Updates from September, 2006 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Dark Liquid 2:42 pm on September 26, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Arduino 

    I got quite excited reading about Arduino this morning, so much so that I bought one. Its based around Wiring and Processing which are both cool projects in theiir own right.

    In case you can’t be bothered to click the links, the system is basically a development board focused around the Atmel series of microcontrollers, namely the AtMega8 or AtMega168. It is designed to be used with ther own bootloader, software and programming language (Arduino).

    Best of all, its all open-source and if you don’t want to build it yourself, its pretty cheap to buy pre-made too. I’m looking quite forward to playing with it when my board arrives.

    Hurray!

     

    • Ken 12:57 pm on November 10, 2010 Permalink

      Hi,
      It’s a bit (well 6 years) late but it’s nice to see another Arduino user in the area. I’ve just got mine after a year or so of umming and ahhing, so glad I did. What are you doing with yours?

      Ken

    • Dark Liquid 1:15 pm on November 10, 2010 Permalink

      Not much to be honest at the moment, I’ve been busy with so many things that projects have come and gone rather quickly. I’m one of those terrible people that seems to start many things but never finish them. The original plan was to build a USB interfacing notification system, so I could write some plugins, etc for pidgin and other various software to trigger some piece of hardware or another when a notification popped up.

  • Dark Liquid 9:21 am on September 24, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    More desktops 

    I knocked up a couple more desktops. One yesterday and one this morning.

    The one this morning is my first attempt at a dual-screen desktop.

    As always, you can find them in the desktop wallpapers set of my flickr account

     

  • Dark Liquid 11:22 am on September 22, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Rails code that doesn’t get executed for generations and migrations 

    At work, we’ve developed some plugins that cause issues when invoked in generators. For instance, you may be creating controllers on the fly, and so when you what to generate a controller to override the automatic one, you can’t as it is ‘reserved’.

    Well, you can determine what context in which you code is being executed quite easily using built in globals in Ruby.

    To elaborate on the boss’s original post

    I’d love to wrap this in a nice plugin, patch or gem to enable cool things like this:

     

  • Dark Liquid 6:39 am on September 20, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Desktop Backgrounds 

    I recently put up some of the backgrond I made that I feel are still worthy of public consumption. You can view them on my Flickr desktop wallpaper set. Enjoy!

     

  • Dark Liquid 9:33 am on September 16, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Shattered Ubuntu 

    I’ve been taking a look at the Shattered 3D Ruby rails-like application framework recently for something to mess about with, but getting it to work under my Ubuntu Linux install was a complete arse.

    Well, I’ve just managed to get it working!

    (…)

     

  • Dark Liquid 3:53 pm on September 9, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Hurray for Last-Exit! 

    I use Last.fm to track my music and learn about new music and bands. But when they changed their Last.fm player software I couldn’t do that. Then I learnt about shell-fm, a console-mode last.fm player. Usually, I’m listening to music while using the GUI, so I’d prefer a GUI player, but oh well, this is better than nothing and works well enough.

    I tried their beta linux version, but it refused to work at all, and also required Qt4, a dependency I didn’t really want to add to my system.

    Now, I’ve discovered the wonderful Last-Exit, a GTK2-based last.fm player, and its awesome.

    Yay!

     

  • Dark Liquid 6:13 pm on September 8, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    XHTML Strict Invalid with RESTful forms 

    At work, I discovered that using the standard “form_for” helper with simply restful generated invalid markup, since the secret “fake method” input tag was not enclosed in a proper element.

    Therefore, I wrote a plugin to hack it in for the time being. you can get by:

    It works by hacking the tag helper to put a div tag around itself first if the tag has a name of ‘_method’. Evil, but it works for now.

     

  • Dark Liquid 7:26 am on September 8, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Tired 

    I was at work till 3am this morning (woohoo 10 hours overtime!), most of which was wasted on a tiny bug which came down to being fixed by one line:

    Also, the whole ActiveWebService thing seems stupid, when included it was causing all sorts of errors because we were creating controllers dynamically, and so it was trying to do something or other involving loading web service api files for them and getting it wrong, hence breaking everything, even though we weren’t asking for any web service functionality at all. We ended up not loading the framework, but thats hardly an ideal solution.

    Why the “neither _api or _api found” error kept popping up even though were werent requesting an api in the first place is beyond me.

    Anyway, back to sleep and then into work for round two! Ding, ding!

     

  • Dark Liquid 10:04 am on September 2, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    New software, new design 

    Well, as promised I have switched over to using Mephisto as my new blog software. So far I’m pretty impressed and its gone like a dream, though hacking around with Dan Webb’s extra plugin goodness was a little problematic.

    The theme is something I hacked up from the LazyDays theme on OSWD. Expect changes since I’m still learning what I can do with the templating system and the documentation is down grr

     

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