Hackday: Intro to Ruby Meta-Programming

12/22/2009

Me and my esteemed colleague, Matt Swasey, just wrapped up the third Hackday at Viget Labs. For this Hackday we led a discussion surrounding the mind-altering world of meta-programming. You can read a detailed summary of the event on the Viget Extend blog. You can also take a look at the code and notes we put together on GitHub.

Pygrack, Pygments Highlighting Middleware

11/07/2009

Rack, the ruby web server interface, has a powerful feature called rack middleware that allows you to filter requests and responses in your application. In an effort to explore the possible uses of middleware Lunar Logic Polska created CodeRack, a rack middleware coding contest. When Matt Swasey, a fellow Viget Labs developer, saw that Trevor Turk had created a pygments API he suggested that we create a CodeRack entry that uses the API to provide syntax highlighting to your rack application.

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simple_importer, a csv processing gem

10/26/2009

I just released a tiny gem that helps in creating CSV import tasks. Check out the introductory blog post on the Viget Labs developer blog.

Getting XML Into Your Processing Sketch

10/08/2009

During one of the recent Learning Processing sessions, Keith asked how one would go about getting data from a web service, such as YQL, into a Processing sketch. After poking around the Processing library reference we were able to create an example of how to pull in data from a web service and use it to control the parameters of a sketch.

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Learning Processing, Lesson 1

09/03/2009

Over the next few weeks months I will be teaching a small introduction to programming course at Viget Labs. I’ll be using Processing as a means to explore some basic programming concepts and I’ll be following the excellent book Learning Processing: A Beginner’s Guide to Programming Images, Animation, and Interaction by Daniel Shiffman. Each lesson will have an accompanying blog post that outlines the topics we’ll try to cover and links to any resources we may need. Here are some notes on Lesson 1.

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Learning Processing, Introduction

08/25/2009

Over the next few weeks months I will be teaching a small introduction to programming course at Viget Labs. I’ll be using Processing as a means to explore some basic programming concepts and I’ll be following the excellent book Learning Processing: A Beginner’s Guide to Programming Images, Animation, and Interaction by Daniel Shiffman. Each lesson will have an accompanying blog post that outlines the topics we’ll try to cover and links to any resources we may need. Here is the first installment!

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Excess Poultry Waste Contamination

08/20/2009

While this post may not fit the strictly technical nature of my blog, the impact of unregulated poultry waste is an issue that directly affects me, and most likely you as well (especially if you live in or near Northern Virginia). There is a very important bit of legislation coming up regarding poultry waste regulation that you have an opportunity to voice your opinion about! Here is an explanation of why you should care and information on how you can help.

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Monome & Lily

06/02/2009

I recently gave a presentation at Developer Day on the Monome and Lily. Here is a brief synopsis of the talk as well as some resources to help you get started making patches in Lily.

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