Just got back from this month’s ORUG, where Matthew Williams gave a presentation on using Ruby to control an Arduino. Matt is a very natural speaker, and the presentation was great. He even demoed a bartending robot he built, which should be featured on Make very soon.
I took notes during the presentation, and they are […]
Continue reading about Physical Computing with Ruby and Arduino
After lots of code, tests, and fun, I’ve produced a Firefox extension to add a useful, new feature to Twitter, as opposed to writing Twitter extensions as a joke
Simply put, the extension provides autocomplete for Twitter usernames from your own list of friends while you’re using the web interface at twitter.com. It’s totally […]
Continue reading about Twitter Autocomplete (Tw-autocomplete Firefox Extension)
OK, here’s the deal, as quick as I can put it, but with enough words that Google will correctly index this post and make this information easier to find for the next person who needs it.
Let’s say you’re developing a Firefox extension, and you need to look at the HTML of the page. You know […]
Continue reading about Javascript Events, the DOM, and Firefox/Gecko
OK, so the title of this post might be a bit overstating.
But, if you work with Javascript and need to use dates/times, you should absolutely check out a JS library for formatted dates and times by Steven Levithan (who is obviously cool; his blog is titled “Flagrant Badassery”).
It’s a library that extends the stock Date […]
Continue reading about Javascript, Dates, Times, and One Man’s Dream
Detecting page loads is a useful ability. It’s easy enough to throw in a
gBrowser.addEventListener(”load”, function_name, true);
But, it causes extra events to get generated. There’s load events occurring in the browser that aren’t page loads. The trick to detecting real page loads (but not Back/Forward navigation when the page is still in memory — only page […]
Continue reading about Detecting page loads in a Firefox Extension
Corey sent me a link to Ubiquity, a dynamic-mashup-maker-that-reminds-me-of-Quicksilver. The video is cool looking, I may keep an eye on this project to see where they go with it. I think it’s a useful tool if you have these specific tasks coming up often, and the ability to make new commands is neat.
OK, so let’s say you’re an OSX user, and you use the command line a lot. I bet you’ve accidentally deleted a file using rm, and wished that it had gone to the Trash.
We had this problem a few days ago, and fortunately the file was under version control. But we looked for a solution […]
Continue reading about Trash aware rm for OSX — never lose a file again
In case you haven’t heard, PHP may soon have support for lambdas. These are basically anonymous functions that let you more easily create dynamic code, or throwaway functions that only get used in one place. Mmm. Lambdas.
Here’s a neat trick, if you’re working with Ruby. Ever wondered how to get a list of all installed gems?
At the command prompt, type
sudo gem server
Once you’ve done this, go to http://localhost:8808, and you can see all the Ruby Gems installed, along with info and documentation about them. Awesome!
Hat tip to Matt
Continue reading about Listing Ruby Gems, or just viewing documentation
One hugely important thing in coding is debugging. Unfortunately, a lot of Javascript debugging gets done via alert() calls. This gets awkward quickly, with the alerts affecting timing, and just being annoying if you have to dump large amounts of data out.
Firebug is a great development tool, and has a really handy logging interface that […]