My watchmaker’s bench is getting ever closer to completion.
Ruby-serialport doesn’t play well with RubyGems. Trying to require ‘serialport’ when using RubyGems results in: NameError: (eval):1:in `private_class_method’: undefined method `create’ for class `Class’ from (eval):1 from (eval):1 from /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:27:in `require’ from (irb):2 The quick fix to get around this is by doing: Kernel::require ‘serialport’ It would be nicer if we could avoid the conflict [...]
I’m falling in love with GitHub. To see if this love will last I’ve moved my LocoNet server gem to GitHub from RubyForge. The RubyForge gem still exists (and will continue to do so) but changes will be happening at GitHub (probably permanently). To get the new version of the gem you will need to [...]
It’s been hot here in Melbourne so rather than actually leaving the house to do anything I’ve been sitting in front of a fan mucking about with my computer. Yesterday afternoon I created a Ruby implementation of a LocoNetOverTCP server. I’ve decided to call it Nickel-Silver because that’s the common name of the alloy most [...]
Has the boss just discovered wikis? Does he now want to be able to create links between records in your intranet applications? Need to quickly add wiki functionality to your models and views so you can get back on with your life? That’s what happened to me recently. Since the wiki code was almost exactly [...]
Recently I needed to set-up an application to keep track of regular safety inspections for power tools and other equipment. The application is very trivial but my client was quite pleased with one particular feature which wasn’t actually requested. The “bonus” feature was an iCalendar feed which allows the client to have his computers subscribe [...]
I’ve frequently needed a very simple search method that allows partial matches for any combination of fields in a table. The following snippet shows how an ActiveRecord derived object might have a filter to allow for selection of records given a set of partial values. class YourClass < ActiveRecord::Base def self.filter( partial_values ) # don’t [...]
I recently needed to install all the PIC programming tools I use on several Macs. Since people often ask for help installing these kinds of things I’ve decided to put together an installer package containg all the tools I use for the majority of my PIC’n needs. Hopefully someone else will find it useful. The [...]
For a long time I’ve been frustrated by the lack of tools for programming micro-controllers (PICs specifically) using MacOS X. Most bit banging serial programmers wont work with a USB-to-Serial adapter, though I’m told some commercial ones do. There are some USB programmers available but until recently I wasn’t able to find one that was [...]
To be fair to the MacOS team that works on Skype they’ve got a lot of things spot on. Skype for MacOS X is a Cocoa app and it feels good, it works well with other programs and on the whole it fits in. There are a couple of things about it which annoy the [...]