Not much to say, I'm just an average computer geek with many eccentricities. I love coding, electronics hacking, reading, writing and music. I just mill around in Poole and Bournemouth in Dorset, living out my life as a professional Ruby on Rails developer and web designer.
Just a few minutes ago I released my first rubygem – tuxdroid an api for interfacing with the tuxdroid robot from kysoh.
It’s sweet being able to just do:
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<code>require 'rubygems' require 'tuxdroid' tux = TuxDroid::Tux.new tux.mouth :open</code> |
Of course, you’ll need ruby-usb installed as well, which isn’t a gem as of yet so you’ll have to compile that manually.
I recently bought myself a Tux Droid from Kysoh. It kicks ass. I’m currently writing a ruby interface library for it. It comes with a python API for interfacing with a C daemon, but I’m writing a direct interface between Ruby and the robot using Ruby-USB. So far I can initialise the USB interface and send commands to the robot, but I need to do more research to know if its safe or not.
I might write a ruby client for the daemon as well when I get a bit more clued up on socket programming with Ruby.
I also need to work out how to get it working with my MacBook so I can mess around with it on the go.
Well, things are looking up. Yesterday I got a phone call about some flats we went to look at on Valentines Day.
Basically, the phone call was to tell me we were eligible for one of the flats and that we have to do an interview/get some info for them for reference purposes, etc. So, if all goes well, we’ll be getting a nice new flat in the near future – and we’ll actually be able to own it instead of just renting.
We are having the interview tomorrow, so wish us luck!
I’m quite excited!
I must say I am really impressed with the 37signals job board. After only 3 days, we’ve already had 4-5 applicants to our ad for a Junior Rails Developer.
We’ve posted on pretty much every free ruby-related job board around and got nothing back at all, so in this case, it seems you really do get what you pay for.
On Friday I finally managed to get our new in-house server working. Centos doesn’t like the p5VD2 motherboard from ASUS because it is using the JMB363 IDE/SATA controller. You can use either SATA or IDE – but not both at the same time. So installing from an IDE DVD drive onto a SATA harddrive is problematic at best.
First thing I did was look for tutorials/howtos. Turns out the problem is ‘well known’ (I wish someone had told me!) and you can ‘solve’ it by changing the boot prompt command to:
linux all-generic-ide pci=nommconf
but this disabled the DVD drive for me so I was screwed.
So, what I did was make sure the BIOS had set the chipset to IDE compatibility mode and then I booted with the above boot parameters and did a network install. I did this by copying the whole dvd contents to a folder on one of our local webservers and then going through the network installation setup screens which are fairly self-explanatory. All this went through fine but after getting the software installed (and updated) the DVD drive still didn’t work so I had to compile a new kernel.
I downloaded the 2.6.20.1 kernel, copied the .config from the current kernel across, did a make menuconfig and setup the sata stuff (I compiled it into the kernel instead of as a module, I didn’t want to deal with any more potential hassle) and voila! It all worked and I can use the DVD drive along side the harddrive. I was a little shocked to notice that the harddrive had switched dev file from hda to sda and the DVD drive had taken the place of hda, but it all worked and booted up fine so I was happy.
Hello? Is anyone out there?
I’m looking for other Rubyists in the Bournemouth area. There doesn’t seem to be a local Ruby User Group and so I’ve created a basic entry for one for Bournemouth at RubyHolic. Are there any other ruby guys or girls anywhere near me? I’d love to meet you.
I’m not very good at this whole organising groups thing, so be gentle when it comes to arranging a meet up 
Since I didn’t see an option to add personal member details at rubyholic I’ll introduce myself here:
I’ve been using Ruby since 2+ years ago when I started using Rails. I work with it professionally as web developer and sysadmin for a local Bournemouth web design/development company called SonicIQ (SonicIQ are hiring by the way). I’m interested in all things Ruby and am currently working on a simple Ruby/SDL-based tile engine in my spare time among other various projects. I’m mostly a Linux guy and try to attend the local LUG with some kind of regularity but I also love my MacBook.
Paul Hamblin 11:18 am on June 8, 2008 Permalink
I live in Bournemouth but I’m on a ship in the Gulf at the moment as I’m in the Navy.
I plan to learn RoR and probably get into it in a big way over the next few months.
It’s good to see RoR is being developed in Bourne, hopefully I will get good enough to bring something to the table in the future but at the mo I am very much a newbie.
I am also thinking about buying a mac because I’m getting sick of PC’s being rubbish.
Feel free to contact me.
Paul