Indigo + RubyOSA

August 17th, 2007

Decided to quickly at lunch show rubyOSA and Indigo in action…

First open up IRB and require rubygems and rubyosa.

irb(main):001:0> require "rubygems" 
=> true
irb(main):002:0> require "rbosa" 
=> true

Then bind OSA to Indigo server (Indigo must be started)

irb(main):003:0> home = OSA.app('IndigoServer')
=> <OSA::IndigoServer::Application:0x24fc2f0 desc="'sign'($4F444E49$)">

As you can see here are a bunch of lights that in various states:

I want to turn all the lights in the house on. So I grab my new ‘home’ object and manipulate.

irb(main):004:0> home.all_lights_on
=> nil

As you can see now all the lights are on:

I decide it’s time to turn them all off so I grab that same ‘home’ object and shut them off.

irb(main):006:0> home.daylight? ? home.all_lights_off : home.all_lights_on 
=> nil

Tada… All the lights are now off:

There is much much more to come.

Coming to a Home Near You?

August 17th, 2007

Last night had a tremendous technical dinner with a great friend Gary Howard. It makes me honestly believe that there is hope for Arizona to become a technology hub and that spirit of innovation is alive and well here. Gary is a design engineer that has put a lot of time into home automation and Asterisk installations during the past 18-24 months to see what possibilities exist for opportunity. We often exchange ideas and tinker with components of a system, but the “bug” to really try to develop somethings beyond playing around has hit.

Step one will be to allow home automation control via telephone. That is to start integrating two great home products Asterisk + Indigo. So last night I grabbed Indigo and RubyOSA. There is fully OSA support in Indigo and now I have the full API available. Within 15 minutes or so I am able to control Indigo via ruby in IRB! Yeah!!!! I however have Ruby 1.8.4 installed and it has issues with the bus for such things so I can’t run via Rails until I upgrade to 1.8.6. This means that I can easily control Indigo via a rails application.

I then have the ability to manipulate Asterisk via Rails with the work of Telegraph. Now I can have a single code base to control a home device that interfaces via respond_to either via Telephone or Web Interface (and soon iPhone Interface). So maybe this doesn’t sound cool, but it in under an hour a whole new world has been cracked open that shines light into being able to integrate worlds that have long existed as separate. I think there is going to be some fun stuff coming out of this and hope to show of some samples at future Ruby meetings locally. If you like this space and want to play. Drop me a line!

Agile Planning and Estimating

August 17th, 2007

So myself and a fellow co-worker ( Matt Heidemann ) have been arriving to work early every morning as we both are the carpool center points for young students in our lives. Generally we are the only two in the office until stand up time and we have been exchanging good dialog on Agile Methodologies and looking at our current process. We had a good discussion the other day on difference between XP and say something like SCRUM) . One big thing we noticed was that XP is very heavy on the engineering process (pair programming, refactoring, etc), but a bit light on the estimating and planning side. Where something like SCRUM really doesn’t cover the engineering process as seems to be almost entirely focused on the estimating and planning of the work.

This lead to a discussion the following day on how to write better user stories . Getting those stories to encompass acceptance tests and furthermore getting those stories/acceptance tests turned into specifications for the code. How do you turn a process into a iteration plan, to cards on the wall, to specifications of all acceptance tests to code that makes those tests pass. It is far too easy for engineers to become undisciplined and start writing the tests after the code or for the business analysts to walk away from an iteration planning session without defining the acceptance criteria.

This morning we discussed the use of rcov , heckle and rake stats and how to apply this to some of our existing work to get an idea on the health of our process and projects. There is a lot brewing at Integrum that makes me really excited. It’s not often you can come to work everyday and love what you do and feel like you leave better at what you do than when you arrived. It happens more often than not here.

A client of ours talked about the book User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn. I really liked his book Agile Estimating and Planning but wondered if anyone had read User Stories Applied and what they thought of it. If you loved or hated it let me know. If I end up picking it up I will try to do a review for others. If you are local to Phoenix or in the area and want to talk about Agile process please drop me a line. I would love to chat.

So You Think You Have It Rough?

August 16th, 2007

A while back one of my team mates (Josh Knowles) was crying foul that google just didn’t love him . I found this humorous at the time, but could certainly understand the frustration. For anyone that knows Knowles he has his own opinions on development and isn’t afraid or shy about sharing them. In fact, his title at Integrum is Opinionated Developer.

So what, you ask? Well some one told me I should google “Opinionated Developer”. So I did. Guess what! Google loves Josh. So why is this rough? Well if Josh is considered the #1 most opinionated developer behind DHH . Well imagine what my life is on a day to day basis. I mean after all DHH did tell a room of his critics to fuck you. Can you get more opinionated than that? Apparently you can, just ask Josh. ; )

Rails Rumble Announced

August 15th, 2007

There is a great little rails application throw down happening over at Rails Rumble in September. What a great way to spend a weekend and have some fun while creating a sample application and showing off how productive you can be using Ruby on Rails.

From the Rails Rumble website. “In a nutshell, Rails Rumble is a competition to test your Ruby on Rails hacking skills, build some cool new web apps, and make some friends. The concept is simple: you get 48 hours to design, develop, and deploy a web application from scratch. After those 48 hours are up, you’ll be judged by the community through a peer-ranking system in a variety of categories (see Rules for more information).”

“After about a week of controlled mayhem, judging wraps up and the dust settles. Winners are then declared, and awarded some cool prizes. We’ll be announcing what those prizes are shortly. Teams can consist of up to 4 people. Or sign up as a spectator and help judge. We’ll be rolling out the full suite of goodies soon, and if you add your contact info to the alerts list we’ll shoot you an email when registration opens.”

One cool thing about this over other similar events is that you can participate as a spectator and help judge!

Phx Dev House!!!!!

August 13th, 2007

It has been a while and I have been miserable at blogging. I just didn’t want to not blog about the phxdevhouse that took place a few weekends ago. Mostly I want to thank all that showed up. I was a bit nervous opening up my house for geek free for all, but it was well worth it!

Laurie and the kids headed off to the Buttes to enjoy a weekend away from the geeks. Josh Knowles headed over early to help setup and brought all the food/drinks. We got to hear several great topics including prime number series, google gears, a topic on perl and many others. The side conversations and excitement were definitely great. I was really hoping that we would get more into the code, but I think for a first event this was a good start.

There might even be a centralized development meeting (non language specific) that comes out of this. Brian, James and Alan step it up!!! It was nice to see a turn out and some excitement. Let’s keep the ball rolling.