James Britt - Code, Content, Caffiene

The World of Eric Torres

2009-11-06T01:54:00Z

I had a great time last night at TinyArmy. Daniel Davis and Eric Torres gave their “Alter Egos” talk from Phoenix Design Week. Very good presentation, both in style and in content.

Much of what they said connected with what I know and have heard about running a small, self-funded start up. Managing work; rejecting jobs that don’t further your true goals; dedicating time; not neglecting your family. Good stuff.

A real treat, though, were the slides, which featured a mixture of art by Daniel and Eric. I’m well familiar with Daniel’s art, but for whatever reasons did not know Eric’s work.

The World of Rynaga makes use of crisp lines and repeated shapes, plus striking color schemes, to create a cohesive universe.

Great work you should be paying attention to.

(J)Ruby and Android Development - 22 October 2009

2009-10-19T02:06:00Z

I’ll be giving a presentation at the next Phoenix Android Developers Group meeting on 22 October 2009.

I’ll be talking about suing Ruby and JRuby for Android development. The talk is broken into three main parts:

Using Ruby as an aid in the development process
Writing Android applications that use the jruby.jar library to evaluate ruby code
Using the Android Scripting Engine to run ruby scripts

The main focus, though, will be on the last two items. However, I’ve been using (and extending) Andi while I do Android development, so an overview of that tool (and using Ruby more generally) to augment your developer toolbox helps round out the discussion.

When: 22 October 2009
Where: OpenRain HQ
2220 South Country Club. Rd.
Suite #107
Mesa, AZ

Time: 6:30pm

Map to the meeting.

Doors open at 6:30pm; actual talk kicks off at 7pm.

Android development helper tool Andi, version 0.2.0, released

2009-10-17T20:25:00Z

I just uploaded an updated gem for Andi, the helper tool for Android application development.

See the Neurogami post for details.

The Web, for Artists, so far

2009-10-17T04:15:00Z

I’ve bundled up the drawings thus far into a largish PDF: The Web, for Artists

The trick now is to keep making time to finish it.

The plan is to intersperse the drawings with some expository text to fill in the numerous details.

Desert Code Camp - Nov. 7 2009

2009-10-08T23:24:00Z

Another edition of Desert Code Camp is right around the corner. November 7. 2009

The session/wish-list schedule page is up, so now’s the time to see about maybe giving a presentation.

The Web, for Artists

2009-10-04T21:13:00Z

I’m honored to be the speaker at the next Tiny Army meeting.

Tiny Army is the brainchild of Daniel Davis, he of Monster Commute fame. It’s a monthly gathering of Phoenix-area artists and illustrators.

Basically, the talk will be about assorted Internet geekery (What exactly is the Internet? What’s a domain name? What’s a hosting service? What’s HTML? Is that the same thing as PHP? Is it contagious? ) for people who are not Internet geeks.

And I’m doing a comic to help ‘asplain it all.

There are great opportunities for artists to get their stuff on the Web, and a little tech knowledge can help guide some key decisions.

When: Wednesday, October 7th, 6 pm
Where: Art Institute of Phoenix

2233 W Dunlap Ave # 109, Phoenix, AZ‎

We’re meeting in Room 239.

Take the elevator to the 2nd floor and make an immediate right as you step out the doors and you’ll come to a hall.

Make a left down the hall.

Follow the hall down & it dead-ends into Rm. 239.

Poker Night Fundraiser for HeatSync Labs

2009-09-23T00:03:00Z

HeatSync Labs, the Valley's hackerspace, is having a fundraiser.

Theme: Poker Night! And Other Nefarious Deeds…

Date: October 3, 2009

Time: 6-10 pm

Location: Mesa FOP Lodge 9 (the current regular HSL meeting place; 1452 E. Main St., Mesa, AZ 85203M)

Tickets: Pre-sale (available at the Oct. 1 HeatSync Lab meeting) $10 pp and $12 couples, Door $12 pp and $18 couples.

HeatSync Labs is a grassroots, non-profit hacker group trying to jump-start a real hackerspace for the Phoenix area. They meet every 1st and 3rd Thursday of the month at 8:00PM at the Mesa F.O.P. Lodge.

Drop by, and consider helping out by supporting this fund raiser.

From the O'Reilly Ruby Blog

2009-09-02T16:40:00Z

I used to write the occasional post for the O”Reilly Ruby blog. It’s more or less faded away, but I still like a few of my longer pieces. I’ve collected these over on the Neurogami site

Staying on task while encountering new bugs

2009-08-31T16:46:00Z

I have a new post up on the Ruby Best Practices blog: James will be right back after these interruptions

I’m a big fan of automating mundane tasks. The typical process is that I’ll hack out something barely functional, and over time weigh the annoyance of lack of features against effort required to add or fix something. Sometimes things just stay simple; the ”@” script, for example. Other times I end up growing a library. See Todoist-NG, for example.

Often things just settle into a state of “good enough”. That’s the case with Todoist-NG; I’ve been using GitHub for pretty much all my OSS projects lately, but this is one that somehow never made the migration from Gitorious. I’m pretty sure it’s because I’ve not had to change anything in a while. WFJ.

I’ll move it, though; it’s easy. I think that’s one reason I really like GitHub. Creating a new repo is largely frictionless, so I tend to do it for even minor things. I can then make apps, snippets, gems, and so on available to whoever is interested, but without the sense of formality one gets from a RubyForge.org project. The feeling of “might as well” is a big aid in making more code available to more people.

Likewise with helper apps; if I find even a small bug or quirk, or think of a possible feature, I figure I might as well make a note of it since it’s so easy.

Ruby Training in Phoenix

2009-07-29T16:31:00Z

David A. Black is one of the more notable figures in the world of Ruby programming. I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know him over the years at numerous Ruby conferences and exchanges online.

He is currently offering Ruby training in Edison, NJ, September 14-17, 2009. If you are interested in Ruby training, I highly recommend him as a teacher.

However, I realize (as does David) that traveling to New Jersey for the training may be a bit of a hurdle.

I’ve been in contact with him about doing a training session in the Phoenix area, and he’s quite interested. It comes down to a matter of numbers: Are there enough people here interested in this?

The course being held in September is “Introduction to Ruby”. However, most of the Rubyists I know here would do better with an advanced course, and David can offer that as well. Of course, there may be people here who don’t currently know Ruby but would like to learn.

If you are interested in some form of Ruby or Rails training here in the Vally, please get in touch with me so I can sort out the level of interest and see about coordinating something.

I’d also like to hear what people think about general tech training here in the Valley: what’s good, bad, missing, whatever.

Yes!

2009-07-15T13:38:00Z

Another year.

Sweet!

Swingin' Safari

2009-07-08T05:27:00Z

I’ve been getting into using Swinger, a library that works with Jemmy and Cucumber to test JRuby Swing apps. Such as JotBot

It’s quite the slickness.

It’s still somewhat new, I believe, and I ran into some things that didn’t work quite as I wanted. So, I forked the repo and started adding things (which I hope see added back to the original repo).

The most notable additions so far are some step definitions that allow you to specify a text field by name, instead of by the current content. Very handy, especially if you have several text fields, all empty..

I also had trouble getting forms to appear via a system tray icon menu. I spent some time looking over the Jemmy docs and discussion lists, but found nothing to help me. The best I could do was get a Swing/Cucumber feature run to kick in once I manually clicked open the tray icon’s popup menu and exposed a particular menu. Not quite my goal.

My hack was to give the application being tested a Drb server that allows a client to invoke calls on application classes. Specifically, it works on controller instances. So, rather than work through a series of operations on a systray menu (which isn’t what I’m trying to test), I can invoke FooBarController.instance.open and get the frame I really want to work with.

Now, there are some risks in this. For one, I could end up shipping an app that exposes a direct and inadvertent raw API. I’m not deeply concerned with that; there are easy enough ways to ensure this only works under development conditions.

There’s the real chance I end up with tests that aren’t really testing the application under normal usage. That’s OK, at least for now. Most testing presents some amount of artfice, so it’s something one has to watch anyways.

For these systray menus, all the code does is invoke open on some controller instance; the Drb approach just side-steps having to click menu items. In fact, that was what lead me to try Drb. I simply wanted a way to call those same methods but without having to have a Swing frame. It wasn’t obvious to me how, in Swinger or Jemmy I could “talk” directly to my application except by way of some currently referenced container. So I poked a hole.

I don’t foresee adding this Drb step stuff to my fork of Swinger. I’d have to re-think how it’s done. Right now, it is pretty tailored to Jimpanzee apps, making assumptions that clearly are not valid for all JRuby Swing apps. More likely I will add the creation of Swinger/Cucumber features and steps to the Jimpanzee generator code, or possibly offload that to a Jimpanzee-centric generator driven by Rhesus .

If I think I’ll be using Swinger for all my Jimpanzee apps, it may as well be in that generator; less work for James when starting a new project.

I can perhaps then hook up a more generic template for Rhesus that provides less specific Swinger scaffolding.

Ignite Phoenix - Cross-platform desktop Wii applications

2009-06-19T21:24:00Z

My talk from Ignite Phoenix IV is now up on Blip TV: Building cross-platform desktop Wii applications

You can also download it as an mp4 file here

BTW, I am granting release of the video under a Creative Commons license

Cross-platform desktop Wii applications by James Britt / Neurogami is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Take me to your leader

2009-06-10T19:33:00Z

At the upcoming Desert Code Camp in Phoenix, AZ, there is to be a session titled Open forum with Community Leaders

But there’s also an invite-only after gathering.

I can understand wanting to keep the attendance restricted, to help boost the signal out of the noise. But I’m curious about the selection process. I was among a list of about eight people who got an E-mail invitation to the second session. Certainly there are more people in the Phoenix area whose input would be just or more valuable , and who are just as deserving as being on that CC list.

So, who are the “community leaders”? Why would you call them that? Who and what are they leading? Do we have community followers? Do the followers agree on who are the leaders?

I don’t see myself as leading anyone, and have no interest in doing so. I find the term “community leader” , um, misleading. Few people are doing any real leading. Me, I organize or instigate or simply help out. I may take the lead on this or that project, but I’m not leading any people, except maybe over to a free seat over in the back of a user group meeting.

What I try to do is give people a hand in leading themselves, if they are interested. From ruby-doc to rubyaz.org to the talks I’ve given and articles written, I’m much more interested in providing tools and resources than in telling anyone what to think or do.

Yes, I’m opinionated (like everyone else on the planet), but I seriously expect everyone to take everything I say with a good deal of skepticism. One reason for writing is for me to find out what I think, and hopefully get feedback to learn where I’m wrong.

Maybe I’m leading by example, but I don’t think that’s what is meant when labeling people as “community leaders”. It seems intended to declare a specific distinction among people, something of, for lack of a better term, a class distinction. Not to be all Marxist theoretical here, but the leader/follower distinction partitions people, and does not encourage useful gradations. It’s something like an orchestra; you are either the conductor or you’re not; you are either giving directions or taken them. Rarely does the first violinist swap places with the conductor; everyone has their assigned role and they stick with it.

I much prefer a jazz improve jam session approach. People are leaders for certain things at certain times. No one assumes that the leader at this moment will be be the leader later on. Each person not only believes they could lead, but is expected to do so by the others. Back when punk wasn’t total laughable bullshit, it was common for people to be the band one night, and in the audience the next. You were expected to participate; that was the whole point.

You are not on this Earth to be a spectator.

Certain distinctions are practical, and many of the people who get tagged “community leader” have some aspect worth noting. Often that aspect is having done something. Doing is important, and worth recognizing, but there are degrees of doing, whereas leading is pretty much an all or nothing behavior. Emphasizing a vague notion of “leading” isn’t useful. But people can do in varying degrees, with varying skills, and should be so encouraged.

Maybe a better term is “community doers.” Or just “doers.” It’s more objective, more open to participation, and presents a more valuable goal.

I’d rather see people doing than leading or following any day.

Wii! Presenting at Ignite Phoenix IV next month

2009-05-27T02:08:00Z

Looks like I’ve been selected to give a presentation on developing Wii desktop apps at the next Ignite Phoenix.

Now my heart’s all aflutter …

Better get cracking on those slides.

Thanks to all who voted for my talk!