Baroquebobcat » Uncategorized

Twitter API + rest_client == Awesome

nick — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:20:00 +0000

I was catching up on my tweets last night, when I saw this tweet and thought to myself, “Hey, that should be easy to do with rest_client”

So I dove into the Twitter API docs and found the pages on creating friendships and reading list members.

I then looked at rest_client’s documentation to see how best to manage the basic auth login, etc and decided to use RestClient::Resource, since it stores some of the config data for you., even though it makes things more complicatted due to needing two separate resources — one for api.twitter.com and one for twitter.com.

It took me ten minutes or so to put it together and test to make sure I didn’t make any stupid mistakes. Cool?

Winter Cooking

nick — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 06:11:13 +0000

While I was home for Christmas & New Years I cooked up some tasty stuff.

Chicago Deep Dish Pizza — Cooks Illustrated recipe(requires registration, but totally worth it.)

Apple Turnovers — Again a Cooks Illustrated recipe, this time from the America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook.

Broiled Salmon — I don’t remember, but I think this mostly came from the America’s Test Kitchen Cookbook, except the mushrooms.

Okonomiyaki(wiki), Hiroshima style(お好み焼き) — Hiroshima style means it has ramen and a fried egg.

My First Arduino Sketch

nick — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 02:37:00 +0000

I got my arduino and chumby guts from makershed.com this week.

I unboxed them and thought about what to do with them.

My chumby guts needs an enclosure, something I am going to wait until I have access to power tools perhaps.

But the arduino provided immediate gratification. Who knew embedded programming could be so easy.

My first arduino sketch (can you guess what it says?):

On Conductors and Directors

nick — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 05:14:56 +0000

This reminded me of all the time I spent in Howard Hall, practicing music and listening to music majors talk about their work.

When Unsure, Food Pics Post

nick — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 06:10:05 +0000

Behold yonder food.

Click on them for more info, some even have descriptions. Also, flickr is awesome

Windy City Rails

nick — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 11:33:24 +0000

I’m going to Windy City Rails today. It should be fun.

Methusela’s Children

nick — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 04:58:38 +0000

Reading this post by Charles Stross reminded me of a TED talk I saw a few years ago.

Thinking about these sort of things also reminds me of some of the Heinlein I read when I was in middle school and high school. Lazarus Long is a fascinating character. I remember wondering what it would be like to live so long. I find myself continually amazed reading and listening to people talking about the possibilities that advances in medical science could create.

RubyNation

nick — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 06:43:22 +0000

Check it out. I am going to rubynation this week(this week since it is already sunday here). I plan on writing up my conf notes here afterwards, but we will see how it goes. I am looking forward to it. It the first time I have been in/around DC since I was in middle school. Ah, that was a fun trip.

As my first non Mountain West Ruby Conf, it should give me a chance to see some of the differences between regional conferences. On the other hand, some of it will be very much the same.(Herding Tigers)

Moved to Disqus Comments

nick — Fri, 29 May 2009 04:37:10 +0000

I changed my comment system over. Got tired of dealing with spam.

Self Organizing Communities

nick — Tue, 05 May 2009 07:00:36 +0000

One of the things that I find fascinating about the Internet is how it makes it easier for groups to form organically. I was thinking about this because of a reaction to the GoGaRuCo pr0n presentation ridiculousness. The group I am thinking of is RailsBridge. Which started as a response to the need to do something positive in reaction to all the recent negativity in and about the rails community.

It has only been a few days, but already they have a mailing list, a website, an IRC channel and are looking for people interested in helping them file as a non-profit. Also, there are also spin off projects, like RubyChallenge.

I personally think this is an awesome idea. And represents the best that the Internet as a social media can offer–enabling people to get together to help out others.