phortx-blog

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Yesterday evening I started to use SWIG to wrap the Sunxi GPIO C Lib into a ruby gem. Works pretty well until now. Next step is to implement a high level object oriented ruby API for the functional GPIO C interface.

That enables you to do high performance ruby GPIO programming on your cubietruck!

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markover - Utility for converting markup (markdown, textile, ...) files to PDF files. Fork of gimli, which is dead.

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Plasma 5 Screencast.

More Infos: http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma5.0/

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I'm done with Flickr

They just changed their login stuff and I'm not able to login without yahoo ID anymore. I've no Yahoo ID and never had. Can't login. WTF. Goodby Flickr. Hello 500px :)

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My experience with the cubietruck

Recently I've buyed a cubietruck, since I've wanted to have a board with more power then the Raspberry Pi for my home automation. The cubietruck seemd perfect with its 2 GB RAM and dual core CPU. 

I want to share my impressions and experiences I've made with my new toy.

First of all: It's fast. It's really fast and it makes a lot of fun to work with it. Even with the Pi, which was overclocked to over 1 GHz, I didn't reach that performance. It feels nearly like a "real" PC. I'm very happy with that :)

Unfortunately is the cubietruck not as user/developer friendly as the pi. The community is much smaller and the systems doesn't support everything on the board, there are not drivers for everything and you have to dive deep in the technical details to understand and use the gpio headers. That's challenging and you learn a lot but may be annoying too if you want to get things running fast.

I'm in love with Arch Linux. I use it nearly everywhere except on my VPS and I've powered my Raspberry Pi and my whole home automation with Arch Linux. Unfortunately it's really unstable on the Cubietruck. Everything works basically but it usally crashs after each system upgrade and doesn't boot anymore. That's annoying the hell out of me. So I'm forced to user another system then Arch Linux on the cubietruck. 

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JS Promises in one sentence

A Promises is a asynchronous try/catch mechanism in a method called "then", which you give up to two functions: A function which is called if everything went fine and a function which is called if something failed.

Start to use it, It's the future of JavaScript. And be aware of jQuerys deferred concept, since it's not compatible with the Promise/A+ specification, which is implemented in the Browsers and ECMAS 6.

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I should blog more often

really. I've so much to share but such few time or motivation to write :(

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The original Diablo featured a single dungeon that had 16 levels. The dungeon was enter-able through a cathedral, and on each level you’d have to look for a stairwell that would take you down to the floor below until you finally reached hell. Besides that cathedral, there wasn’t much else in the game except for a small village around it with some shops where you could buy and sell things. Each dungeon level was procedurally generated, which means that each time you played the game the layouts of the levels would be different, and the stairwells would be in a different locations. It turned out that Blizzard generated the layouts by using the exact path you walked to the cathedral as you started the game as a seed for their algorithm. At some point some guys figured this out and they calculated the route you’d had to walk to have the stairwell going up, and the stairwell going down right next to each other on every level. Pretty clever.

Which games used the weirdest tricks and hacks in their programming? (via scriptsht)

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Bitcoin

Today I made about 18 EUR with bitcoin speculation. That's nice, since my investment was quiet small (less then 100 EUR). The bitcoin price is currently at 161 EUR per BTC. I really regret, that I didn't mine some bitcoins as I heard the first time about it. I would be rich right now :)

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Setting up a rails environment in your script

require File.expand_path('../../../config/environment',  __FILE__)

The path may change depending on the location of your script.

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Show the world we want a phone worth keeping! #phonebloks http://thndr.it/15eLEMU

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How to Change, Remove, or Restore the Shortcut Arrow Overlay Icon in Windows

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Are there some good developer, ruby, webdev, linux, etc. blogs outside to follow?

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I hate TDD.

TDD is slow. It takes longer time to ship features. This is obvious as you have to code for the features as well as the tests.

TDD is wasted effort. During the early turbulant stage of an application development when business requirements change like a 16 year old’s hairstyle, 90%…

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The missing feature in Googles websearch

Googles websearch has some really nice features. You can convert currencies, let it calculate some arithmic problems, you see wikipedia articles while searching and so on. Google is awesome.

And Google knows, that I'm from germany, that's why it prefers to display german results in the websearch.

Well now ... if I enter an english word as search term. Google searches for it. Nice. But why doesn't it offer an translation of the english word to the german equivalent? It knows, that I'm a german (the site is in german, the search results are german) and I'm searching for an single english word, so why there is no translation feature, which tells me what the word means?

Actually I do that really often if I need a translation: I hack it in the address line of my chrome and google instant will show me results. And most of the times, the first result is dict.cc. I click on the first link and get the translations. Done.

But if google would translate it instant, it would save me some time and it would simply be awesome ;)