Heya guys. Most of you know I’m hosted on the (mt) grid, which is really great web hosting and I totally recommend it, but it’s only web hosting. By it’s nature, it’s so specialized, it can’t really do anything else. Surely a lot of you have noticed that I’ve gotten very disinterested in making little javascript widgets (mainly because the vast vast majority of my user’s never donated or even said “Hi”) and have become more interested in ruby and hacking and desktop apps and also, robotics. At my house I have a Macbook, an iPod Touch, and an iMac G4 on loan from someone who will be picking it back up any day now. What I’m looking for is a Mac Mini or something very similar to it that I can run Mac OS or Ubuntu on, which runs silently, or very very close to silently. It needs to be able to interface with my wifi network too, but I could get that happening with a USB stick or something in machines that don’t have it. The iMac lacks an airport card too and it works fine on a Belkin usb stick after a bit of hacking.
If any of you out there have any computing devices of this nature which I could run ruby stuff on and the likes, and has a couple of usb ports on it, or could have them added with a PCI card, please do let me know! I might be able to pay some small amount for it, I really don’t mind how ancient it is as long as it can run a recent linux okay.
Alternatively, if any of you guys know of any cheap devices that can be hacked to run linux and interface with wifi networks, that’d be great to know! Unfortunately neither our toaster nor our fridge feature usb ports or processors. Something akin to an iPod Touch but much much cheaper would be quite ideal.
Also if anyone has any old little laptops like iBooks with say, a dead screen and battery, that would be really perfect, small, quiet… as long as it can boot, do wifi (or usb), and run a unix based OS from the last ten years or so. If you have anything like this you’d like to get rid of, contact me at “blue@” followed by this domain! :)
Hiya hackers! I’ve been playing a lot with _why’s Shoes doodad. It’s a funky little UI thingo for making desktop apps that’s really fun to use and all that. There are some really great tool’s coming to life in the ruby universe that I really wish I’d had when I was a kid back playing with Quick/Visual Basic.
So anyway’s, one of the things that used to be so painful was making anything networked! IP sockets are such a pain in the butt. It shouldn’t be so hard, so I’ve done something about it. Legs is my little ruby script a couple hundred lines long. It implements the json-rpc spec for super simple warm gooey peery sort of networking. Because it uses JSON and TCP sockets, it’s compatible with pretty much any language if you can be bothered implementing the json-rpc 1.0 spec in it too. Check it out on my github!
I hope some of you find this useful. I’m really hoping this will get included with Hackety Hack when it gets rebuilt in Shoes. It’s not designed for high load systems or anything where stability is hugely important. You could make server’s that could handle more load by multithreading the requests, but it’s a huge pain in the butt to write servers like that, so Legs doesn’t support it. Legs is for ruby newbies who know enough syntax to make their own class, and know enough about IP to know what an IP address, hostname, and port are. Of course you don’t have to be a newbie to use it! I’m using it for nifty experiments, even thinking about building a little open hackers p2p network on it! It is intentionally designed to blur the lines between client and server, so any idea of a client or server is one the user invents through their own design. :)
Soon _why’s new(ish) UI toolkit Shoes is having a bug day where we’ll all be getting together on irc for a whole day to squish bugs and play with shoes and find problems. It’s starting at mid day GMT time on the 11th, and then again on the 25th, and going till mid day the next day. Come meet _why and all his lunatic friends on freenode in the #shoes channel.
Free oats will be made available to all who attend. We all really want to get shoes ready for a good solid release on the 31st of July. What we need most of all is people and objects resembling people to come along with idea’s and make them in shoes, and give feedback, find crashes, and all that jazz. If you know C, you might be able to help debug any issues that come up, but mostly we want rubyists, even total newbies, to come along and learn shoes with us. Download the latest build of shoes before you come. Oh and you’ll want to go grab the free book Nobody Knows Shoes, which you can get in pdf or printed on lulu. :)
Come complain and make the world a better place!