Codingsoftware

Lots of things have been in flow since I’ve posted here, but here are few tidbits to explore:

• A conversation about what happens when valuable things become free.
• The Weave!
• World of Wisdom Podcast episode…

Say that we agree to define collaboration as a group’s ability to coordinate effort to produce some work output.  I believe that the effectiveness of collaboration improves in direct proportion to:

Usually I am more energized by building tech than by talking about it, but I am so excited about what my son and I did over winter break, that I just have to share about it here.  In an odd kind of busman’s holiday, I spent a good chunk of my time off writing a Holochain application.  Coding with my kid is just pure pleasure for me, but I have to describe the additional incredible experience of having spent 4 years building a tool, and now suddenly being able to use that tool to build what it was meant for: creating collaboration applications.

Seems like end of the year is DYI electronics projects time for me as the Sound Alarm happened round this time last year too.  Well, I’ve been having a ball making Arduino stuff, this time as Christmas presents.  This time I got my documentation act together even more and made a construction tutorial on instructables too!   The code for Das Blinken Bonken is on github, and here’s a video of Jesse showing off the game:

I’ve just completed my second Arduino project, a sound level detector which sets off an “alarm” when there’s the sound level is to high for too long.  I built it for use in a school that wants to provide visual feedback to students when they are being too loud.  The “alarm” is a string of flashing LEDs that’s controlled by an IR-remote, which I reverse engineered using the the arduino itself and the excellent IRremote library to figure out which codes activate the LED string. The IRremote library includes an example that dumps the codes and code types that remotes typically use.  So I just ran that example with my arduino hooked up to an IR detector from adafruit.  It was really quite easy to do.

To get emacs to syntax color clojurescript files (cljs) add this to your .emacs (or other emacs config file):

 (setq auto-mode-alist (cons '("\.cljs" . clojure-mode) auto-mode-alist))

Well, I too have gone down the rabbit hole of having to upgrade compiled-from-source apps to 64bit architecture after moving to Snow Leopard.  The hardest by far was postgres.  The sad thing is that 32bit version works just fine, but the adapter gems for rails don’t, hence the need for the recompile.

I was looking at how perl6 is coming along and found this: http://perlgeek.de/blog-en/perl-5-to-6/ which is really cool.  Besides being a really nice presentation of the material (including the “Motivation” section) there’s just lotsa nice stuff.  Some of the new way outa here cool perl6 features:

We are building out the new currency frontiers web-site, using the Wagn, which is pretty darn cool. It’s a wiki + database + cms. It’s kinda geeky, but not so much that you have to be a programer to use it (so don’t freak if your aren’t), but if you are a programming inclined, there’s lots of nice stuff you can. Ethan and Lewis are are the excellent chaps wheeling the Wagn. Kudos dudes.

Have just read an excellent blog post on “dumb databases” and the issue of read vs. write consistency. My own mesh & churn for open money comes out of the same realizations that in a distributed environment the way to handle many many issues is to put the responsibility on the reader to verify the validity of the data.

I just realized that Behavior Driven Development is very similar to double entry book-keeping in accounting!Â

Well, I’ve officially joined the git bandwagon.  I’ve put metaform up on github (the open money projects will come soon, but I think probably on gitorious); I’ve been reading tons of articles about git; I installed it on Tiger (use MacPorts) and Leopard (install from source with these instructions but use 1.5.5); and now I’m blogging about it.  The most interesting article so far on git, has made me realize how closely related it is to the mesh and churn…  Quite interesting!

Hey googlers looking for tech-support:

I was trying to install various packages (emacs, etc) from universe on Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10), and I kept getting weird segmentation faults (Setting up emacsen-common (1.4.17) Segmentation fault). Turns out that the problem was that my server was being hosted on a VPS running XEN for virtualization, and you have to first install libc6-xen: apt-get install libc6-xen

Ok, so in a previous post I described the rabit-hole which is switching to rails. Below’s my capistrano deploy script which solves a number of problems:

1. The production server needs a mongrel cluster configuration file added.
2. Deployment requires restarting the mongrel cluster.
3. On Ubuntu the database.yaml spec has to be modified to because you need to specify a mysql socket path differently from OS X.

So here’s what I added to make it work:

The last few days working on the openmoney.info website, I’ve had a major hassle dealing with what appears to be a bug in the html renderer in Firefox.

The issue is that in Firefox, text in a list item won’t wrap around a right floated image; like this: