bleything.blog(:stuff)

Well. RubyConf was two weeks ago now and I still haven’t completely wrapped my head around it. It was a different experience this year than last (understanding that last year was my first RubyConf), and I’m not sure whether I liked it better. I would have preferred a single track, although I completely acknowledge the reasons why multitrack made sense… I just didn’t like having to make decisions between two talks I really wanted to see, which happened at pretty much every junction.

I particularly enjoyed Ryan Davis’s and Eric Hodel’s talks, which both more or less boiled down to them talking about the tactics they use to write more/better code. That’s the kind of thing I really like to hear about: the ways that other people boost their productivity and output quality. In this case, the people were experts, but it’s fun to hear from newbies too, as they almost always bring new perspective.

Another highlight was Laurent Sansonetti’s talk on how Apple loves Ruby. I can’t really explain how totally awesome this was. Apple really does love Ruby, and the stuff you can do in Leopard with Ruby is astounding. You’ll just have to watch the video.

Speaking of which, one totally awesome thing that may not be universally known is that Confreaks recorded (almost) every session and are publishing the videos on their website. It’s a lot of video to process so things are a little slow in coming, but eventually all of the conference videos will be here. They’ve already published all of the RejectConf presentations... you can see my 3 minutes on IRB history (now with more working) here. The code is available here.

I’ve also arranged to get the raw camera captures for my talk and I’ll be putting together a video of my presentation in a different format later. On that topic, the slides for my presentation are available at this link. They’re under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0... the video on Confreaks will be as well, which is slightly different than what their pages say. The non-commercial clause is the only exception.

Also as promised, below is a list of links to the stuff I talked about:

Serial Hardware

• Keyspan USA-19HS USB -> serial adapter — the best USB/serial adapter I’ve found. About $40.
• FTDI FT232R USB -> UART chip — These are only available in surface-mount packaging. You can get one on a breakout board from Sparkfun, if you need it by itself. See the Buy Some Gear section.
• FTDI TTL232R USB -> UART cables — these are USB cables with embedded FT232Rs, available in various configurations. Necessary if you’re using a Boarduino (see below) and handy to have around for other purposes as well.

X10 Home Automation

• x10-cm17a gem / project page
• CM17A FireCracker kit — The FireCracker control module, one appliance module, one transceiver/lamp module, and a remote. Note that these are much cheaper on eBay. See links in the Buy Some Gear section below.

BetaBrite LED sign

• betabrite gem / project page
• 213C-1 sign — this is the model of the sign I demonstrated

Arduino development boards

• Ruby Arduino Development / project page
• Boarduino — the small breadboard-compatible Arduino clone I demonstrated
• Simple Message System — an Arduino library that provides a simple ASCII messaging protocol. Look for Ruby bindings Real Soon Now™
• Prototyping Shield — Note that Sparkfun also sells a ProtoShield. Lady Ada’s is far superior.
• Arduino clones — There are a number of Arduino-compatible boards that are cheaper or have different design goals. I didn’t talk about these, but check out Freeduino and the Bare Bones Board

XBee Radios

• other xbee modules are pin-compatible, so pick the one that best suits your need, and remember that the Series 1 doesn’t fully support ZigBee
• Arduino xbee shield

Buy some gear!

• Keyspan USA-19HS — Froogle it or just hit up your local computer store. I got mine at CompUSA.
• FTDI FT232R — Available on a breakout board from Sparkfun, or from Digi-Key and Mouser as a bare part.
• FTDI TTL232R — Available in all configurations direct from FTDI, or in most configurations from Digi-Key and Mouser. If you’re doing a Boarduino, though, your best bet is Adafruit, because you can get a little price break if you get it bundled…
• X10 gear — eBay. Try this search for “x10 firecracker”.
• BetaBrite — Apparently they’re sold at Sam’s Club. We don’t have those in Oregon so I can’t confirm. I got mine from eBay. I use this search, which catches both “BetaBrite” and “Beta Brite”. You may be able to find other retailers too.
• Arduino — Lots of options here. Sparkfun is a good one, but I prefer Adafruit. I recommend the Starter Pack, which comes with an Arduino, ProtoShield kit, battery, wall wart, USB cable, and some goodies to play with.
• Boarduino — Adafruit. Be sure to tick the box to add the TTL232 cable if you need one. You’re going to have to solder this one… if you just don’t feel like it, email me and we can talk ;)
• Protoshield — Adafruit again. There’s also the Sparkfun one, but it’s more expensive and poorly designed (see the last paragraph in the description on Sparkfun to see what I mean)
• XBee modules — Digi-Key or Mouser. Maybe other places too, but they’re who I’ve used.
• XBee Shield — NKC Electronics, who sells on eBay as nkc_store. I’ve been very pleased with their service. NKC also sells some Arduino clones, for what it’s worth. Sparkfun sells exactly the same thing (albeit with an XBee module) for $80, which is highway robbery. Here’s the link, though, if you feel like throwing your money away :)

On behalf of the entire LAIKA Information Technology department, it is my great pleasure to announce the release of a number of projects developed by the Information Systems group:

• Athenaeum — A “live” web view of the contents of a Delicious Library
• Growl Notifier — A plugin for CruiseControl.rb that sends build notifications to one or more Growl daemons.
• Linen — A framework for building command-line interfaces
• TextMate Bundle — Some of us use TextMate. This bundle includes some helpful commands and snippets that we wrote.
• ThingFish — A network-accessable datastore with extensible metadata
  Please note that the ThingFish release is alpha quality, and much has changed between the current download and trunk. Watch for a new release Real Soon™

These projects were all developed to fit needs within our organization, but designed to be useful outside LAIKA as well. They’re released under the BSD license, and are therefore free to use, in every sense of the word.

Where To Get It

The primary source for LAIKA Open Source software is opensource.laika.com. This is a Trac instance, and is the main point of contact for all LAIKA open source projects. Check here first. File bugs here. Read documentation here :)

Downloads will also be hosted at RubyForge, so any of our projects that are available as gems will be installable via the normal gem mechanism. You can view our project page at laika.rubyforge.org and download our files at here.

About LAIKA

LAIKA is an animation studio based in Portland, Oregon (USA). We are currently working on two feature films and a large number of commercial projects. More information is available at laika.com

About LAIKA IS

LAIKA’s Information Systems group is a team of programmers, database administrators, and tech writers inside the Information Technology department. We make the shiny tools that help the rest of LAIKA do their jobs more easily, ease the sharing of information between groups, and solve mission-critical problems (like picking a place to go to lunch).

We believe in open source software. Many of the tools we use in-house are open source, and we feel strongly that we should give back whenever possible.

LAIKA’s IS department is:

• Ben Bleything
• Jeff Davis
• Michael Granger
• Steven J. Hall
• Jeremiah Jordan
• Myra Lavenue
• Mahlon E. Smith
• Anthony Roberts
• Kim Wallmark

How to Contact Us

If you’ve got problems with the code, please file appropriate bugs in our Trac instance. If you’ve got general questions or comments, please email opensource AT laika, dot com.

I’m damn sick of comment spam. To that end, I’ve set Mephisto to turn off commenting after 3 months and disabled comments for all articles older than that. You can always email me, it’s my first name at my last name dot net.

Dear readers,

Yes, I’m still alive. I’ve been insanely busy at my new(ish) job with LAIKA Inc, where I’ve been slinging Ruby since December. More about that later. I’m working on preparing a library I wrote at LAIKA for release, but until that’s finalized, I should probably keep it under my hat.

Also, I’ve set up rewrite rules to redirect my feeds to FeedBurner, inspired by Geoff’s recent post on the topic. If you notice anything funky about the feeds, please let me know!

Not that I expect this to impact a lot of people or anything, but I wanted to let the intertubes know that I’m in the process of migrating services to a new machine. This may mean some downtime for bleything.net webservices (including this blog, the george demo, etc) as well as subversion and trac.

Also, I cut over my email services Friday morning, but hosed the config on the new box. If you emailed me and it bounced between about 7 and 10 PST Friday, it’s because I’m a biig idiot. Plz to re-send.

For the past couple of weeks, my blog has been dead. I’m sure a number of you got curious why the RSS feed wasn’t updating and ventured to http://blog.bleything.net, only to find that I had left a bitchy message about how Typo was screwed up.

Well, those sentiments still apply, but I’m back in the blogging business. Today I finally migrated my blog to Mephisto. There are still some outstanding issues (permalinks, sections, etc) but for the moment, I’m rolling again.

I’d like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that you really ought to be reading my blog via the FeedBurner feed, which you can snag here. As soon as I get a little more comfortable with Mephisto and get a style worked out, I’ll be removing references to the built-in RSS feeds in favor of that… so switch now or I’ll force you to later ;)

I’ve got some news and some code to post, but it’ll have to wait for tomorrow. Cheers!