit hole if it’s unclear what distance I traveled.

Railroads used to include mileage information in their timetables. Amtrak did right up until the discontinuance of paper timetables in the last few years. For railroads in Europe, the best source of information are the railway atlases published by Schweers + Wall. These maps are extraordinarily detailed, showing lines and distances (in kilometers). For the US, the best source of distance are employee timetables. As the source suggests, these are internal documents used by employees. They show distances, sidings, speed limits, and include various rules governing operation. Distance doesn’t change all that often, so older employee timetables can still be useful.

I’ve made 14 trips on NJ Transit’s Raritan Valley Line since 2016. But first, a nomenclature issue. The Raritan Valley Line is both a physical piece of infrastructure and a service that uses that infrastructure and the two are not coterminous. The service runs from High Bridge, New Jersey (Raritan on weekdays) to Newark, New Jersey. A limited number of trains continue from Newark to Pennsylvania Station in New York, but usually you transfer in New York.

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It started over a cup of coffee. My friend Nate and I were having coffee at ThreeBirds. I was back from HighEdWeb North Carolina and getting ready for WPCampus. He was basking in a delightful trip that he’d taken to DC recently and was interested in replicating the experience–a trip taken for the trip’s sake. We didn’t set ourselves many parameters, save that we’d like to knock it out over a weekend and we wanted to travel by train wherever possible. We settled on circling Long Island Sound.

Long Island stretches 118 miles, from New York City to the Atlantic Ocean. North of it lies Connecticut. There are two ferries that cross it, one between Bridgeport and Port Jefferson, about halfway across; the other between Orient Point and New London, at the eastern end of the island. The Long Island Rail Road comes within a mile of one ferry and eight miles of the other. The various rail services on the Northeast Corridor have direct service to the ferry terminals in Connecticut. We devised a plan involving eight trains, three ferries, and two buses. Looks simple on the map, right?

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Back in October I started using Nix to run my local authoring environment. I stayed with it, found other use cases for Nix, and then co-presented (with Jason Woodward) at WPCampus 2024 on “Using Nix to Define WordPress Dev and Test Environments.” The monster has definitely escaped the laboratory at this point.

While working up that talk I discovered devenv. I think of devenv as a wrapper or overlay for Nix flakes and it does two things that I immediately found useful:

1. It wraps the complex Nix syntax into a set of declarations for adding languages, processes, and services.
2. It provides a text-based interface for managing those processes and services.

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It’s in the trees, it’s coming!

You’re an academic from the United States and you’re in England to visit a few of your collaborators. You’ve organized a small conference about the work of a fellow academic who leads a Satanic cult. He’s a fraud and you’re going to expose him. When you arrive in London you find out that one of your collaborators died in a freak accident the night before. There are strange clues in his notes. You visit the British Museum and the arcane work mentioned in the notes is missing. While you’re at the museum the cult leader visits you and after a conversation that is at turns fascinating and disturbing, he informs you that you have three days to live.

Night of the Demon features modern, skeptical people who do not believe in spiritual evil encountering people who not only do believe in that evil but know for a fact that it exists. This is distinct from the original Wicker Man or Midsommar; the pagans in those films believe, but neither film provides evidence for the fact of their belief. Night of the Demon, made in 1957, walks a similar path to The Devil Rides Out, Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen, and The Exorcist. The execution, however, has some distinct features.

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Target: Harry is right in my wheelhouse–a bunch of actors trundled off to Europe to have a nice vacation and shoot a movie–but I got here indirectly. Target: Harry, also known as How to Make It and What’s in It for Harry?, was directed by Roger Corman and released in the United States in 1969. In 1979, for reasons that aren’t clear, it was released in eastern England on a double bill with Foes, an American science fiction film.^[1][2] Even after getting a proper Kino Lorber Blu-Ray in 2019 (2K remaster), it’s still pretty rare, with 209 ratings on Letterboxd as of writing.

As with so many of these films the production history is a little muddled. Roger Corman shot almost all of it in 1969, either as a made-for-TV-movie or a TV pilot that wasn’t picked up. The former feels more likely; the movie is feature length and it’s hard to envision a TV series from that era having the budget required. Gene Corman added two completely gratuitous nude scenes later, which apparently accounts for Roger taking his name off and getting credited as “Henry Neill.” They add nothing except running time; they’re even more gratuitous than the alternate-take nude scenes in The Beast of Yucca Flats.

Leonard Maltin dismissed Target: Harry as a “humdrum redoing of The Maltese Falcon.”^[3] That’s true to the extent that they’re both plot-optional, running strictly on vibes, and concerning a man who finds himself in the center of a criminal conspiracy. Where they part is tone and quality: The Maltese Falcon is a classic noir, set entirely in San Francisco. It’s also a superior movie. Target: Harry, like Harry in your Pocket or Silver Bears, invites you to go hang out with its actors in some location for an hour or two, and promises that you’ll have a good time. John Huston himself made an early, superior example with 1953’s Beat the Devil, which followed Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Gina Lollobrigida, Robert Morley, and Peter Lorre to the Amalfi Coast.

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I learned about Foes on June 1, 2024. Someone Liz knows on a discord server drew her attention to it, and Liz drew my attention to the top two reviews on Letterboxd. The first one called it the “Messiah of Evil of 70’s Alien Films.” The second praised the atmosphere while also noting that you should watch the 72-minute director’s cut and not the 90-minute version with additional framing scenes demanded by the distributor.

Out of the gate Foes was ticking a lot of boxes for me. It’s a regional horror/science-fiction film shot on a modest budget. It’s little-known but might have interesting vibes. It also has a troubled production and release history. The theatrical cut is 18 minutes longer than the director’s cut and consists entirely of framing scenes with different actors. Sources were unclear, but it probably never had a theatrical release in the United States but may have had one in the United Kingdom. Garagehouse Pictures brought out a Blu-ray in 2019, sourced from 16 and 35 mm elements.^[1] 2019 is an eternity in boutique Blu-rays and I wound up dropping about fifty bucks on eBay.

Money well spent!

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Growing up, I was aware of Eye of the Needle in a vague sort of way. My parents had it on VHS and described Donald Sutherland’s performance in it as chilling. We never watched it together. Dad could be a little prudish about R-rated movies with sexual content; when he showed me The Godfather as a teenager, I remember that he had me cover my eyes when Sonny Corleone has sex with Lucy Mancini. I assume he did the same for Michael and Apollonia’s wedding night. Shortly before his death, and relevant to this review, Dad expressed his discomfort with Return of the Jedi’s treatment of Princess Leia in Jabba’s palace.

Richard Marquand directed Eye of the Needle, and apparently impressed George Lucas enough to be offered the job on Return of the Jedi. He made only three more features before dying of a stroke in 1987 at the young age of 49, following the troubled production of Hearts of Fire. Inevitably he’s remembered for Return of the Jedi, though as with Irvin Kershner and The Empire Strikes Back there’s an asterisk and the inevitable questions of who did what on the production. The difference is that Kershner died in 2010 at the age of 87, and anyone who’s listened to the commentary tracks for Empire recognizes Kershner’s enormous contributions to the finished product. By comparison, Marquand remains an enigma.

Eye of the Needle is a Ken Follett adaptation, and as of 2024 the only feature release. I haven’t read the source novel, published in 1978. The story is set in the United Kingdom during World War II. There is a prologue of sorts in 1940, with the main action in 1944. There are two primary point-of-view characters: Faber, a German spy undercover in the UK, played by Donald Sutherland; and Lucy, a young recently-married Englishwoman, played by Kate Nelligan.

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