Codingsoftware on flow

Movement!

Wed, 24 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Lots of things have been in flow since I’ve posted here, but here are few tidbits to explore:

We: Social Spaces for Collaboration

Tue, 26 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Say that we agree to define collaboration as a group’s ability to coordinate effort to produce some work output. I believe that the effectiveness of collaboration improves in direct proportion to:

Decentralized Next-level Collaboration Apps with Syn

Wed, 10 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Usually I am more energized by building tech than by talking about it, but I am so excited about what my son and I did over winter break, that I just have to share about it here. In an odd kind of busman’s holiday, I spent a good chunk of my time off writing a Holochain application. Coding with my kid is just pure pleasure for me, but I have to describe the additional incredible experience of having spent 4 years building a tool, and now suddenly being able to use that tool to build what it was meant for: creating collaboration applications.

Das Blinken Bonken!

Tue, 07 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Seems like end of the year is DYI electronics projects time for me as the Sound Alarm happened round this time last year too. Well, I’ve been having a ball making Arduino stuff, this time as Christmas presents. This time I got my documentation act together even more and made a construction tutorial on instructables too! The code for Das Blinken Bonken is on github, and here’s a video of Jesse showing off the game:

Arduino Sound Alarm

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just completed my second Arduino project, a sound level detector which sets off an “alarm” when there’s the sound level is to high for too long. I built it for use in a school that wants to provide visual feedback to students when they are being too loud. The “alarm” is a string of flashing LEDs that’s controlled by an IR-remote, which I reverse engineered using the the arduino itself and the excellent IRremote library to figure out which codes activate the LED string. The IRremote library includes an example that dumps the codes and code types that remotes typically use. So I just ran that example with my arduino hooked up to an IR detector from adafruit. It was really quite easy to do.

clojurescript syntax hilighting in emacs

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

To get emacs to syntax color clojurescript files (cljs) add this to your .emacs (or other emacs config file):

Upgrading postgres on Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6)

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Well, I too have gone down the rabbit hole of having to upgrade compiled-from-source apps to 64bit architecture after moving to Snow Leopard. The hardest by far was postgres. The sad thing is that 32bit version works just fine, but the adapter gems for rails don’t, hence the need for the recompile.

perl6

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I was looking at how perl6 is coming along and found this: http://perlgeek.de/blog-en/perl-5-to-6/ which is really cool. Besides being a really nice presentation of the material (including the “Motivation” section) there’s just lotsa nice stuff. Some of the new way outa here cool perl6 features:

Enjoying being on the Wagn

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

We are building out the new currency frontiers web-site, using the Wagn, which is pretty darn cool. It’s a wiki + database + cms. It’s kinda geeky, but not so much that you have to be a programer to use it (so don’t freak if your aren’t), but if you are a programming inclined, there’s lots of nice stuff you can. Ethan and Lewis are are the excellent chaps wheeling the Wagn. Kudos dudes.

databases and read vs. write consistency

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Have just read an excellent blog post on “dumb databases” and the issue of read vs. write consistency. My own mesh & churn for open money comes out of the same realizations that in a distributed environment the way to handle many many issues is to put the responsibility on the reader to verify the validity of the data.

bdd & accounting

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I just realized thatÂ Behavior Driven DevelopmentÂ is very similar to double entry book-keeping in accounting!Â

git bandwagon

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Well, I’ve officially joined the git bandwagon. Â I’ve putÂ metaform up on githubÂ (theÂ open moneyÂ projects will come soon, but I think probably onÂ gitorious); I’ve been reading tons ofÂ articles about git; I installed it on Tiger (use MacPorts) and Leopard (install from source withÂ these instructionsÂ but use 1.5.5); and now I’m blogging about it. Â TheÂ most interesting articleÂ so far on git, has made me realize how closely related it is to theÂ mesh and churn… Â Quite interesting!

ubuntu gutsy on a xen virtual host

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Hey googlers looking for tech-support:

I was trying to install various packages (emacs, etc) from universe on Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10), and I kept getting weird segmentation faults (Setting up emacsen-common (1.4.17) Segmentation fault). Turns out that the problem was that my server was being hosted on a VPS running XEN for virtualization, and you have to first install libc6-xen: apt-get install libc6-xen

rails capistrano deploy script OS X to Ubuntu

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, so in a previous post I described the rabit-hole which is switching to rails. Below’s my capistrano deploy script which solves a number of problems:

The production server needs a mongrel cluster configuration file added.
Deployment requires restarting the mongrel cluster.
On Ubuntu the database.yaml spec has to be modified to because you need to specify a mysql socket path differently from OS X.

So here’s what I added to make it work:

A "list items won't wrap" Firefox css fix!

Sun, 15 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The last few days working on the openmoney.info website, I’ve had a major hassle dealing with what appears to be a bug in the html renderer in Firefox.

The issue is that in Firefox, text in a list item won’t wrap around a right floated image; like this:

down the rails rabbit hole

Fri, 13 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The last month has been quite a trip down the rabbit hole into the new reality of ruby on rails! The promise of a powerful and well designed web application framework was just too much for me to resist, so I decided to leave my own yawaf framework behind (though it has certainly served me well).

SnapMail on Seth Godin's Blog

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

So marketing blogger Seth Godin has a mention of SnapMail in the same breath as File Maker Pro on his blog. It’s nice that my humble little program is in such august company, though the context is a bit sad. What’s so odd is how SnapMail was created before the Internet was at all a house-hold word, back in 93, and it still has such a faithful following. I guess there is something valuable about having a little communication tool that’s not on the Internet! Who’da a thunk?

another currency metaphor

Wed, 23 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

In my on-going quest for good metaphors and ways of thinking about the community/multi-currency world, an excellent metaphor came to me that is useful when talking about all this with programmers:

Phronesis and the Internet: the Process Revolution

Wed, 12 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I learned about the Aristotelean intellectual virtue of phronesis along with the related term episteme a few years back from Kathryn Montgomery in discussions about her book How Doctors Think. Episteme is the scientific rationality we are all quite familiar with. Phronesis is usually translated “practical wisdom” and is the kind of rational skill doctors and entrepreneurs have that is based on experiential knowledge and provides the ability to take the best action in particular circumstances. We are much less likely to have thought of this as a separate kind of rational capacity. These terms came up again recently for me in the context of a collective intelligence discussion, which really set my mind going and has led me to some propositions and a conjecture:

simple shared state protocol

Sun, 02 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Recently it hit me that I knew of no generalized protocol for sharing the state of an abstract space among a group of computers. I did a quick google search to see if I could find anything, and after coming up dry (which doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist) I decided to slap one together to test out the many uses for this that were readily apparent to me (i.e. any application where multiple users must be able to collaboratively make changes, and become aware of changes made to that space in real time: chat, bulletin boards, network games, etc.) Of course there is similar stuff like Croquet that certainly does an even more complicated generalized version of this, and lots of single purpose applications, like Subethaedit which must also do thisbut I haven’t found other efforts that are quite as simplistic and generalized. So, I slapped together the beginings of a protocol as well as a ruby based server, and a RealBasic based clients for OS X and Win to test out the ideas, all of which are released under the GPL license. [tags]collaboration,FLOSS,sharing[/tags]