Check out these tubes, pretty bad ass, don’t you think? With the help of Daniel Naito’s amazing project and the TI TLC5628CN 8-bit serial DAC I’ve managed to get my Arduino controlling an IN-13 tube. I’ve got simple 3 wire serial communication working with the TLC5628 (thanks Ogi Lumen), and but I’m only utilizing one DAC right now. The nixie tubes on the left are facing up and therefore are hard to see, but they are cycling 0-9-0.

I might have mentioned previously that I recently bought an Arduino Duemilanove. It’s pretty damn cool and I’m amazed at the amount of power you can get for such small price (and form factor).

My first month or so was spent hooking it up to LED’s and the Ethernet Shield. I wasted a bunch of time on a poorly thought out messaging system. I had LED’s hooked up to PWM outputs and was controlling their brightness independently from my computer. It was a great learning experience and the perfect way to remind me how to write C. Luckily for us all, that code has been scrapped (it can probably be found at the first revision on Github).

This week I got a package from Canada. “What comes from Canada?” you might ask. Not much, but there is a place that loves to ship NOS Russian Nixie tubes. Ogi Lumen has been a pleasure to deal with, and provides a top quality kit. Assembling the Nixie Driver kit took about an hour, and getting it up and running was smooth as can be. Ogi Lumen provides a concise and well written library with only a handful of functions for the developer to learn.

Tomorrow I’m giving a lightning talk at work about all this. I’ve spent the better part of the evening putting together some code to help with a demo. I’ve cleaned up the messaging protocol a bit (it still needs major refactoring, but I’ve opted to keep it simple). Now I have a few different kinds of messages, as well as minor error handling. I’ve set up a simple way to clear the Nixie tubes, a command to left justify some digits (and continuously shift them to the right) as well as right justify the display (with no shifting). But my ace in the hole is a demo command I’ve put together that will do some cool cycling of content across the tubes.

Ok, so it’s still not all that exciting, eventually I’ll buy more than two tubes. First though, I have plans to conquer this beast: Neon Bar Graph. I’ve placed an order from Digi-Key for a few discrete components to get myself started, eventually building a shift register/DAC driver similar to the Ogi Lumen Nixie Tube Driver kits (probably without the cool boards though).

The Mack Framework is a pretty nifty combination of Rails, Merb and many other Ruby frameworks. It’s built off Rack and therefore should be simple to deploy. I really want to work with it, but what to do? Does anyone have any ideas? I need a project.

Have you ever heard of reflows in terms of browser rendering? I hadn’t but this short blog post has some neat videos of them in action. Check it out, let me know what you think.

Lately I’ve been lacking any personal projects. To compensate I finding myself working on code for my employer (Leapfrog Online) during my free time. That’s not very fun, but my lack of creativity wasn’t able to provide a solution.

All of that changed tonight. For some unknown reason I suddenly came up with a project. I’m not going to say what the actual project is yet, but I will say I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the Arduino, and was thrilled to find this: RAD. I will probably end up ordering one of these starter kits when I get back from RailsConf in a week.

I went to RIT for Computer Engineering, and I’ve always loved working with hardware as a hobby. Since I’ve been out of school I really haven’t done much with my soldering iron or bit mask knowledge, mostly Rails work, so this will be a fun change.

Today at work I was asked to generate a report from some data we’ve been recording for the past month. The query I came up with ended up producing ~3000 rows. Far to many to copy and paste into a text file and email to anyone. I knew there had to be a way to produce a CSV from PSQL, but how? Googling returned a number of informative links, but I was still a bit confused.

I ended up asking my fellow devs, and received a few possible solutions.

The first was to start PSQL with the the following flags:

psql -A -F , *connection specifics*

The second was to enter PSQL like normal and then apply these two commands:

\a
\f ,

Both suggestions 1 and 2 require you to also run the following command before running your query:

\o filename.csv

The third, and by far most elegant solution came from one of our DBAs. He recommend entering PSQL like normal and then using the following command all in one fell swoop:

\copy (select statement) to '/my/file/name' with delimiter AS ',' NULL AS ''

It is worth noting that the previous command will only work in Postgres >= 8.2

I’m posting this here in hopes others searching for this will find this a clear succinct description, but also, for my own reference as I’m sure I’ll be asked to perform something similar again in the future.

This is the output from a cool command I found on ones zeros majors and minors

history 1000 | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' \
| sort -rn | head
124 rake
106 svn
84 ss
36 cd
30 git
26 rm
26 ls
16 sc
10 mate
5 psql

How about you?

And, again from ozmm is the try command. I think I’m going to start adding this to my projects, seems really simple and helpful.

class Object
  ##
  #   @person ? @person.name : nil
  # vs
  #   @person.try(:name)
  def try(method)
    send method if respond_to? method
  end
end

This weekend a fellow member of Rochester On Rails was nice enough to share an invite to Git Hub. Check out my account, I just published two little plugins I use all the time at work and at home when building Rails apps.

The first is Fixture Manager. This plugin adds a few methods to ActiveRecord classes allowing you to save database contents to YAML (either in your test/fixtures folder, or in cms/fixtures). The plugin also provides a few Rake tasks that wrap these methods as well as a simple static class (FixtureManager) giving you two options as to how you want to save and load your data.

The second is Rcov Task. This plugin contains almost no code, its a Rake task that simplifies running your test suite with rcov (and opening your browser if your in Mac OS X).