Last night’s Phoenix Rails meeting was a nice kick off to the holiday. We covered a number of topics and saw some new faces. I am impressed that we have had visitors from United Arab Emirates and Houston, Texas in the last few months. Since we covered so much, I figured I would do a quick recap with links as many of the topics were new to many attendees.
Jade Meskill started the meeting by recapping some items encountered at RubyConf.
I apologized I wasn’t able to get some folks doing work with facebook to show up and talk about what they were doing, but started a small discussion on
OpenSocial and talked about the plugin to expose rails resources as an open social api.
I did a quick visual demo of home automation using IndigoRubyOSA and Rails. I will try to post on this later. Pertinent information is where to get home automation gear… Smart Home and Mac Home Store are both sources cited.
James Britt wrapped up the conversation by discussing moving away from Trac and on to Red Mine.
A few days back I saw rumblings of Marvel Comics releasing their catalog online. I must profess I still have probably 2,000 or so comic books under the stairs at home. I even have some original page masters from Strange Tales. While an avid reader of science fiction, I went through a 2 or 3 year spread where I consumed as many comic books as possible. It all started on a road trip across the states one summer. I bought 5 or so comics in a truck stop and was dying for us to run out of gas so we could stop again and get more.
While I am disappointed that Marvel has chosen to make this pay service, I am delighted to see them get digital. Someday perhaps they will learn about online community and see that giving away the digital version might actually make the paper version sales explode. Anyone else out there ever enjoy comics? If so, what were your favorite titles and what do you think of Digital Marvel?
I have been a DishNetwork consumer for some time. I have bounced between all the services and found my way back to DishNetwork (mainly because when we moved to the new house the local cableTV company didn’t provide service). Getting into the Home Automation space I have been following things a bit more closely when it comes to technology in my living room. I was pretty amazed when EchoStar (DishNetwork) boughtSling Media. It confirmed that DishNetwork might be the only provider that gets it.
So a few nights ago I fired up the TV to catch up on shows (soccer keeps me about two weeks behind). Low and behold there was a “custom” DVR recording from DishNetwork on listing. I decided to play it. In a nutshell DishNetwork now lets you attach your receiver to an ethernet connection. They announced IP Video on Demand. While I am not drooling to use this, I am thinking they are up to something wicked with SlingBox. I really need to get an Airport by the TV and hook up audio and cable box. In a nutshell, I think I am motivated to get the digital media setup going at the house.
So today for a customer we were faced with the problem of finding out of if a process was already running on a system. We toyed with several variations doing everything via shell script before executing the ruby script, but in the end we decided we needed to do it inside of the ruby script in order to use the custom logger that the project uses.
We found that a good article from Jay Fields on system calls from Ruby. We decided that %x was exactly what we were looking for because we needed the return values.
The first part executes `ps ax` which will give back to stdout a list of the running processes.
The second part takes that output and executes `grep irb` which will give back to stdout all the processes containing the expression irb.
The last part takes that output and does a line count to see how many lines are returned. The trouble here is that three lines were returned even though only two irb processes are running. The reason is that the grep irb also shows up as a process containing irb. The great thing about unix is that there are ways to do about anything.
Doing the following:
Gives us the desired output. By adding that `grep -v grep` we are telling grep to eliminate lines that have grep. This now gives us the desired result of 1. Now we can accurately tell if a process is already running. More specifics on the unix part of this can be found here.
We hear a lot about going green for the environment. That is stop wasting valuable resources and promote healthy (to you and the environment) choices. The idea of lean agile practices could be considered similar. One of the key factors in lean agile is eliminating waste. Several SCRUM colleagues started The ‘W’ Campaign to eliminate waste. So do something good for your organization today, find one source of waste and eliminate it.
While sometimes it can feel depressing seeing that this weekend there a San Diego BarCamp. Super Happy Dev House is rocking in San Francisco. Just about the time it feels like a technological desert around here, I am pleasantly reminded that we are building a vibrant community here!!!! If you care about technology, you need to attend. Thanks James for putting this together.
My schedule is busy and one thing I wanted in a chore program was to help me keep track of repetitive tasks like changing air filters at the house, putting in pool chemicals, etc. One of those things was helping maintain our cars and our RV. I thought, that it was important enough that maybe it should be a separate application. Well today I found Service Beacon which seems to do an excellent job of this. It even includes RECALLS and helps find service locations.
Maybe I am easy to impress this morning, but this has me excited.
I was struggling like mad to find a good free chore program that had some Web 2.0ish features and just couldn’t. I was really resolved to start a Free Software project to do it. Following rubyconf tweets this past week I hit a twitter profile that mentioned My Chores. I haven’t touched it yet, but already it sounds like what I was looking for….
Team (Family) Tasks
Email Reminders
Mobile Version
RSS Feeds
iCal Feeds
Twitter Notifications!!!!
And the HOLY FSCKING GRAIL-> FULL OPEN ID SUPPORT
So why does Open ID just kick ass? This was the sign up process…..
Enter Open ID:
Four items specific to MyChores:
Personally I think OpenID should include name and email information as almost all sites want that anyhow.
A few week backs I was speaking with the guys at Open Rain who are doing some wicked stuff with facial recognition. I was telling them how it would be really cool to load celebrity photos and then find what celebrity you most look like. Well, it appears the folks at MyHeritage are doing some really wicked stuff in this space. Very slick UI and lots of cool things to do. I will say that I think the engine still is not very accurate, but fun none the less.
Here are my famous look a likes…..
Watch me morph into John Carpenter….
MyHeritage does a great job of letting you share this stuff and interfaces directly with several blogging engines to directly embed. I am very impressed. I am wondering how this compares to Geni. My father is really into family trees. I will have to get his opinions. For now, have fun morphing.
So I am sure some of you are like stop the Open Social hype already. It is apparent by things I have been hearing that many people don’t see any impact of Open Social. Perhaps this graph will help open some eyes.
As you can see Open Social has more than FIVE times the traffic that Facebook has. People can say Open Social is for the “second tier” social networks, but honestly, I don’t get the Facebook hype. The only upside I ever saw was tapping into their traffic/market share. This graph clearly indicates to me that Open Social buries them in this facet. Why write a application on FaceBook’s platform, when I could write on my own platform and connect to FIVE times the traffic? I knew I should have bought Google stock two weeks ago. Buying at $660 and selling for $720 would have been nice 8 day investment.
Open Social is live as of late last night. Have to finish work for a client demo this morning, but definitely plan on digging into it this afternoon. The list of partners is becoming rather incredible.
Looks like I passed the grueling final exam and am now an official Certified Scrum Master. I have filled out pertinent paper work and will be submitting later this week to become Certified Scrum Practitioner.
I have been following Joost a bit lately. It doesn’t hurt that they have a soccer channel on there. I had considered hacking an appleTV to allow for installation of Joost. Today I stumbled across Miro and I am very intrigued. I didn’t realize some of the things Joost did and I definitely am attracted to the open nature of Miro. It’s bit-torrent integration saves me some work on my master media plan. Anyone out there using Miro?
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