Geeky 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:

Behold, the magpi...

Tue, 25 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

And, YAAP (Yet Another Arduino Project), the Micro Arduino Gaming Platform Interface. Finally I’ve done the “shareable value” part of putting together an instructables for how to make the retro-game controller I built for (and with) Will for Christmas. I love this video of Will demoing it:

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.

gendocs

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Autodoc is a great tool for automatic documentation generation for your clojure code (the clojure api itself uses it).

If you are using github-pages to publish the docs, here’s a simple little gendocs sh script to dump into your bin folder to do all the work in one go:

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:

zuptime!

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

So today a bunch of our websites went down, and the scripts I had in place to monitor for this type of occasion hadn’t been updated for some time so the new websites weren’t even in the scripts. Upshot: I didn’t notice for too long.

wordpress update time & syntax coloring

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

So I’ve just spent a couple hours updating wordpress to 2.8.4 (it’s been a long time since I’ve done an upgrade) and I’m trying to pick from the myriad syntax coloring plugins. I tried using SyntaxHighlighter Plus which has nicer configuration options. But it doesn’t look as good as wp-syntax

MacBook Pro trackpad clicking intermittently broken

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

So when I got my new MacBook Pro (late 2008 edition) with the fancy new trackpad that is an integrated mouse button, it had an incredibly annoying problem: every 4th or 5th click, didn’t click! So I’d be clicking on a window behind the current one, or clicking on an icon in the dock, and it would sometimes take two or three clicks to switch to the window or app. After checking in with Apple (and unfortunately 2 hours on the phone walking through all sorts of different options), they ended up sending me out a new MacBook Pro. The new one arrived yesterday and after a fairly straightforward migration (only the printer driver for my Canon MX850 didn’t automatically migrate), I now have laptop with a properly clicking trackpad.So, if you have this problem, you at least have my experience telling that it’s a hardware not a software problem.

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 me some solutions

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Well, git definitely takes some gitting used to.

My situation is using git with three team members and a private shared repository that we all pull from and push too. Additionally our project has a submodule that lives on a public git-hub repository (metaform).

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