Well, here's my contribution to the [so far] rather hacky collection of ruby Websocket clients. It's MacRuby only as it utilises NSInputStreams as opposed to traditional ruby TCP sockets, and the new Grand Central calls in 0.6. Using it is just a case of creating an instance of Websocket, calling #push on it and implementing a callback to receive whatever gets sent back:
More refinement to come, and maybe a demo. Hack away here.
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I spent an age trying to work out why when I ran something like:
macrubyc main.rb some_lib.rb -o app
I’d get a LoadError trying to run the resultant app binary. Specifying absolute paths when you require all dependent files solved the problem for me.
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Just to let everybody know that I bumped the cups version number to 0.0.6 the other day. The new version of the gem is on gemcutter so you can grab the upgrade next time you update.
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As per this post, you can just use the CoreFoundation APIs:
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Yup. I’ve got a web-based jukebox application using libspotify and facebook connect running on a server at my place.
And because clause 3.3 of the terms of use which prevents me from obtaining any material compensation from my intellectual property, that’s where it will stay.
It’s not like I was looking for more than beer money- I’m not under any illusions here. But I won’t be dictated to by a bunch of Swedish communists.
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I know I’m not exactly one to talk but…
One pervasive change I’ve noticed in the four years since I’ve been out of academia is the proliferation of laptop ownership on campus. I happen to think that IT does a great deal to reduce administration costs in universities, [as it does in almost all institutions these days] and that the fact that a laptop now costs less than an iPhone will naturally increase the number you’ll see. It also strikes me as a good thing that laptops replace the dumb allocation of rooms full of PCs for students to use, which incur entirely avoidable provisioning, maintenance and energy costs.
However, when I’m confronted by a lecture hall full of nominally attentive students pissing the time away on Facebook you realise that while computers are of proven utility in an academic context, their role in the actual learning process seems to me at best negligible and at worst seriously detrimental.
I think it’d be great if it were considered socially unacceptable to have a laptop open in class; nobody ever got better grades through social networking. But I won’t be holding my breath.
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I upgraded to Snow Leopard the other day and have been looking forward to being able to tinker with the nascent GCD framework.
After three hours I got something working, but underperforming. To be continued…
On another note, it’s a bit disappointing to see I can’t embed gists directly into Tumblr any more. C’est la vie I guess.
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I’ve been sporadically working on a library for the P4D API. It’s a cool concept and I haven’t found a similar service (in the UK at least). The service really lowers the point of entry for businesses looking to automate their delivery services; unless your outfit needs to ship seriously high volumes, it’s unlikely UPS, DHL et al are going to be interested in talking to you directly.
That said, it’s a little more complicated to hook into P4D unless:
I’ve reworked the current library several times since I started in an attempt to keep the ruby methods as intuitive as possible while persisting things like quote ids to allow easy reuse. Developing a set of abstract routines for serializing / deserializing the PHP and converting the returned data into callable objects has been another challenge.
This is far from a finished product, but I’ve decided to release what I’ve got so far and see if anybody has any feedback.
Feel free to check out the source here. You need the php-serialize gem, available here.
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After a long a period of contemplative deliberation, I decided to return to college last week. As a consequence this will mean quitting my full-time job with FX Capital Group and a reassessment of development priorities.
It wasn’t an easy decision. If it weren’t for the fact that I had a great job, an empirical and clear-cut call on my situation would have been a whole lot easier.
I believe if I focus on the challenges immediately ahead, I’ll be able to reflect on my time at UCD and say I made the right choice.
My contact details remain unchanged.
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