So you can see that I was hitting tab expecting to see .cap resolve to .capitalize but it did nothing. I'm not quite sure if this has been broken for a long time or forever. On Linux, irb seems to just work. So I found a fix out on the 'tubes.

sudo gem install bond
$ cat ~/.irbrc
require 'rubygems';
require 'bond';
Bond.start

And now the tab is delicious.

>> "foo".cap [tab]
>> "foo.capitalize
=> "Foo"

Now while you're at it, might as well get the color going with wirble:
sudo gem install wirble
Add some more lines to .irbrc. Now our .irbrc looks like this:
$ cat ~/.irbrc
require 'rubygems'
require 'wirble'
require 'bond'
Wirble.init
Wirble.colorize
Bond.start

Irb will have color and [tab] now which you can see in the screenshot right there. The colors can be customized in wirble but it seems to be limited to ANSI terminal colors. I wish the terminal would support RGB #html_codes, you could really go crazy and port some of the awesome Textmate themes over to the irb term.

x = 5

5 gets sent to x and x gets sent to the console or to the bit bucket if nothing is watching for it. Irb with Ruby will tell you this explicitly which is great for debugging and developing.

>> x = 5
=> 5

But sometimes it's annoying. Like when you have a massive array of objects and you're iterating through them. A quick trick is to add another meaningless return on the end like this:

>> x = 5; 1
=> 1

If x=5 was a huge database result set or a large array, it'd be hard to read. But 1 is easy to ignore.

Install a gem

I found Watchr. It's not too hard to set up. sudo gem install watchr to get the gem. If you're on *nix, grab the filesystem event gem: sudo gem install rev. Now we have watchr up but we need a config.

Create the watchr config

The docs tell you to edit a config/watchr.rb file. Mine came from the examples on their wiki. It worked out of the box. It's posted here. It's a basic rails testing config that I haven't had to edit. It's very readable if you need to futz with it.

Create a test case

Ok so watchr just runs `rake test` which you can do in your rails app root. But perhaps you don't have any test cases created. The generators will create them for you. But assuming you don't have one, create a file named [rails app root]/test/functional/hello_test.rb.

require 'test_helper'
 
class HelloTest < ActiveSupport::TestCase
  def test_hello
    s = "Hello"
    assert_equal("Hello", s)
  end
 
end

Obviously this is a crappy assertion.

Get Growlnotify

Obviously, you'll need growl installed. But you also need the growlnotify binary. It's good to have anyway (I use it in Automator). I didn't have it by default on two of my machines so I assume that the normal Growl install doesn't install it. It's on the Growl 1.2 dmg under extras. You just have to copy it to /usr/local/bin. Download the growl dmg, open the dmg. You don't need to reinstall growl.
sudo cp /Volumes/Growl-1.2/Extras/growlnotify/growlnotify /usr/local/bin

You can test it with:
growlnotify -t "Title" -m "Message"

Make doomguy happen

Create a directory for the growl icons: mkdir ~/.watchr_images.
Copy these two doomguy faces to ~/.watchr_images/. On mac, hit Shift+Cmd+G and go to the hidden folder.

Now we should have two pngs in our hidden folder.

The watchr.rb file references these images. If you want to put it somewhere else (like maybe under ~/Pictures), you can change the .rb.

Ok Go!

Launch with: watchr config/watchr.rb from your rails app root. Watchr should be in your $PATH because you installed the gem. You should have a blank screen now where watchr is waiting.

When you save a file, watchr will fire. Depending on the file you saved, a different test will run. If you save a controller, for example, the functional test for that controller will fire. If you save a model object, a unit test for that model object will fire. If you want to force a whole test suite to run hit Ctrl+\ in the watchr window.

When things pass:

When things fail:

The growl display setting is "Music Video". I have it popping up on my 3rd monitor which is less distracting but still visible. However if you put it on your main monitor, the overlay won't interfere with mouse clicks, which is nice. It makes for a killer setup where I don't have to test my app with a browser or with contrived/non-automated tests. Now I just need to write more tests.

First, the symptoms. Let's say your dev account is about to expire in January 2010. You want to renew for another year. You add a year subscription to your cart, pay for it. You'd expect your new expire date to be Jan-2011. But in your profile and in the "thanks for ordering" activation page it says March 2010 or something else wrong. Support send me activation links basically to the same page that wouldn't activate any differently. Each time I checked out, it would say March 2010.

The trick was to click on renew membership (as if paying again), click the checkbox to select which membership you want to buy ($99 year) and hit continue. Now you're on a "Review your purchase" page. Click continue here. Finally, it says "Proceed to your country's Apple Online Store to purchase" and has an add to cart button. Stop here.

Click the following link: http://developer.apple.com/iphone/enroll/activate.action. It should bring you to a page with a single textbox for your activation code (the one you've been trying to use all along). Put this in and hit continue. Your expire date should be correct now. If not, try using a link formatted like this:
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/enroll/activate.action?activationCode=YOURCODEHERE

Seems like they have some bug in the dev store. Please comment if this helped you so it's documented.

Here's my stack on my Mac: (do not use this stack, this is just for informational purposes only)

• ruby19 installed via macports: sudo install ruby19
• regular rubygems installed
• ImageMagick 6.6.0-0 installed via macports
• A bunch of github gems installed but not firing on the controller method that crashes

So I started over on a CentOS 5.4 VM just to try out my stack and it worked. Except, I used ruby 1.8.7 compiled via source. It's a really lengthy process and it'll be part of my README if I ever get this project done. On CentOS you have to compile and install ImageMagick yourself because yum has a really old version. There's a ton of devel dependencies too. If anyone needs the instructions, leave a comment and I'll copy/paste from my README.

So I suspected that ruby 1.9 was causing problems my mac laptop and that turned out to be true. I did a sudo port uninstall ruby19 and then a sudo port install ruby. I had to reinstall all the gems again but it wasn't too bad. If port gives you a ln error, just exit your shell and open a new one.

So RMagick, ImageMagick and ruby 1.9 do not play together.

Basically, my bot joins an IRC channel and then listens for PRIVMSG commands starting with a password. It takes those commands and controls an LED. For example, I'd send this privately to the Arduino:
command password LEDON

And then the red LED comes on. I tell it "LEDOFF" and it turns off. Ok, it's not a new RFC spec worthy of IEEE recognition and international adoption. But it got the job done in a human-readable manner. Previously on my facebook status light project, I had done much of the processing on my laptop and only send hex codes to the Arduino to light up LEDs. The difference now is that the Arduino is doing the processing and no computer is needed.

While I was working on this little project, I had the bot join the channel and announce itself.

At one point, I was working on code and then my bot would disconnect. I checked the serial monitor and the server seemed to drop me after a few minutes. The channel would say that I timed out. I realized that I wasn't responding to the PING from the server. So I threw in some code that checks for anything from the server that starts with "PING :". I then respond with "PONG". I remember seeing PING?/PONG! messages in mIRC back in the day. Now it makes sense why mIRC was doing that in the console window.

It works great and I was excited about how much this little board could do in 14KB. And then I kept testing it. After about 7 or 8 "turn on" and "turn off" commands, the Arduino wouldn't do anything anymore. It's like it just froze. If I typed 5 commands, it'd stay connected for a long time. But every time I'd send it 7 to 8 commands, it would lock up. And by lock up, I mean the commands wouldn't work anymore and it would time out from the server. WTF. So close!

So I figure that it's something to do with pointers and memory. I really don't have a solid grasp on pointers and C. I got a lot of this working by iterative experimentation over many days. So I was looking for a better way to send human readable commands to my bot. By human readable I mean something that works like a unix command "command arg1 arg2". Of course this human readable bit introduces strings which is tricky enough in C (for me) and even worse on the Arduino. I figured this was a problem that someone smarter than me had solved.

I found a library called Messenger. It's pretty simple to install, just throw it in your ~/Documents/Arduino/libraries folder on Mac and um ... the equivalent on Windows? There are examples in the Messenger folder that you can checkout. HOWEVER the whole point of me posting this big long thing is the following.

The example checkString really threw me for a loop. It did exactly what I need it do to in a much cleaner way. I uploaded to the Arduino and then broke out to a shell.

$ screen /dev/tty.usbserial-A9005bCr 115200

Substitute your virtual usb device for the /dev/tty path. Note that the sketch uses 115k serial speed. You won't see anything when you type but if you hit "enter" (to clear the buffer) "on[enter]" in screen LED 13 will turn on. Type "off[enter]" ([enter] means the enter key) and it will turn off. Great! Exactly what I need. But then I tried typing "on" then "off" then "muffins" then "on" and the light stayed off. Any garbage gets the Arduino stuck like my sketch. Ok, is what I'm trying to do impossible or is this just coincidence?

I modified the checkString example to look like this:

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// This example demonstrates Messenger's checkString method
// It turns on the LED attached to pin 13 if it receives "on"
// It turns it off if it receives "off"
 
 
#include <Messenger.h>
 
 
// Instantiate Messenger object with the message function and the default separator 
// (the space character)
Messenger message = Messenger(); 
 
 
// Define messenger function
void messageCompleted() {
  // This loop will echo each element of the message separately
  while ( message.available() ) {
    if ( message.checkString("on") ) {
      digitalWrite(13,HIGH);
    } else if ( message.checkString("off") ) {
      digitalWrite(13,LOW);
    } else {       // ADD THIS
      break;     // ADD THIS
    }                // ADD THIS
  }
 
 
}
 
void setup() {
  // Initiate Serial Communication
  Serial.begin(115200); 
  message.attach(messageCompleted);
 
  pinMode(13,OUTPUT);
 
}
 
void loop() {
 
  // The following line is the most effective way of 
  // feeding the serial data to Messenger
  while ( Serial.available() ) message.process( Serial.read() );
 
 
}

I added the break and it's able to deal with garbage. I tested more than 20 commands with banging on the keyboard in between and it seems pretty solid. Now I just need to integrate this with my IRC bot and I might have something that can stay online for a while.

By the way, after you use screen to connect to a serial port, hit "Ctrl+A, k" to kill the window and break out of screen.

Update: People have asked for the code. It's posted after the break.

// UNSTABLE IRC BOT
// TODO: Integrate with Messenger.h for stability
#include <Ethernet2.h>
#include <WString.h>
 
#define STRING_BUFFER_SIZE 128
String buffer = String(STRING_BUFFER_SIZE);
 
// string variable to hold server name detection
String hostString = String(50);
 
byte mac[] = { 0xDE, 0xAD, 0xBE, 0xEF, 0xFE, 0xED };
 
// CHANGE ME
byte ip[] = { 1, 2, 3, 4 };  // arduino IP: 1.2.3.4
byte gateway[] = { 1, 2, 3, 4 };  // your router IP: 1.2.3.4
byte subnet[] = { 255, 255, 255, 0 };  // your network mask
 
// irc.freenode.net
byte ircServer[] = { 74, 208, 174, 239 };  // IP of freenode.net
 
int responseWait = 100;         // default: 1000
int joinWait = 100;             // default: 1000
int pingCheckThrottle = 10000;  // check for PING event every 10 seconds once connected
int reconnectWait = 5000;
 
// CHANGE ME
char ircNick[20] = "DuinoFace";
char channel[20] = "#freebsToTheDee";
boolean isLoggedIn = false;
 
Client client(ircServer, 6667);
 
// turn on when debugging
boolean isDebugOn = true;
 
// logged in (in channel) status light
int ledPin = 2;
 
void setup()
{
  //router time?
  delay(500);
  Serial.begin(9600);	// opens serial port, sets data rate to 9600 bps
 
  // Say hello:
  debugNoLine("String Library version: ");
  debug(buffer.version());
 
  Ethernet.begin(mac, ip, gateway, subnet);
  delay(responseWait);
 
  debug("client.connect()");
  if (!client.connect()) {
    debug("client.connect() failed.");
  }
 
  // status light
  pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT);
 
}
 
 
void loop()
{
  if (client.available() && client.connected()) {
    // parse the incoming buffer
    readIRCRequest(client);
  }
 
  if (!client.connected()) {
    debug("Disconnected");
    client.stop();
    delay(reconnectWait);
 
    debug("Reconnecting...");
    isLoggedIn = false;
    setStatusLight();
    client.connect();
  }
}
 
 
int readIRCRequest(Client client) {
  char inChar = client.read();
 
  if (inChar != '\n') {
    buffer.append(inChar);
  } 
  else {
    debugNoLine("Buffer: ");
    debug(buffer);
 
    if (!isLoggedIn) {
      if (buffer.contains("NOTICE * :*** No Ident response")) {
        login();
        buffer = "";
      } 
      else if (buffer.contains(":End of /MOTD command.")) {
        join();
      } 
      else if (buffer.contains(":End of /NAMES list.")) {
        say();
        isLoggedIn = true;
        setStatusLight();
      } 
    } 
    else {
      checkCommand();        
      checkPing();
      //delay(pingCheckThrottle);
    }
 
    // clear out buffer for next line read
    buffer = "";
 
  }
}
 
 
/* We need to send something that looks like this
 *   NICK yaytofu
 *   USER yaytofu 0 * yaytofu
 * Where yaytofu is our nickname
 */
 
void login() {
  String msg = String(50);
  msg = "NICK ";
  msg.append(ircNick);
  //if (debug) Serial.println(msg);
  debug(msg);
  client.println(msg);
  delay(responseWait); /* wait for a response */
 
  msg = "USER ";
  msg.append(ircNick);
  msg.append(" 0 * ");
  msg.append(ircNick);
  debug(msg);
  client.println(msg);
 
  delay(responseWait); /* wait for a response */
}
 
 
void join() {
  delay(joinWait);
  debug("JOIN...");
  client.println(strcat("JOIN ", channel));
  delay(responseWait);
}
 
 
void say() {
  //if (debug) Serial.println("Sending something to the channel.");
  debug("Sending something to channel.");
  client.println("PRIVMSG #freebsToTheDee :Arduino with Ethernet Shield is here.");
}
 
void say(char *msg) {
  debug("Sending something to channel.");
  client.print("PRIVMSG #freebsToTheDee :");
  client.println(msg);
}
 
 
void checkPing() {
  if (buffer.startsWith("PING :")) {
    debug("GOT PING!");
 
    // parse and store hostname in string
    if (hostString.length() == 0) {
      hostString = buffer.substring(5, buffer.length()-1);
    }
 
    // respond to ping
    debug("PONG!");
    client.print("PONG ");
    client.println(hostString);
    setStatusLight();
 
  }
}
 
void checkCommand() {
  // :nick!~nick@static-1-13-5-1.domain.com PRIVMSG #freebsToTheDee :wut
  // state codes 0=DNS   1=PRIVMSG   2=channel  3=message
 
  if (buffer.startsWith(":") && buffer.contains("PRIVMSG")) {
 
    int state = 0;
    int spaces[3] = { 0, 0, 0};
 
    // split on spaces, TODO: state check
    char *bufferArray = buffer.getChars();
    for (int i=0; i < buffer.length(); i++) {
      char test = bufferArray[i];
      if (test == ' ') {
        debugNoLine("found space at:");
        debug(i);
        spaces[state] = i;
        state++;
      }
    }
 
 
    String dnsName = buffer.substring(0, spaces[0]);
    String privMsg = buffer.substring(spaces[0]+1, spaces[1]);
    String channel = buffer.substring(spaces[1]+1, spaces[2]);
    String cmd = buffer.substring(spaces[2]+2, buffer.length());
 
    debugNoLine("dnsName:");
    debug(dnsName);
    debugNoLine("privMsg:");
    debug(privMsg);
    debugNoLine("channel:");
    debug(channel);
    debugNoLine("cmd:");
    debug(cmd);
  }
}
 
void setStatusLight() {
  if (isLoggedIn) {
    debug("Setting status light to ON.");
    digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH);
  } 
  else {
    debug("Setting status light to OFF.");
    digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW);
  }
}
 
// No carriage return
void debugNoLine(char *msg) {
  if (isDebugOn) Serial.print(msg);
}
 
// No carriage return overloaded
void debugNoLine(String *msg) {
  if (isDebugOn) Serial.print(*msg);
}
 
void debugNoLine(int *msg) {
  if (isDebugOn) Serial.print(*msg);
}
 
// Carriage return
void debug(char *msg) {
  if (isDebugOn) Serial.println(msg);
}
 
// Carriage return overloaded
void debug(String *msg) {
  if (isDebugOn) Serial.println(*msg);
}
 
void debug(int msg) {
  if (isDebugOn) Serial.println(msg);
}

Be sure to change the two sections of CHANGE ME. Also please note that like I said in my post, I never integrated these two source files together. So the IRC bot is unstable after about 8 commands.

mysql> select count(*) from jobs;
+----------+
|  1414595 |
+----------+

mysql> select count(*) from entries;
+----------+
|   184149 |
+----------+

mysql> select count(*) from batches;
+----------+
|    35170 |
+----------+

1.4 millions jobs with 184k RSS posts. Eep. I need to finish the analyzer part and turn this off. It's only a 200mb DB right now but my procrastination could cause /var to fill up. Heh.

Then I found a page by Dave South. The article's post date is old but at the bottom you'll see he keeps it updated. Thanks Dave!

Assignment 1B is a good API doc researching exercise.

I turned on debug log and looked in ~/Library/Logs/synergyd.log. I found this:

2007-10-04 22:12:11.894 Synergyd[337] DEBUG: dropped bogus motion -840,-526

I searched sourceforge for that string and found code that essentially centers the mouse when it detects motion on the primary screen. There doesn't seem to be an option to control the behavior, so short of me making a patch, I don't see a solution.

UPDATE: I found a workaround, simply move your mouse over to the display that it being buggy and the if() condition doesn't fire off. So in my case, my mac connects to my PC's keyboard and mouse. I move the PC's mouse over to the Mac screen and the Mac stops acting weird (the centering problem).