this month in the machine...

Had three events this months.

First was the regard ActionHack. I great hacking afternoon at the iLab incubator's boardroom in Toowong.

Second was a big weekend at #railscamp in Perth.

Andrew Grimm (A sysadmin at UNSW) gave in interesting presentation of using an evolutionary like randomly generated programs (mutations) to test Rubinius. He used other ruby implementations (as a group) to validate Rubinius' returns. The other implementations effectively becoming the environment appling natural selection on Rubinius, to determine its fitness.

Andrew's slides

Thirdly, Last week I went to a Linux Users Group meeting. HUMBUG's fortnightly meeting at UQ. Was just a chat & hack session. I had one problem, but solved it that morning.

I had a mial server issue on my first attempt to set up a mail server. I found that courier (I think?), when reading the authpgsqlrc file, is failing to recognize comments and thus getting the auth requests against the database wrong. The fix was to move the comments to the next line, instead on the end of the line they apply to.

Next weekend is a new month, off to ActionHack.

Time to revisit Arduino and Ruby playing together.

In the last month I've read most of Earth Garden Book's Easy Aquaponics. It's a great collection of about 20 essays on all aspects of Aquaponics, from principles and beginer's back yard systems to establishing commercial systems.

It's the automation of system, particularly commercial ones that peaked my interest. I remembers a demo given at a rails camp. The 3rd camp in Sydney, from memory. Had some Arduino hardware on a bread board and using ruby on a laptop to drive it. Cool stuff.

Time to investigate that tech again I think.

Cheers,

Gnoll110

RailsCamp4: BackgrounDRb

It has been two week since I got back from Railscamp4 in Adelaide. Been off the grid mainly. Took lots of notes and idea point during the weekend.

The first I'd like to note in a background processing utility. It looks interesting but I've not had a chance to use it. Hopefully I will in the next month or so.

Here is the link to BackgrounDRb.

Enjoy


Gnoll110

Discovery: Rubyspaces

At Rail Camp, the weekend before last.

While flicking through the index of the pickaxe, I came across an entry for JavaSpaces. Went to the indicated section and found a little bit of sample code that shows the concept.

Run it, worked great. This discovery alone make the trek up to Brisbane Water all worth it.

Gnoll110