uRaNGaTaNG » Rails & Co.

If your ruby serial port doesn’t read what’ you’re sending…

tobi — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 16:57:29 +0000

Some days ago I got my Novation launchpad an immediately started hacking with some Ruby and Arduino flavor. I wanted to port ccb23 Raindrops Project to launchpad.

For that, I needed Serial communication within ruby. Thanks to ruby-serialport first steps went quite well. I could write OR read from and to Arduino easily. But for some reasons, writing AND reading using the same instance didn’t work out.

I used a simple ‘send-input-back’ sketch on the Arduino side. So every byte I’m sending is returned back. I checked with the Arduino IDE Serialmonitor and a simple Processing script – everything worked alright. But using ruby it was different. Writing to serial port worked okay, but reading from it was just random. Sometimes I read the response, sometime I didn’t – really, really weird. Some headaches and a lot of time testing I finally found the solution: just open two instances of the serial port. One for sending, one for reading – and, surprise, surprise – it works perfect! Who would have guessed that!? Strange..

// To be completed
require 'serialport'
port_write = Serialport.new()
port_read = Serialport.new()

Ok, continuing hacking, more soon…

Ruby: a nice way to get name of current method you’re in:

tobi — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:39:52 +0000

This is a nice extension to get the name of the method you’re currently in (Ruby < 1.9)

module Kernel
   private
   def this_method
     caller[0] =~ /`([^']*)'/ and $1
   end
end

for Ruby >= 1.9 you can uses this:

module Kernel
   private
   def this_method
     __method__
   end
end

[see Stack Over Flow as well]

Lot’s of Ruby and Rails Tricks

admin — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:35:54 +0000

Quick, short post I always had in the queue:

Check this out, here some lists of good techniques to get started and to impove your Ruby and Rails code:

http://nettuts.com/articles/web-roundups/10-awesome-ruby-on-rails-techniques-to-get-you-started/

http://www.rubyinside.com/19-rails-tricks-most-rails-coders-dont-know-131.html

http://www.rubyinside.com/21-ruby-tricks-902.html

[Awsm picture taken from DesignShark]

Extending Active Scaffold as_paperclip_bridge to delete & update image/attachment

tobi — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:53:35 +0000

As you know I’m quite fond of working with Active Scaffold (AS) for data administration proposes. Quite recently we moved over to the RoR paperclip attachment plugin for file upload handling. I was even more happy to see a Active Scaffold bridge which integrates paperclip smoothly into AS as well. It’s created by and hosted here on github.

Unfortunately it didn’t provide the possibility to delete or update an image once it’s assigned to an object. Well no problem, another fork of mine, some coding and now it possible. I basically reused to code of the as_file_column_bridge. Check it out here:
~~http://github.com/rngtng/as_paperclip_bridge/tree/master~~

Update: changes got merged into trunk, check it out:

http://github.com/mnaglik/as_paperclip_bridge/

My first GitHub fork: bounce-email

tobi — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:40:12 +0000

Hurray! I finally forked a github project. Yesterday I ran into the bounce-email gem by Agris Ameriks on Rubyforge. It’s basically a 1:1 port of the PHP Bounce Handler classby Chris Fortune and not very rubyified. Thanks to David Reese, bounce-email is forked on github and I could easily extend it.

I rubyfied the class, did some code cleanup, added (yet a very simple) way to get the original message, and gained some performance by paring message only on demand. A testcase was broken as well the Rakefile, both are fixed. See the update here:
http://github.com/rngtng/bounce-email/tree/master

A short collection of Content Management Systems (CMS) for Ruby on Rails

tobi — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 21:48:31 +0000

Here is a short collection of current Content Management Systems (CMS) written in Ruby and mostly suited to use with Ruby on Rails. Check out Ananablau as well for a nice PDF slide.

Comatose (29. June 2007)
Comatose is a micro CMS designed for being embedded into existing Rails applications

http://railsbased.org/projects/8-Comatose.html

Geego
Geego is for developers and designers that want to provide fully updatable websites for their clients.

http://www.geegocms.com/

Mephisto (27. July 2006)
Complete Blog System, Mephisto is a publishing system that makes it super easy to setup a blog or website.

http://mephistoblog.com/

Typo
Complete Blog System, Similar to Mephisto

http://wiki.github.com/fdv/typo/

Radiant CMS
Radiant is a no-fluff, open source content management system designed for small teams.
Looks cool but no direkt RoR integration?

http://radiantcms.org/

Railfrog (3. July 2007)
Railfrog is a user-friendly, open-source website deployment and content management system built with Ruby on Rails.
dead project?!

http://railfrog.com/

Rubricks (31. July 2007)
Rubricks is a component based open source CMS powered by Ruby on Rails.

http://rubricks.org/

Seymore (04/02/2007)
Seymore is an open source content management system which integrates directly into pages.

http://www.slicedsoftware.com/software/seymore/

SimpleCMS, (29. December 2007),
small simple, inline edit. Simple CMS is a very easy to use and pretty advanced CMS plugin.

http://pullmonkey.com/2007/12/30/simple-cms-plugin-for-rails-demo

CMSPlugin
CMSplugin provides your Rails application with a “CMS framework”. That means authentication, authorization, roles, permissions, categories, tags, etc… but from a very flexible scope.

http://cmsplugin.rubyforge.org

open rcms (25.6.2007)

http://rcms.oopen.de/Home/

Roxanne
An in-place editor for your entire website. Roxanne is a simple Site-Management Tool to quickly manage your content. See first steps to get the idea behind Roxanne.

http://www.m42.ch/projects/roxanne/information.php

Substruct
The first and most robust Ruby on Rails open source e-commerce project.

http://code.google.com/p/substruct/

Goldberg (promising)

http://www.goldberg.240gl.org