Recent content on Dead Programmer Society
There I was this morning in a state of almost perfect sensory deprivation, by which I mean scrolling thru social media, when all at once an extraordinary thing happened: I noticed something! It was something that I have seen before. It was something that I will see again. Programming languages change. Programming tools change. But programming is very much about fashion and style, not just pure…
Lately, all of the cool kids seem to be doing something with the newest protocol on the block, Model Context Protocol. Being neither cool, nor a kid, has not stopped me from doing the same of course. I wanted to test out one of my recent experiments adding MCP support to wasmVision using that venerable tool of the ancient sages known as curl. Surprisingly, I was unable to find a simple guide to…
New term we just discovered this morning: “Buzz Factor” “Buzz Factor is how many buzzwords have to fall out of popularity for your system architecture to require a redesign.”
I just realized the odd parallels between a “fish story” and “story point estimation”. In a fish story, the fisherman tells about the “one that got away”. Famously the size of this mythical fish seems to get bigger and bigger each time the tale is retold. Everyone knows this already, but no one ever argues with the ancient mariner. And since there is no fish…
Every so often, HyperCard pops up again in one of my feeds. HyperCard disappeared not long before the World Wide Web rose to dominance but is still not forgotten. What exactly was it that captured the imagination of so many? Perhaps it was the idea that everyone could be both a reader and also an author, using the same tools. HTML’s “View Source” with all its flaws was at least…
Coming up at the end of next month it is Gophercon EU once again in Berlin. https://gophercon.eu/ Our Go/TinyGo hardware hacking session will be all day Tuesday, June 27 in the same attached biergarten as last year. Yes, it is literal hacking of hardware outdoors in summer in Berlin with beer. And drones. And brand new GopherBadges: https://gopherbadge.com/ Then the always great talks and fun over…
Gobot v2.0 has been released! There is a long list of features and fixes, you can see the full changelog here: https://github.com/hybridgroup/gobot/releases/tag/v2.0.0 Thanks to the fine efforts of Thomas Kohler for doing all the heavy lifting to make it happen, and to all the many contributors. You are the ones who made this release happen while I have been busy with so many other things. It is…
The “Dead Programmer Society” blog is finally moved onto a proper static web site using Hugo. Now that we are (back) to the future of self-hosting, small websites, and federation, I feel inspired again. Let’s see what happens.
After taking so much time off of any serious blogging (there might have been a guest post or two somewhere), I’m finally starting to feel the urge again to write something longer than 140 characters. The last year has been an incredibly busy one with The Hybrid Group, KidsRuby, and so much other goodness. So if any of you are still with me, I’ve returned. Hello!
Yo, Gabba! Gabba, hey? Gabba is a Ruby gem to do easy server-side Google Analytics tracking of page view and custom events. Gather around and I’ll show you how it works. Google Analytics is the gold standard of website traffic reporting. In addition to tracking page views, one of the interesting capabilities it has is to track custom events. These could be shopping cart checkouts or video…
This last week was the fantastic RubyConf X. It has been ten years of RubyConf and in celebration of this notable occasion, the organizers located it in New Orleans and opened up the registration to a lot more people then most years past. This had the clearly foreseeable consequence of turning the conference into a really fun time! So here, in no particular order, are 10 cool things I saw or heard…
Once again, it is Lady Ada Lovelace day, and time for me to celebrate some women software developers that I know personally. This year I want to call out four women that I have especially noticed their knowledge and dedication. In no particular order… First, a big shout out to Sarah Mei (@sarahmei). Sarah is a founder of RailsBridge, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping people…
This last weekend, we completed migration of a slightly more complex Ruby on Rails application than the usual to Engine Yard’s EY-Cloud. It took a few tries, and a tiny bit of research, before we completely understood what to do to get it up and running with all of the needed capabilities. Naturally this was due to gaps in my own knowledge, and I wanted to post about what I had learned, and…
Longtime readers of this blog know that I can really get into writing about Ruby conferences, and I had a great time this last weekend at LARubyConf 2010. This time, I got to try some thing new: I was guest blogging the conference for TheBitSource, which has been providing some great coverage of other tech events like PyCon and SCALE. Please check out my complete recap from the 2nd annual Los…
I had first heard of the PhoneGap open source framework for multiplatform mobile development last year at the FutureRuby conference in Toronto. Honestly, I did not really concentrate on all they were saying at the time, and in the flurry of info including back-to-back mobile sessions with Rhomobile, I did not fully retain a clear picture of what they had to offer. My bad. It was not until late…
Recently, I added some sparkline graphs to a Ruby on Rails application. A sparkline is a very small graphic that displays a large amount of information, typically shown over time, and usually embedded in some other text. Invented by the father of modern infographics Edward Tufte, the sparkline has become a fixture of many online applications that want to visually display some stats in a simple,…
It has been an amazing year for both personal and professional code development. Starting with the inspiration to begin Project Flying Robot, to the prestige of presenting at LARubyConf, FutureRuby, TWTRCON, IgniteLA, 140 The Twitter Conference, RubyConf, and Conferencia Rails, and lastly the year-end fun of starting out the ongoing #code2009 Twitter meme, so popular that it spawned a couple of…
As usual, no blog posts = a lot of other activity here at Flying Robot HQ. Among other personal stuff, my brother Damen Evans and I have been getting ready for the last public demos of @flyingrobot for 2009. And we are going out with style! Later this week, we roll up to San Francisco to present at the prestigious RubyConf! Then, next week @flyingrobot and I will fly off to Madrid, Spain, to do…
This post continues what I started with “PostgreSQL on Ubuntu on EC2: The Installation Guide”. Once you have your PostgreSQL database server instance running, you will need to backup two different things: your database data, and the instance itself. The database data will be backed up using Elastic Block Storage (EBS) snapshots. Once we have the instance running the backups correctly,…
I was shocked to discover this morning that this is to be my 200th blog post. Wow! It has been a good run so far since I restarted the Dead Programmer Society in 2006, and I really appreciate the awesome feedback and support that I have received from the community. To commemorate this personal event, here is a list of my top 10 favorite posts, in no particular order:
For some time, I have had clients hosting a couple different applications on Amazon EC2 using Ubuntu. One of these apps uses PostgreSQL, and has been running without event for quite a while. Yesterday, I got to catch up for lost time, by spending the entire day wrestling with data recovery issues related to a failed apt-get upgrade on an important database server. Luckily, the awesome Eric Hammond…
FutureRuby Day 2 began in a seemingly calm and reflective way. Coffees were sipped, and hangovers nursed. As the self-inflicted wounds from the Pravda-Vodka-Kalashnikov faded, Pete Forde, our leader and spiritual adviser, began a short sermon. His message was simple: Vegas is a horrible place to hold RailsConf. And we should live in a manner that follows the “Four Agreements”.…
It was with tremendous excitement that my brother Damen and I had arrived in Toronto for FutureRuby. Not only were we getting to attend the reprise of what had been by all accounts the “Best. Conference. Ever.”, but we were going to be speaking about Project Flying Robot. There had been many interesting interactions with various security personnel on the journey, thanks to the many…
I just realized it has been an entire month since my last post. Sorry! In case you were wondering, the always overambitious plans for Project Flying Robot have taken up more time than expected. And parts. Especially parts. Lucky for us, the benefit of a hard deadline approaches: FutureRuby is coming up next week. My brother Damen Evans and I are going to be showing off our latest works in Unmanned…
As Maker Faire approached, my brother Damen and I were very busy working on something cool: support for the now-shipping Blimpduino kit! Thanks to the tireless efforts of Chris Anderson and Jordi Muñoz, the long awaited Blimpduino kit is now shipping at Makershed. As readers of this blog know, we have drawn a lot of inspiration from the Blimpduino. Now, we actually have 2 of them, and you can get…
We were around Barstow on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold… wait, that was someone else’s story. OK, restart. We were around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the excitement began to take hold… we were on our way to RailsConf 2009! No screaming bats, just loud pumping techno music to power the PT Cruiser. My designer, who was not old enough to be…
Well, just a very short time after I started using Heroku, they went commercial. Yes, after their very successful beta period, where apparently 24,999 web sites other than mine were already hosting, Heroku is now offering a paid version of their service. I had a sneak peak at the pricing a few days ahead of time, but I was not able to talk. And despite my intentions of blogging this right away,…
I have been wanting to upgrade the hardware used in our Dorkboards for flying_robot, from the ATMega168, to the newer better faster ATMega328. More memory, and a faster UART for serial communications with the XBee modems in the same pinout = easy win. Thanks to a quick shipping turnaround from @adafruit I got them in before the weekend, so I could play a little bit today. The first step was to…
Last night, I finally got around to deploying something on Heroku, an interesting service founded by my formerly LA-based Ruby programming chums Adam Wiggins, James Lindenbaum, and Orion Henry. I had played with their previous incarnation of the service, now known as “Heroku Garden” but only recently have I gotten to know a little bit more about the incredible offering they have…
As the 2009 Los Angeles Ruby Conference (LARubyConf) drew to a close, our keynote speaker Jim Weirich took the podium. I have seen Jim speak several times, and he is both intelligent, as well as down to earth, which is a rare combination indeed. The subject of his keynote would be anything but down to earth. In fact, it would have to be one of the most ambitious talks I have ever seen at a Ruby…
I was very happy when the next presenter at the Los Angeles Ruby Conference 2009 (LARubyConf) was Blake Mizerany, creator of the very cool Ruby micro-framework Sinatra. As long-time readers of this blog know, I am very into Sinatra. There has been an incredible amount of work going into Sinatra lately, so I was very interested to catch up on what the team has been up to. What is Sinatra?
I had no idea what I was about to experience at Los Angeles Ruby Conference 2009 (LARubyConf) when Danny Blitz took the podium as the next presenter. I had seen him hanging out with his distinctive pompadour, tattoos, and leather jacket. He is a big guy, and hard to miss. But he had been pretty quiet till then, which was about to change radically. Herding Cats is a term commonly used when…
The next session at the 2009 Los Angeles Ruby Conference (LARubyConf) was Jeremy Evans presenting Sequel, which is a very powerful database toolkit for Ruby. Ruby originally had adapters for each database. The problem was that each was very database specific. This was a problem due to both SQL differences, as well as API differences. no behavior 1997 - ruby-postgres was first created. 2000 - DBI…
The second presentation of the day at Los Angeles Ruby Conference 2009 (LARubyConf) was Aaron Patterson, XML maniac. I had a run at hardcore XML/XSL a few years back, and it has been a while since I walked the razor’s edge of the angle bracket. But Aaron is not just an aficionado, he is genuinely obsessed. Given that he is the maintainer of the Nokogiri and Mechanize gems, this makes me…
Lead-off man Dan Yoder started off the day’s proceedings at the Los Angeles Ruby Conference (LARubyConf) 2009, with a presentation on Ruby Waves called “Resource Oriented Architectures and Why It Matters”. Despite not getting the same attention that some Ruby frameworks have, the Waves team has been tirelessly working on it. According to Dan, the foundation of Waves has gotten…
Yesterday was the first ever Los Angeles Ruby Conference. Despite being located a bit out of the way, down in Tustin, the venue was actually completely amazing. Called the Marconi Automotive Museum, the place was like “Robin Master’s garage” quipped one attendee, being that it was FULL of Ferrari’s and other highly valuable and hot sports cars. Thanks to the tireless…
I just had a small realization: there is a perfect ratio for Twitter use. Wait, before you laugh and hit the back button, hear me out on the following idea. There is an emergent trend in optimal Twitter use: If you have X followers, You should have 2X people that YOU follow And have made 3X updates Get it? Twitter 1-2-3. Nice simple rule… Here is what is means if these ratios are out of…
It is Ada Lovelace Day today, and to support the women in technology, bloggers all over the world are celebrating the female side of tech. What do I mean? You may not know it from the throngs of hairy guys at tech events, but not only are there women in tech, they have done a lot to make YOUR life easier. Let’s review a couple current ladies of technology that have been rocking my world.
At long last, after many obstacles to be surmounted, yesterday we achieved liftoff. The blimp prototype “Rogue 1” of our flying_robot project to create a platform for Ruby Arduino Development powered Unmanned Aerial Vehicles has achieved an important milestone. After our third complete rewiring of the main circuit board, two burned out Pololu micro serial motor controllers, some time…
Yes, the rumors are true, our talk for LARubyConf was accepted. If you want to see the first ever public live demonstration of flying_robot, the real thing, actually flying around and such, come check it out live and direct at the first Los Angeles Ruby Conference on April 4. I do yet not know exactly what our demo will include, but from what we have been doing so far in the lab, you won’t…
We had made incredible strides forward in our construction of “Rogue 1” our autonomous blimp that we are building as the first implementation of flying_robot, our Arduino-framework for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles based on top of Ruby Arduino Development (RAD). We are also heavily influenced by the cool Blimpduino project. We were finally ready for a live test… or so we thought. We…
Our flying_robot project for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles has been underway for a few weeks now. Much soldering, and playing around with cool Arduino tricks has been taking place. You can read more here, here, here, and here if you need to catch up. One aspect that I have mentioned several times, but not gotten into much detail about, is our protocol for communicating with the UAV from the ground…
I do not often pay full attention to Giles Bowkett. That is the flip side of being the provocateur that he is, some people will occasionally tune out. However, when anyone plays the Steve Krug card, I am compelled to take a look. Yesterday, Giles posted a dead-on point about user registration, called “I Don’t Care About Your Hoops”. When you compare the success of simplicity, as…
As we proceeded along with our flying_robot project, one thing became abundantly clear: weight matters. The Arduino Diecimilla that we had been using up to this point, although a fine package for beginners, was just not going to make it when it came time to weigh in. Yes, there is the Arduino Nano, but it is not a cheap device. Also, it has a few options that were not important to us, like the…
I just noticed that there are already a whole bunch of the approved presentations for RailsConf 2009 on up the web site here. It is looking really good already, go check it out. If you are into Ruby on Rails, you really should be going… I am!
Last weekend was a fantastic hardware/software jam session with my brother Damen, working on our autonomous Ruby Arduino Development (RAD) powered blimp. Lots of little pieces had been coming in the mail, my brother had been soldering, and I had been programming away. Both of us were eager to start putting it all together. The first item of business was getting our bearings. We had acquired from…
I will be running the music BOF at RailsConf 2009 in Las Vegas. What does that mean? We’re gonna get down. All styles will be represented, so if you have an instrument or a voice, bring it. We have a Google group started here.
I read Jamis Buck’s posting late last night, about how he was retiring from involvement with Capistrano, Net:SSH and a few other closely related projects. First of all, the community owes him a lot for doing so much work on these crucial parts of the Ruby on Rails ecosystem. Seems like he has fallen victim to his own project’s popularity. So many people using your code, and they start…
It has been very overdue to get Frankie updated to work with the latest versions of Sinatra and Facebooker. But where I have been lagging, mjfreshyfresh has stepped up, and submitted a patch that gives compatibility with Sinatra 0.9.x and Facebooker 1.0.2. Thanks, my main man! The Frankie gem has been updated to version 0.3, and it is available at your convenience. Note that you really do appear…
We have been making some amazing progress on our flying_robot project. This post is actually from almost a week ago, but I have not had time to catch up blogging with what we have been getting accomplished. As I had mentioned in my first posting, one of the reasons that we did not simply copy the Blimpduino, is that we do not want to use a standard R/C controller for manual control.