Wow! After more than two years I finally got my hands dirty hacking the Nabaztag rabbit. The release of the source code last summer were very encouraging here! Expect some awesome results in the next time

Let’s start with NabaztagInjector, an Arduino Library to inject data:

What bothered me for long was the missing possibility to connect external devices to the rabbit. How awesome would it be to use the rabbit for sending data into the net? Imagine it as WIFI shield you Arduino.

Guess what – that’s possible: replacing the RFID reader with an Arduino (both use the I2C bus) running a simulation of the RFID reader chip, enabled me to inject any custom data to the rabbit. Hacked!

As result, I created this tiny Arduino library to encapsulates the full process behind and easy API:

/**
 * Simple Arduino NabaztagInjector example sketch
 **/

#include <Nabaztag.h>

void setup() {
  Nabaztag.begin(0); //0 = standalone
}

void loop() {
  // send 1337 to the rabbit
  Nabaztag.inject(1337);
  //done
}

Check out the full Readme, Source code and Examples here:

http://www.rngtng.com/nabaztag-injector-arduino-rfid-hack/

Sugru is this fantastic super modeling clay made by Jane from Ireland. It allows you to hack the world and fix stuff. First its soft, sticks on nearly and material allowing you to put it in any shape, later it hardens and keeps its form. Perfect for me!

Check my hack, where I used Sugru replacing the missing glass pieces and preventing the loose ones from falling of. My display is protected again, and the phone is working – yay!

Visit the Sugru Website and get some for yourself: http://sugru.com

In my early webdeveloper days I created a small javascript which named ‘SizeIt!’. It purpose was to resize all website elements according to the size of users viewpoint. So regardless which screen resolution the user has, the website propotions would always be the same. Honestly, it worked only in very special cases and was slooooow (these days)

But the idea was great and it even gave me second place in a competition – ‘Die besten JavaScripts’ of Internet-World in August 2000. Read the result here (german only, sorry).

Not sure where I do have source code, will continue searching archive and post it here someday – stay tuned …

Click here to view the embedded video.

http://events.ccc.de/camp/2011/

Follow these instructions from resque readme (apache, ngnix) and check out current resque repo. Now update following two files:
1. Add gem "resque-scheduler","2.0.0.d" to Gemfile
2. Run bundle
3. Add require 'resque_scheduler' to config.ru

Restart you webserver and are ready to go – Happy scheduling!

Both file after editing:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'logger'

$LOAD_PATH.unshift ::File.expand_path(::File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/lib')
require 'resque/server'

# Set the RESQUECONFIG env variable if you've a `resque.rb` or similar
# config file you want loaded on boot.
if ENV['RESQUECONFIG'] && ::File.exists?(::File.expand_path(ENV['RESQUECONFIG']))
  load ::File.expand_path(ENV['RESQUECONFIG'])
end

require 'resque_scheduler'
                                           
use Rack::ShowExceptions
run Resque::Server.new

source :rubygems

gemspec

group :test do
  gem "rake"
  gem "resque-scheduler","2.0.0.d"
  gem "rack-test", "~> 0.5"
  gem "mocha", "~> 0.9.7"
  gem "leftright", :platforms => :mri_18
  gem "yajl-ruby", "~>0.8.2", :platforms => :mri
  gem "json", "~>1.5.3", :platforms => :jruby
end

This weekend was Rails 3.1 Hackfest. The rails community was called to test the upcoming version 3.1 to its limits, to find bugs and or flaws and get it polished for the final release. So I did:

I’m working with the rails 3.1 since it first release candidate, but never tried in production. So I made my task to finally test this, and bring my app in the wild – on my (not root) server. Rails 3.0 is running there smoothly so I didn’t expect any problems – wrong!
Show stopper was the Javascript Runtime dependency on production. Reason was quickly found: Coffee-Script – ahrg! It depends on ExecJS, which depends on a Javascript Runtime. Unfortunately, and that’s because I’m not on a root server, I got neither node.js, therubyraser, Mustang nor Johnson installed there.

I read this article, which supposed to precompile the assets – didn’t help either and runtime is needed again.

In the End, the solution was as simple as obvious: just don’t use coffee-script in production I did, removed the coffee-script gem form my Gemfile – and tatatata: it works! Uhh! This took me quite a long time to get it right. Javascript Runtime dependecy no good for prodcution, and reading Mr. Katz it’s looking good to get this fixed for the final release – uff! Happy so get tin final one soon! Yeah!

[cheesey image taken from PragDave - thx]

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here are the slides:

http://www.slideshare.net/rngtng/rainbowduino

Thanks to David for recording!

It totally looks like the two long line go up, but if you apply a ruler, you see, it’s indeed straight:

A optical Illusion – weird, right?

I was quite annoyed by the wasted time it took each time I grep the rails routes table.
Wait, can’t this be cached? – Sure it can!
So I came up this nice little alias to cache the output once:

alias route='CF=tmp/routes_cache; [[ ! -s $CF ]] && rake routes > $CF; cat $CF | grep '


now it’s ultra fast, try e.g.:

$ route root

bang!

First I checked Stackoverflow – Tian had similar problem over there: Nokogiri: Parsing Irregular “<”

As a quick fix I came up with this method using a reqular expression to identify unclosed tags:

def fix_irregular_html(html)
  regexp = /<([^<>]*)(<|$)/

  #we need to do this multiple time as regex are overlapping
  while (fixed_html = html.gsub(regexp, "&lt;\\1\\2")) && fixed_html != html
    html = fixed_html
  end

  fixed_html
end

See full code including test here: https://gist.github.com/796571

It works out well for me, I appreciate any feedback and improvements

See full code and test here:

https://gist.github.com/796571