uRaNGaTaNG

Uh, long, long time ago, (aka. last year autumn) I’ve been to GoTo Conference 2011 in Århus to present SoundCloud. For the evening program, a Lego Mindstorm Sumo fight was organized which, for sure, we couldn’t miss. Watch our sweet robot in action -
the first round of the sumo battle, where Team SoundCloud flips over the opponent!

http://vimeo.com/30364841

Unfortunately that was already it’s glorious time - we dropped out for the second round. Anyway - it was big-huge-massive fun. Make sure you grab some lego bricks and build your own.

In case you’re interested in the code, it wasn’t much and nothing to be proud of - but worked!
https://gist.github.com/1280779

Here’s another little AppleScript I recently wrote:

DelJect - an AppleScript to delete and eject any external Cards/USB Stick

A friend asked for this little script: His problem was, that his photography camera couldn’t deal with apple’s hidden files like.DS_STORE etc. To workaorund that, he had to delete those files each time before ejecting. DelJect automates this manual process. Voila!

Download the latest version here: DelJect.app

Usage
Just run the binary, select the device (USB stick), confirm delete and unplug the stick. Done!

As a litte gotcha, DelJect will remeber the device - so next time, just confirm & go.

Thanks to Niels for the idea and thanks Icon-Land for Icon.

https://github.com/rngtng/DelJect

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:

[gist id=1582447]

Check out the full Readme, Source code and Examples here:
http://www.rngtng.com/nabaztag-injector-arduino-rfid-hack/

Big Sitemaps are Big - Google Sitemaps at SoundCloud Hack and Tell @Cbase Sept’11

Me speaking about Sitemaps at SoundCloud and presenting the big_sitemaps gem to handle to load easily.

https://vimeo.com/34774323

Unfortunately I kept on dropping my iPhone until its display glass broke. Typical me. But after that, even worse, the little bits of broken glass where loose, slowly felt off one after another destroying the displays protection completely. Whereas the drop (besides the broken glass) didn’t effect the phones functionaries at all (even its touch capabilities are 100% working), the vanishing glass revealed the display which could get destroyed by dust and moist easily. Luckily I found a solution: Sugru.

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

Wuhooo, look what I found in my archives:

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 …

Yay, I’ll be at CCC Camp 2011 - and for sure I’ll bring my arduino/rainbowduino stuff with me. So come over, say hello and join in the crazy hackingingz!

[videofile]ftp://ftp.ccc.de/events/camp2011/trailer/camp2011_trailer.m4v[/videofile]

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

Here’s how you get resque-web and resque scheduler playing well with passenger:

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:
[gist id=1101580]

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]

I gave a short talk at Hack and Tell in Berlin. I briefly introduced the Rainbowduino device and my work on mtXcontol. Watch me here:

http://vimeo.com/26667454

Here are the slides:
http://www.slideshare.net/rngtng/rainbowduino

Thanks to David for recording!

A bit of fun: Look at this, a Screenshot I took ages ago and just found to share. It’s taken from a piece of code I was writing within jEdit by that time.

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?

Install:

Overview useful components: ruby-toolbox.com

Must haves:

• homebrew /macports
• git
• rvm

Load RVM extensions + completion

    [[ -s $HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm ]] && source $HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm
    [[ -r $rvm_path/scripts/completion ]] && . $rvm_path/scripts/completion

create proj folder:

 $ mkdir  'test'

create .rvmrc

  $ rvm use ruby-1.9.2-rc2@test --create

Init git

  $ git init

Interesting gems:

  rake (0.8.7)
  bundler (1.0.7)
  cheat (1.3.0)
  gemedit (0.9.0)
  gist (2.0.0)
  git (1.2.5)
  hirb (0.3.5)
  jeweler (1.5.1)
  what_methods (1.0.1)
  wirble (0.1.3)
  awesome_print (0.3.1)

Useful commands:

• rails gems

  $ gem install rails
  

• create rails project

  $ rails new . -d mysql -J
  

• check Gemfile for needed gems

  $ bundle install
  

• check DB file

cp database.yml database_example.yml
  $ cat 'db/database.yml' >> .gitignore

getting started

Scaffold: rails g scaffold Sentence text:text type:string language:string Database: rake db:migrate See all rake commands: rake -T

Rails console

• reload!
• ` _` show last result

  Sentence.find( :first)
  Sentence.first
  Sentence.find( :first, :conditions => {} )

## AEL

Sentence.first.where( :language => 'de' )
 Sentence.where( :language => 'de' ).order("RAND()").limit(1)

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!

I had the ‘problem’ that user feedback included lot of love - mostly by writing ‘hearts’. Unfortunately expressing hearts is done by ‘<3’ which turns the input into invalid HTML. Bummer. So if you still want allow other basic tags, you have a problem. Here’s how I solved it:

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:

[code]
def fix_irregular_html(html)
regexp = /]*)(

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

fixed_html
end
[/code]

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

Here’s a HowTo for a nice visual indication to see quickly if your Mac OS X Terminal is running which ssh connection.

The trick is to change your Terminal Theme before you ssh and change it back afterwards.

1. Create Theme:
got to Terminal -> Preferences -> Settings create a new theme (or copy existing one) and adjust to your needs, e.g. a light red background etc. Give it a nice name e.g. “SSH-Theme”

2. Add this function to your .bashrc

function tabc() { NAME=$1; if [-z "$NAME"]; then NAME="Default"; fi osascript -e "tell application \"Terminal\" to set current settings of front window to settings set \"$NAME\"" }

“Default” is my default Terminal theme, name this whatever u have

Usage:
tabc SSH-Theme #switch to theme with name tabc #switch to default theme

3. Create alias to ssh to server:

` alias sshmyserver=”tabc SSH-Theme; ssh yourserver.com; tabc”`

That’s it - your are done! Now, if you type sshmyserver, your Terminal color will change, ssh will start, and when you end ssh, everything will be back again..

Btw. for Terminal on Mac OS X, I very recommend Visor - a quake like console

UPDATE

That’s how you do it with iTerm:

` function tabc() { COLOR=$1; if [-z “$COLOR”]; then COLOR=”{0, 7722, 9941}”; fi osascript -e “tell application "iTerm" to set background color of current session of current terminal to $COLOR” }`

alias sshmyserver=”tabc ‘{18000, 2500, 2500}’; ssh yourserver.com; tabc”