Daniel Jackoway

RubyConf 2010 Presentation

2010-11-11T00:00:00-08:00

I just spoke about Ruboto at RubyConf.

Here are the slides

Useful links:

Ruboto homepage
My sensor demo
Garrett (I used Charles Nutter’s fork)
My port of the starter Ruboto script to mirah
My GitHub and Twitter profiles and my email are in the footer
The files that showoff turned into my slides are here

Install Redis On Joyent

2010-08-26T00:00:00-07:00

UPDATE: Redis is now in the package manager. To get it run

$ pkgin update
$ pkgin install redis

I’m playing with Joyent’s new Node.js Smart Machine in preparation for Node Knockout

I tried to install redis just by downloading, untarring, and making, but I ran into some issues. Here’s how I got it to work.

Packages

I had to install a few things from the package manager to make this work. I installed a few things that I’m pretty sure are unnecessary, so I think all you should need to do is

$ pkgin install gmake-3.81 gcc44-4.4.4

Version

The first thing you should know is that redis-node-client requires at least redis 1.3.8. The 2 featured downloads on redis’s Google code page were 1.2.6 and the rc for 2.0. So I just went for the rc. If you want to use something between 1.3.8 and 2.0rc4, go ahead, but this tutorial will assume you want 2.0rc4.

Install

Alright, time to install Redis.

SSH into your Joyent box and run

$ wget http://code.google.com/p/redis/downloads/detail?name=redis-2.0.0-rc4.tar.gz
$ gtar -xzvf redis-2.0.0-rc4.tar.gz
$ cd redis-2.0.0-rc4
$ CC=`which gcc` gmake

And then it should work. gmake test failed, but it was an issue with the tests themselves, not the Redis install. So then I started a screen session (you’ll have to install screen), ran

$ ./redis-sever

in the screen session, switched out of screen, and ran

$ ./redis-cli 
redis> set testkey testval
OK
redis> get testkey
"testval"
redis> exit

So it at least works to a degree.

It doesn’t look like Joyent will let me reset my Smart Machine to try that from scratch and make sure it works, so if anything doesn’t work, or you know of a better way, comment and I’ll update the post.

First Ruboto Release!

2010-08-25T00:00:00-07:00

I finally have a first release of my Ruby Summer of Code project, Ruboto.

Ruboto is Ruby for Android–the goal is to allow programmers to do everything they could do by writing a Java Android app in Ruby, writing no Java code at all (and hopefully no XML either).

It doesn’t quite fit that description yet. You can write Activities, BroadcastReceivers, and Services in Ruby. That’s all it supports so far, but it should be pretty easy to add other classes. And I haven’t yet tackled the issue of all of that ugly XML, but that’s coming soon.

It’s super-alpha. I’ll be shocked if there aren’t bugs, and I can almost guarantee you that 0.0.2 will not be backwards compatible. So for now, treat this as something to play around with, not something to write production apps with.

Enough boring you. To install it just run

$ gem install ruboto-core

Right now, the only docs are the README, but I’ve made it pretty comprehensive (and long …).

A few more random things:

If you’re at a loss for how to write scripts, the demos are really helpful.
All ruboto scripts written for the irb should work. If you find that not to be the case, please let me know.
It’s slow. Really slow. Once the app gets started, it’s fine, but it takes forever for JRuby to get setup because Dalvik’s reflection libraries are slow. They’re going to fix that eventually, but we’ll probably work around it before then.

So this is 0.0.1. What’s coming up?

Better docs.

Better error messages.

Plugins. So that people can encapsulate common patterns and make scripts simpler.

Easier configuration. XML sucks. That’ll be a little tough because I need to preserve the default configuration that Android generates, and I want plugins to be able to generate configuration too. But I’ll figure it out.

And then I’ll write a couple sample apps.

That should all happen in the next week and a half before RSoC is over. After then, there’s plenty to do like supporting the rest of the classes, speeding it up, making it perfect, etc.