Now the building has commenced!
I posted a live stream on the the frontpage:
(Click on the image)
Building a 3D printer
Hacking on vacation
I’m on vacation in New Zealand, visiting my sister (Marie-Louise a.k.a. Seven). Se happens to be engaged to a fellow Geek (Let’s call him Uan). Well, She’s more geek than us because she created the most complicated machine in the world (which we can’t even imagine to produce): a baby!
As an IT shop owner (http://queenstownhq.co.nz/) who’s always busy to satisfy his customers Uan tends to shift his “want to do projects” (because customers pay the bill right?) to the next weekend.
Because he already has a lot of the parts and of course there is a shed (all New Zealanders appear to have an shed. great inventions are made here: The world first JET powered beercooler), I offered some help. (otherwise I would ending up changing the new toddler’s diapers…..)
May I present to you: my
TODO list
- DIY Touchscreen (we’re half way, more to come soon!)
- Arduino hacks with Processing and OSC (I’ve got an Git Repository on Github)
- An philips Moodlight imitiation: PhilipsLed
You might think: “Dude, you’re on a bloody vacation! Go see the country!”. Yup, been there, done that! This vacation is for me to sit back and relax: I have been far too busy the last few months with working for clients. Now it’s some Leon time: do some personal interesting stuff!
I’ll keep you posted!
Automagically tagging releases in github
(update: now available as a gem for capistrano)
Today at work we were discussing branching and tagging etc. to keep track of the currently deployed release on various servers. We’re working with Capistrano to do deploys.
This is a script I came up with:
Edit: refactored some errors out of it
Ralf: S3 logfile downloader and merger
Today we released a new gem called Ralf, it stands for Retreive Amazon LogFiles
Download the gem at http://gemcutter.org/gems/ralf or browse the source at http://github.com/kjwierenga/ralf
Usage
Prerequirements:
- An S3 account (duh)
- Enable logging on S3 (use cyberduck for example)
Execution:
r = Ralf.new(:config => '/my/config.yaml', :date => '2010-02-01')
r.run
Or run it in one go:
Ralf.run(:config => '/my/config.yaml', :date => '2010-02-01')
Parameters:
:config a YAML config file, if none given it tries to open /etc/ralf.yaml or ~/.ralf.yaml
:date the date to parse
:aws_access_key_id (required in config)
:aws_secret_access_key (required in config)
:out_path (required in config)
:out_prefix (optional, defaults to 's3_combined') Prefix the output file
You can ommit a configuration file when you supply the required parameters :aws_access_key_id_, :aws_secret_access_key and :out_path
They take precedence over the config file
Caveats
- There is no logrotation as we know it like on regular unix machines
More info: S3 Server Access Logging
TODO
- CLI executable
- Grouping/combinig on week/month
Credits:
This plugin is created for kerkdienstgemist.nl for processing the logfiles generated by S3.
Authors: Leon Berenschot and K.J. Wierenga
Twitter Screen Saver (a.k.a. a “Stream Saver”)
Just a quick and dirty experiment: A Twitter ScreenSaver.
With the Apple Developer Tools installed, you are able to create your own screensavers with Quartz Composer.
(I’ve been experimenting with this tool a few years ago when it was called PixelShox. Later it was bought by Apple to include it in Quicktime.)
This “StreamSaver” is still a work in progress and sorry; OSX 10.5+ only.
If you have any idea’s, lemme know!
Download/see it here, and place it in ~/Library/Screen Savers.
Prediction: “Twitter App Formatting Standards War”
Well…, a war is a little bit exaggerated. But consistency is the issue here, which remembers me the early days of different implementations of webbrowsers (which is still a pain in the ass, ask any random webdeveloper)
For example, today I ran in to the formatting of an URL. In tweetdeck it’s only clickable when an URL has the protocol attached to it (http://). So I complained about it, thinking that people didn’t understand linking in tweets.
Turns out I was wrong, apps like tweetie and the webinterface of twitter itself automagically create a hyperlink from an address prefixed with www without an http://.
So my question is, should there be a standard (like HTML/CSS) or developer guidline to format tweets (or is there one already?)
Sending prawn documents with ActionMailer
Problem: How to send a prawn pdf wich normally is generated by a controller.
and keeping it DRY
Required: Prawn & prawnto
RER2009 Rumble
We (@kjw and @leipeleon) participated in the RubyEnRails Rumble last weekend. It was a blast!
Prevent spambots from posting
Just got a report that we’re getting spammed by a spambot.
Then I recalled a remark @smeevil made about a technique he used to fight off spambots: create a valid form element but put it away somewhere off screen (a hidden field won’t probably work)
Using github on the mac for non-programmers
A quick and dirty tutorial for some friends of mine.
Needed software:
- git-osx-installer: Full native OSX git client.
Nice to have:
- Textmate: text editor.
- GitHub account (for push rights).
- GitX: Grapichal tool for commiting to local repo (OSX 10.5+).
Create account on github
Go to http://github.com for an account.
Optional: Provide an SSH key for pushing changes.
Clone a Repo
My advice is to generate a special dir for the projects (mine is Rails).
Fire up the terminal and type:
# Goto the dir
cd ~/Rails
# if the repo is read only:
git clone git://github.com/LeipeLeon/facebooker.git
# if you have push rights:
git clone git@github.com:LeipeLeon/facebooker.git
# if you installed GitX (as mentioned above)
gitx |
Adding changes
With the gitx program it’s easy to commit thanges to your local repo. When these are ready to commit to the master you sync it first with the HEAD and then push your changes.
# get changes from the master repo to your local repo
git pull
# push your changes
git push |
Additional info:
If it’s a rails application you’re cloning, startup the server with
# Copy database credentials, uses sqlite3 as default
cp config/database.yml.example config/database.yml
# install required gems
rake gems:install
# make tables
rake db:migrate
# startup server at http://localhost:3000
script/server |
and you will be able to use the application at http://localhost:3000