Freelancing Gods 2010

This is the fifth (and last) of my guides to Cambodia

Well, this post has been a long time coming… don’t take that as any reflection of quality, mind you. And again, this post is focused on Battambang, as it’s where I’ve spent the vast majority of my time when in Cambodia.

The Smoking Pot Cooking Class

As mentioned in my previous post, Smoking Pot has cooking classes – quite possibly the first of its kind in Cambodia. Usually operating in the morning, they provide a great introduction to a Khmer cooking. Make sure you book a day or two ahead!

Vannak (who runs Smoking Pot) will take you down to the market and purchase all the ingredients for the meals you’ll be preparing – and the market is an experience in itself. He’ll then lead you through making three meals – which you then will eat, so don’t have much in the way of breakfast beforehand! Vannak’s very good with the classes, and quite happy to chat about Cambodia in general.

The Bamboo Train

Cambodia has a very basic and unreliable train system – in most places, there’s no longer proper trains running. However, in and around Battambang there is the Bamboo Train – platforms of bamboo wood, metal wheels on axels, and a motor to power the whole thing along – which can be hired to get from one village to another.

For the most part, these are used by locals to ferry goods around, but can also be taken by tourists. It’s not the most comfortable ride in the world, but you get along at a decent clip, and you get glimpses of the Cambodian countryside.

Also: as you can see in the photo above, it’s a single track – so if there’s another bamboo platform coming in the other direction, whoever has the lightest load has to take their platform off the tracks.

Perhaps it’s the adrenalin rush from such an unsafe adventure – seats, let alone seatbelts, don’t exist – but this is easily one of my favourite things to do in Battambang.

At some point, the train line is probably going to be torn up to make way for a shiny modern system (as part of China’s cross-Asia train line) – so if you’re in town, make this a priority, as you may not get another chance!

Phare Ponleu Selpak Circus

Another highlight of Battambang is the Circus at Phare Ponleu Selpak. These kids are extremely talented – I wouldn’t be surprised if plenty of them find themselves in Cirque du Soleil shows.

The performances they put together are a lot of fun – even though it’s all in Khmer, you’ll easily pick up on what’s happening. There’s performances at least once a week – make sure you get along.

Phnom Sampeau

One of the hills close to Battambang is Phnom Sampeau. If you take the stairs up, you’ll find several temples, as well as the Killing Caves. These caves were where many Khmer were killed or maimed and then left to die. It’s not a happy place, but it does help with understanding what the people of Cambodia have been through – and are still recovering from.

On a lighter note, you get some great views from up on the top of the hill. Also, if you stick around until late afternoon, you’ll get to see millions of small bats streaming out from the many caves to find food for the night. I’ve only managed to see this once, but it’s really quite something to watch.

Phnom Sampeau is probably too far for a tuk-tuk journey – the roads aren’t sealed for most of the way, so taking a moto is a far better option. If you speak to your hotel, or ask at restaurants, you should be able to find tour guides and moto drivers without too much hassle.

Soksabike

One fantastic way of getting around Battambang and the surrounding areas is by bike – and there’s now bike tours, run by an organisation known as Soksabike.

This has only started up recently – a good friend of mine has helped get it going – but from what I’ve heard the guides are getting better and better, and it’s a great experience riding out through Battambang to the nearby villages.

Battambang – much like most of Cambodia – is extremely flat, so it’s really easy to get around by bike. Don’t feel you have to be super fit to give this a shot.

More Temples and Touring

There’s several other temples nearby – Wat Banan is perhaps the best known. Quite old, it’s like a small version of some of the temples you can find in the Angkor complex. The one catch is it’s on top of a hill, and the stairs are a killer.

You can also check out some of the local industries – rice paper, fish paste, rice wine and more – as part of your tours, whether that be by moto, tuk-tuk, or with Soksabike.

In Closing

Well, these Cambodia posts have taken me a long time to write. Hopefully they’re useful for others in providing some perspective on Cambodia, Khmer people and Battambang. I’d love to hear from anyone who has made it to this corner of the world and what you thought of the experience.

So, it’s been a couple of months since the Melbourne International Comedy Festival wrapped up, and thus, a couple of months since LaughTrack went silent. I just want to write up a last batch of statistics, as well as some broader thoughts on how the site went in general.

I should have been doing this back when the festival actually finished, but some things got in the way of catching up on classifying all the tweets, and so I only actually got through the last of it yesterday.

The Leaderboard

A quick look at the top 10 (well, 11, given tied scores), going by quality:

Most of those are quite established, but it’s worth noting those who are relative newcomers to the comedy scene: Celia Pacquola and Melinda Buttle – and those who are relative newcomers to Australian shores: The Pajama Men and Jamie Kilstein.

Gains

Here’s who made the biggest gains by rating over the final two weeks of the festival (I’ve trimmed the list to 8 – there’s another 7 on the next score down):

In most of those cases, it only took a handful of positive tweets to gain some serious quality points. So again, let’s go by tweets instead of rating – because this turns out to be a far better metric for who has been getting a lot of buzz.

I’m not going to bother analyse the data from which shows were sold out – it’s far from complete.

What’s next?

LaughTrack was a fun experiment for the festival, but I’m not quite sure of its future.

It’s possibly useful for other festivals (especially those with repeat performances – so, Fringe festivals much more than Film festivals), but I don’t quite have the passion for those festivals compared to the MICF. In other words, I’m probably not going to commit the time to keep the site up-to-date for the Melbourne Fringe (for example) without some personal incentive.

The classification system also needs a lot of work. I spent many, many hours classifying tweets, because automating that kind of intelligence into a website is far from easy, and I couldn’t get it to a reliable state without human interaction. I could open the classification out to everyone who visits the site – and if I run this for next year’s MICF, that’s quite likely – but again, it’s additional work.

And it’s worth noting that most tweets that LaughTrack picked up were not reviews – there was a lot of noise, and very little signal (which is the main problem with automating classification).

So where does that leave us? Well, I’m definitely interested in reprising LaughTrack for next year’s Comedy Festival, and hopefully can get the people behind the festival to send some data on ticket sales through.

As for other festivals, I’m going to need some financial support to dedicate any time to adapting and maintaining the site. If you’re interested in sponsoring development on LaughTrack for a festival, then please do get in touch.

I would love to hear feedback on whether you found the site useful during the festival, and how it could improve. From a personal level, I know I found new shows to go see purely by reading the thousands of tweets that came through.

Just under two weeks ago, we ran the third Trampoline – an informal unconference which brings people from a variety of disciplines together to share what they find amazing.

The day is filled with 20 minute sessions on whatever people who are there offer to discuss. We get a fantastic mix of topics: health, technology, education, dance, meditation, music, media, juggling, comedy, entrepreneurship and more. In true unconference style, none of this is planned beforehand – no speaker is given preference, there’s no keynotes.

All three thus far have been in Melbourne. We’re definitely interested in sharing the love to other cities (but nothing’s locked in yet). That said, it’s a pretty safe assumption that Melbourne host its fourth sometime towards the end of the year.

From a personal perspective, I find these days amazingly energetic and inspiring (granted, I’m a little biased, being one of the organising team). It’s provided me (and many others) an avenue to connect with interesting, passionate people they wouldn’t normally meet. It’s just one of many things happening in Melbourne that solidifies my belief that it is truly – if you’ll excuse the hubris – a global cultural hub.

If you’re interested in keeping an eye on future events, add yourself to the email list, and maybe follow the official Twitter account. There’s also a set of videos – the bulk being from the latest Trampoline – on Vimeo, and a growing set of photos on Flickr.

I’m pretty stoked with how well received Trampoline has been thus far, and looking forward to making the next one even better. Would love to see some more new faces there too, so if you’re keen, jump on the list or get in touch!

Another week has passed, so time for some more LaughTrack statistics.

First up, acts with the best ratings improvements since the start of the Festival:

That list is almost identical (ignoring the order) to last week… essentially: those who did well to start with, have solidified their position.

So let’s look at the differences just in the last week instead.

This list could be considered shows with potential: towards the end, it only took two positive tweets to get them onto the list.

So, let’s now look at who has garnered the most positive tweets. Again, since the start of the festival:

Some big names there, though good to see some relative newcomers appearing too (Ursula Martinez, Melinda Buttle and Celia Pacquola).

As for the increases over just the last week:

Not much difference in the names this time around…

But what can you take away from this?

• Ursula Martinez was an unknown before this festival. She’s just added three extra shows, which matches the buzz she’s received.
• Melinda Buttle is another festival newcomer who has been getting a lot of buzz.
• The big names draw the tweets – but Wil Anderson and Tom Green have both finished their festival runs.
• The Pajama Men won the Barry Award for the best show last year in their first festival, and they’ve followed it up with another fine offering, going by numbers (and reviews).

I’ve also started tracking which performances are sold out – but there’s no point offering stats on that, because my data is far from complete. However, some of the smaller names regularly selling out:

• Celia Pacquola
• Hannah Gadsby
• Anne Edmonds
• The Bedroom Philosopher

Nick Cody, Daniel Burt, Vigilantelope and Clodhopper: Miami all sold quite well too – but they’ve finished their runs.

Last week, I launched a website I’ve been working on in my own time: LaughTrack. It follows what people are saying on Twitter about the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, and provides ratings on whether the crowd thinks a show is good or not.

I’m not going to get too caught up in the site itself right now – that deserves a separate blog post, and I’ve not found time for that.

However, I just wanted to report on the acts that have had the most buzz over the course of the opening week:

I chose the top ten, but there’s quite a few that jumped up to 53, so you get a few extra.

It’s worth noting that those last five gained just three positive tweets. So, at this point it doesn’t take too many tweets to get someone jumping up the board. However, the higher the rating is, though, the slower the rating increases, so let’s look at who got the most positive tweets as a comparison:

Again, a top ten, with one extra because of the same increase.

It’s interesting that almost all on the first list are comedians still making their stamp on the comedy scene. The second list has several more established acts. Only Celia Pacquola made it into both.

Of course, the older tweets were from other festivals – in particular, the Adelaide Fringe and the Brisbane Comedy Festival, which both happened in the lead-up to Melbourne’s Comedy Festival. So these numbers are far from perfect (but then, divining quality from Twitter isn’t a science anyway).

Hopefully you’ve found this somewhat interesting (well, if you’re a comedy buff) – expect more reports as the festival progresses. If you’re in Melbourne, I hope you’re making the most of this fabulous time of year!

While I highly recommend you stub out your search requests in controller unit tests/specs, I also recommend you give your full stack a work-out when running search scenarios in Cucumber.

This has gotten a whole lot easier with the ThinkingSphinx::Test class and the integrated Cucumber support, but it’s still not perfect, mainly because generally everyone (correctly) keeps their database changes within a transaction. Sphinx talks to your database outside Rails’ context, and so can’t see anything, unless you turn these transactions off.

It’s not hard to turn transactions off in your features/support/env.rb file:

Cucumber::Rails::World.use_transactional_fixtures = false

But this makes Cucumber tests far more fragile, because either each scenario can’t conflict with each other, or the database needs to be cleaned before and after each scenario is run.

Pretty soon after I added the inital documentation for this, a few expert Cucumber users pointed out that you can flag certain feature files to be run without transactional fixtures, and the rest use the default:

@no-txn
Feature: Searching
  In order to find things as easily as possible
  As a user
  I want to search across all data on the site

This is a good step in the right direction, but it’s not perfect – you’ll still need to clean up the database. Writing steps to do that is easy enough:

Given /^a clean slate$/ do
  Object.subclasses_of(ActiveRecord::Base).each do |model|
    next unless model.table_exists?
    model.connection.execute "TRUNCATE TABLE `#{model.table_name}`"
  end
end

(You can also use Database Cleaner, as noted by Thilo in the comments).

But adding that to the start and end of every single scenario isn’t particularly DRY.

Thankfully, there’s Before and After hooks in Cucumber, and they can be limited to scenarios marked with certain tags. Now we’re getting somewhere!

Before('@no-txn') do
  Given 'a clean slate'
end

After('@no-txn') do
  Given 'a clean slate'
end

And here’s a bonus step, to make indexing data a little easier:

Given /^the (\w+) indexes are processed$/ do |model|
  model = model.titleize.gsub(/\s/, '').constantize
  ThinkingSphinx::Test.index *model.sphinx_index_names
end

So, how do things look now? Well, you can write your features normally – just flag them with no-txn, and your database will be cleaned up both before and after each scenario.

My current preferred approach is adding a file named features/support/sphinx.rb, containing this code:

require 'cucumber/thinking_sphinx/external_world'

Cucumber::ThinkingSphinx::ExternalWorld.new

Before('@no-txn') do
  Given 'a clean slate'
end

After('@no-txn') do
  Given 'a clean slate'
end

And I put the step definitions in either features/step_definitions/common_steps.rb or features/step_definitions/search_steps.rb.

So, now you have no excuse to not use Thinking Sphinx with your Cucumber suite. Get testing!

This is the fourth of my guides to Cambodia.

I’ve let this series of posts lag so much that I’ve actually been back to Cambodia for a couple of weeks in the meantime. That’s refreshed my memory, so maybe it’s not such a bad thing.

Now, while Phnom Penh and Siem Reap are the major tourist centres of Cambodia, I’ve spent most of my time in Battambang, so it’s really the only place I can provide a decent number of recommendations for. Let’s get stuck into it!

Restaurants in General

A few points to bear in mind:

• Khmer restaurants aren’t known for their speed, so it doesn’t hurt to bring a book.
• Most places that cater for foreigners have both Western and Khmer dishes.
• Unless menus mention both lime and lemon, assume that when it says lemon, you’ll actually get lime.

West of the River

Battambang has a few key streets – running north to south are roads One, Two and Three. One is along the river, and Three is the largest of the three.

As you can see from the map, there’s also streets between these – they are usually referred to by expats as One-and-a-half, and Two-and-a-half, but I’ve no idea if the locals actually have names for them.

Fresh Eats

The food here isn’t particularly complex – but it’s tasty, and their shakes have no milk (a rarity), so they’re particularly refreshing. Perfect for breakfast or lunch. As an added bonus, has wifi.

And if you’ve visited Fresh Eats before, it’s worth noting that they have moved in the last twelve months from the far side of Road Three to Road Two-and-a-half, just south of Psah Nath (the main market).

Khmer Delight

A relative newcomer, Khmer Delight has only appeared in the last year. Good food, friendly staff, and intermittent wifi. It’s worth a visit for meals at any time of day.

You can find it on the road running east-west a block south of Psah Nath, between Roads Two and Two-and-a-half.

Smoking Pot

A stalwart of the Lonely Planet, Smoking Pot is best known for the cooking classes (which I’ll cover in a later post), but also has a good variety of dishes. They also serve a banana and lime milkshake, which became my regular drink (I know it sounds a little odd, but the combination works).

It is located on the corner of Street One-and-a-half, two blocks south of Psah Nath.

Snow White

This place always draws plenty of tourists, and so I rarely went, preferring to support businesses which were a bit quieter. The menu is long, so you don’t lack for choices, and the food ranges from okay to decent.

You can find Snow White on the corner of Street Two, two blocks south of Psah Nath (a very short walk from Smoking Pot).

Balcony Bar

An evening-only option, the Balcony Bar is at the higher end of the scale in terms of prices – perhaps not quite so good value compared to other places. That said, the food’s pretty good (though the menu is almost all Western), and it’s a very chilled location, away from the town centre.

You won’t want to walk here, especially late at night, but all Tuk-tuk drivers (and many moto drivers) will know it – it’s a far distance along Road One, south of central Battambang.

Riverside Stalls

Every night, a couple of dozen stalls set up along the river (south of the bridge that’s at the bottom of the map). You could try your luck here for a noodle soup, but it’s really aimed at the locals: you won’t find any western options, and English won’t get you very far at all.

It’s also probably a bit rough on digestive systems that haven’t spent a few weeks in Cambodia. All in all, you have been warned.

East of the River

While the focus of Battambang is on the west side of the river, there’s still some options out east. You’ll mainly find these along one road, where the temple is by the river, leading to the big statue roundabout on Highway 5.

Bamboo Train Cafe

Formerly known as Apsara Garden, the Bamboo Train Cafe has tweaked its menu somewhat, and offers meals at all times of day. The breakfasts are very good (especially if you’re dying for Western-style toast), meals are generally delicious, and the staff are friendly. There’s also a pool table in very good condition – a rarity.

You can find it just east of Spring Park Hotel.

Green House

A small place beside the Golden Palace Hotel (east of Spring Park Hotel on the north side of the main road), this restaurant has some Western dishes, but the local fare is better. Simple and affordable (moreso than the usually cheap Cambodian standards), but nothing sparkling.

Cold Night

Part of the Golden Palace Hotel (east of Spring Park Hotel on the north side of the main road), you may want to try Cold Night if you’re nearby. Some dishes are quite good (my favourite is the Chicken Curry with Rice), but the staff are rarely friendly.

La Villa

You don’t get much classier than this in Cambodia, let alone Battambang. La Villa is a boutique hotel in (as the name suggests) an old French villa. The food here ranges from decent to very good. If you’re going to go a steak, get the imported New Zealand beef, not the local stuff – it’ll be more tender. The creme caramel is great.

This is not where you come to get a taste of Cambodian culture – but it is a nice break from the culture shock. It’s along the river, north of the main road on the map, but Tuk-tuk drivers will know where to go.