uRaNGaTaNG

By the time I was working at Qype, I often had to deal with OAuth APIs. Doing example request works to a certain point quite good with a Plugin the for Firefox. But when it comes to Authorized or POST Request you’re stuck!

So I developed a tiny command line client, which allows you to send request easily. It comes as a gem and easily to install:

gem install oauth-cli

After installation, execute oauthc. You either make onetime calls, with giving all required data as parameter, or just go into interactive mode, to get a shell for multiple calls and history. For not stating all connection data over and over again, it comes with multiple profile support, a wizard to create those easily and presets for Twitter and Qype.

See this nifty example call:
oauthc -p twitter get statuses/friends.json

I hope you like it - Bug reports, suggestions, updates go to:
http://github.com/rngtng/oauth-cli/issues

See Readme:
http://github.com/rngtng/oauth-cli/blob/master/README.rdoc

See Source:
http://github.com/rngtng/oauth-cli

At Qype we had the problem of a college sending me a file which needed to get into the development trunk and updated on the production system. Problem was, he had

http://gist.github.com/380749

Skype auto accept file,

folder action on download folder.

[plain]
my hotdeploy()

on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving these_items
my hotdeploy()
end adding folder items to

on hotdeploy()
set usr_home to “/Users/tobiasb/”
set prj_folder to usr_home & “Sites/qype_admin/”
set filename to “report_queries.yml”

set srcs to usr_home & “Downloads/” & filename
set dest to prj_folder & “config/” & filename

try
tell application “Finder” to set file_exists to exists srcs as POSIX file
if file_exists then
say “here we go”
do shell script “mv “ & srcs & “ “ & dest
set diff to do shell script “/opt/local/bin/svn diff “ & dest
if not diff is equal to “” then
#set commit to “/opt/local/bin/svn ci –quiet -m’SkypeAutoCommiter: updated report queries’ “ & dest & “;”
#set hotdeploy to “cd “ & prj_folder & “; /usr/bin/cap production qype:hotdeploy FILES=config/” & filename & “;”
#set out to commit & hotdeploy
set out to do shell script “/Users/tobiasb/bin/update_report_queries.sh”
my message(“done”)
say “done”
else
my message(“no changes”)
end if
else
return “no file”
end if
on error the error_message number the error_number
my message(“error”)
say “error”
set the error_text to “Error: “ & the error_number & “. “ & the error_message
display dialog the error_text buttons {“OK”} default button 1
return the error_text
end try
end hotdeploy

on message(msg)
tell application “Skype” to send command “MESSAGE justalii SkypeAutoCommiter: “ & msg script name “to Alli”
#say msg
end message
[/plain]

- updated to Lion -

Here’s a (maybe incomplete) list of my Mac OS X Development system setup. Mainly for me to remember, but maybe a help for you too:

Main Development Setup
Snow Leopard Lion
xCode (or latest iPhone SDK)
Mac Ports, now I prefer Homebrew
Ruby: rvm + rubygems + rails etc.
Database: Mysql 5.1 + Sequel Pro
OpenVPN: Tunnelblick, or Cisco VPN client + Shimo VPN Menubar Addon
Terminal Console Extension: SIMBL + Visor iTerm 2
TextMate + Missing Drawer + Get Bundles + Rails + AckMate …
jEdit + FTP + …
Git + GitX (Experimental)
FTP & Co: Cyberduck
Hudson status: CCMenu
Share Files: Dropbox
Google Chrome
Safari
Firefox + Firebug

Extended Development
Arduino
Processing
Fritzing
Eclipse

Nice to have:
System Notification: Growl + Growl Mail
Read RSS: NetNewsWire Now using RSS within Apple Mail
IRC Client: Colloquy and hide join messages Adium
Skype and Tweetie original Twitter client
Control iTunes: SizzlingKeys Bowtie
Spotify and Spotify Menubar and more goddies
Last.fm: iScrobbler
All Codecs: Perian
Dasboard widgets: IP + App Update
Copy&Paste History: Flycut
Track Work: MacTimeLog
Word replacement: iWork
Keep your Notes: Journler
Extend Finder: TotalFinder
Mail Archiver and other MailPlugins

Install hints
mac ports
sudo port selfupdate sudo port install git-core +svn +bash_completion sudo port install ImageMagick +no_x11 sudo port install wget

ruby gems
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/991708/rails-mysql-and-snow-leopard
sudo gem self update sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config sudo gem install rails sudo gem install passenger sudo gem install piston

Safari open always in tabs:
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200812/make_safari_open_targeted_links_in_new_tabs_instead_of_new_windows/
defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true

Safari enable Development mode:
defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool true defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

Safari Plugins:
http://alexstaubo.github.com/keywurl/

TextMate install bundle
cd ~/Desktop && svn co <http://svn.textmate.org/trunk/Review/Bundles/GetBundles.tmbundle/>

Well, that’s it! Stay tuned for updated…

Some while ago I bought this nice Midi Controller BCD3000 by Behringer. It’s an easy to use device which brings way more fun mixing your MP3. For easy party playing mode I very like Djay, which is a simple but very powerfull mixing software. It now support Midi devices as well!
Unfortunately I couldn’t find any predefined Midi Mappings for Djay and BCD3000. So I created my own. Please download the file here. For now, all basic features are mapped, I may add sophisticated ones soon. It’s hosted on github, so please fork it and add you changes.

Happy DJing!

Yay, I finally got my Rainbow Cube from Seeedstudio. It came in various parts which required happy soldering. Now, I can start experimenting and porting mtXcontrol to support Rainbow Cube as well - stay tuned!

uiuiui, long time no read, as I’m quite busy lately. Just a quick update, my rails patch - fixing ‘reload’ on a AR with default scope - got finally committed - nice:

http://github.com/rails/rails/commit/4db72b702f7faca7da30a64e45daeee13733762a

That’s it! I just released mtXcontrol version 1.1 with lot of updates and improvements. One major improvement is full support for Novation Launchpad: just draw your sequences and display them on your Launchpad! Even better, push the buttons to change the color, add, remove, copy & paste frames. For that mtXcontrol makes usage of the Launchpad Processing library which I released some days ago.

But Rainbowduino support improved as well. I fixed lots of bugs and implemented requested features. Now you can control the display brightness, save up to 10 frames onto the device and serial port is auto detected. In general, I defined an basic API to communicate with the devices, which allows you to add more devices easily (e.g. monome!). With that, all Rainbowduino stuff is moved in a separate Rainbowduino Processing library.

http://vimeo.com/8456119

See official mtXcontrol project page for more.

Yay, I finally released my Launchpad Processing Library. Please see it’s project page and source at github.

Videos & more are coming soon. (Yes, this includes an updated mtXcontrol Version with Launchpad support!!)

Alright, I spend some time with my new toy Nabaztag ‘Nabaccia’

What confused me most: there have been two Firmware version out there. Some project depend on the old one, some other on the, new Jabber based, version.

Here are some interesting projects I’ve found:
http://nabaztools.sourceforge.net/ (outdated, MAC OS X)

http://sourceforge.net/projects/opennab/ (PHP)

http://code.google.com/p/nabazlib/ (python)

http://nabazlab.sourceforge.net/index_en.htm (windows only)

A working Proxyserver: jNabServer
http://code.google.com/p/jnabserver/

A good summery how to start ‘nabazhacking’ is here:
http://www.saraproft.org/?p=912
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2006/03/more_nabaztag_hacking.html

A very detailed look into the electronics of the rabbit:
http://www.petertyser.com/2007/03/11/nabaztag-nabaztagtag-dissection/

Forums:
http://nabaztag.forumactif.fr/ (french)
http://www.mynabaztag.de (german)
http://www.nabaztalk.com (english)

Blogs:
http://www.nabaztag-blog.de (german)

Quite complete list of other sources:
http://www.nabzone.com/?frG=/liens.php

Ok, I finally managed to set up my GPG Mail System. Thanks to the latest version of GPGMail and gpg (1.4.10) (via macports sudo port install gnupg) it’s running fine and smooth again with Snow Leopard and Mail.app. Perfect!

See MacGPG and GPGMail for more…

Find my GPG-Key here

UPDATE: btw. to get GPGP work with gmail, check out FireGPG, a nice plugin for Firefox, which works perfect for me on Mac OS X. Unfortunately I haven’t found any Safari solution yet…

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..

[ruby]
// To be completed
require ‘serialport’
port_write = Serialport.new()
port_read = Serialport.new()
[/ruby]

Ok, continuing hacking, more soon…

By now, I havn’t find any good solution to share my mp3 across multiple systems and disks. I’ve some on my local machine, some at work and some on my external harddisk to archive. Luckily, when copying my tracks to another library duplicates are ignored. But what annoys me most is that my ratings don’t get copied, as iTunes doesn’t store it within the file. Some while ago I found a solution by storing the number of stars into the ‘Grouping’ Field, so I can recover the rating afterwards. Now, I came up with this little applescript do automate the write and recover process. Just run this script, copy you mp3 to the other library, run the script again, and voilá, you ratings are back - nice!

[shell]
(* small apple script to save rating into grouping field and
vice versa. Perfect to persitent store your rating witin the file
*)

tell application “iTunes”
repeat with stars from 1 to 5
set rating_value to stars * 20
set group_name to “” & stars & “ Stars”

set sel to (every track whose rating is rating_value and grouping is “”)
repeat with aTrack in sel
tell aTrack
set grouping to group_name
end tell
end repeat

set sel to (every track whose rating is 0 and grouping is group_name)
repeat with aTrack in sel
tell aTrack
set rating to rating_value
end tell
end repeat
end repeat
end tell
[/shell]

Btw. for each Star rating I do have a smart playlist which allows me to find those quickly.

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

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

for Ruby >= 1.9 you can uses this:

[ruby]
module Kernel
private
def this_method
method
end
end
[/ruby]

[see Stack Over Flow as well]

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]

Ui, I just stumbled over the Orangutan Robot Controller. Funny, as it’s name is similar to this blogs name ;-)
http://www.pololu.com/catalog/product/225 - to bad is has discontinued