Something Unimportant

Techmology

Someone at work wasn’t paying attention and gave me a password to the new Centro Tech blog. Check out our first post, it’s the follow up to the LaunchPad Challenge I wrote about previously.

ejabberd and External Authentication in Ruby

I just spent far far to long trying to get an ejabberd service to authenticate with an external Ruby script. In the hopes of saving someone else the trouble I’ve thrown together this gist.

Fun with TI’s LaunchPad starter kit

I know, it’s been a really long time since I’ve actually written anything on this blog. About a year ago I left Leapfrog Online and moved to Centro. I’m still doing similar stuff, mostly Ruby and a lot of Javascript, but recently I’ve found myself helping out with some recruiting efforts. This Friday, November 19th, [...]

MongoDB SF Conference Notes

CRUD in the JS shell http://github.com/mdirolf/shell_presentation Schema Design 4MB object limit atomicity at the document level ... the rest of the talk isnt visible due to his slides/projector the $ operator sounds cool, I need to research this compare & swap is the safer and more appropriate pattern than just modifying a single value Sharding [...]

First Annual Software Craftsmanship North America Conference

I’m at SCNA today, and so far it’s pretty great. I know this post is short but I plan on eventually cleaning up my notes and posting them here later today or tomorrow. I promise! *edit* As promised, here are my notes (maybe, just maybe I’ll write up a summary… later). George Leonard - Mastery [...]

Arduino Nixie Tube Bar Graph Control With TLC5628CN

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 [...]

Steampunk Here I Come

As my previous posts show, I’ve been working with an Arduino and some Nixie Tubes. Don’t get me wrong, they’re pretty cool, but they don’t come close to IN-13 Bar Graphs. Yeah, neon tube bar graphs that glow orange, don’t even try to deny the badass nature of these. Check out the circuit I put [...]

Some Arduino Photos and a Better Film

I gave a brief Lightning Talk today at work. It went well and the audience seemed genuinely interested and engaged. I’ve posted a 30 second youtube video of the device running on my desk and showing off a few of the commands over the serial port. A few people have mentioned they have no idea [...]

Playing with the Arduino

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 [...]

News Groups :(

Oh news groups, we really have a love hate relationship. Why do many people chose never to send a final correspondence to let the others in the discussion know how things turned out? It’s really frustrating to try to offer help and have no idea if you were useful. Also, why isn’t Google Groups more [...]