open-source

This week I finally received my Arduino Starter Pack from Adafruit. The Arduino is an awesome, Open Source, easy to use platform for getting started in embedded programming. It uses the ATMega168 AVR processor, and there are a bunch of great Open Source toolkits for programming and working with the platform. Very fun.

One of the great things about the AdaFruit starter pack is that it comes with the ProtoShield, an easy daughter-board for prototyping. The ProtoShield also comes with two extra LEDs and a spare button you can wire up to use in your projects. They’re great to use as built-in status LEDs or mode buttons.

But there is no documentation anywhere on how to use them. Poking around at the board and looking at the schematic, I eventually figured out that there were just a couple spare holes on the board that you can use to access them. But they don’t lead to any of the onboard headers, so they’re hard to use.

Fortunately I had a left over three-position header from the kit, so I wired it up with jumpers on the underside of the board.

Its ugly, but it works. Now I can just run jumpers to my breadboard to take advantage of them.

Hopefully somebody else will find this useful.

Facebook, the social networking site, has released a critical piece of their infrastructure, code-named “Thrift” as Open Source:

Thrift is a software framework for scalable cross-language services development. It combines a powerful software stack with a code generation engine to build services that work efficiently and seamlessly between C++, Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby. Thrift was developed at Facebook, and we are now releasing it as open source

Those of you who aren’t software engineering nerds like me and haven’t spent the last year and a half elbow-deep inside one of the world’s largest service oriented architectures might not realize how huge that is.

When you set out to build a large distributed system, the first question you have to answer is how you’re going to glue it all together, especially if you don’t want to have to use the same language everywhere. You could use something standard like XML-RPC or SOAP, but XML is slow and sometimes inflexible. And you don’t really care about interoperability with third-party systems - you just want to be able to connect your pieces together. And what about server frameworks? Do you really want to have to implement all those annoying little bits like configuration and logging for every language you want to use?

What you really need is one standard framework for everything. Thrift provides this. Define your service APIs in a common language and the framework automatically creates bindings for every language you’d want to use, along with service code in your chosen language.

Very cool. If I manage to find some free time I’ll be sure to play with it some more.

Update: My script no longer works with newer versions of Adium, but brnrdbrk was kind enough to update it for 1.3.

So I finally figured out how to write AppleScripts that hook directly into Quicksilver’s “text clipping” interface. For the longest time I’ve wanted to be able to set away messages from Quicksilver… and now I can:

using terms from application "Quicksilver"
    on process text ThisClipping

    tell application "Adium"
        set my status message to ThisClipping
        set my status type to away
    end tell

end process text

end using terms from It may not look like much, but I’m a happy boy. Put that into an AppleScript using Script Editor and save it to ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions. Restart Quicksilver, and you’ll be able to set any text you type in Quicksilver after the “.” command as your Adium away message.

The on process text terms has lots of other uses too. I’m sure I’ll come up with more.

Well, it looks like the boys and girls at Del.icio.us may have made some changes to their RSS feeds that break my plugin.

So I’ve taken it offline for awhile, and I’ll figure out whats wrong with it when I’ve got some more free time. You’ve been warned.

I thought I’d take a minute to plug my friend’s new startup, a project that I think has a lot of potential and that could be very cool if it takes off.

Fundable.org. Its a very neat idea. Say, for instance, that you’ve got a project you’d like to undertake which requires buy-in from a large number of individuals. Something like having a web designer create a good looking webpage for an open-source project or bringing a decent band to a musical vacuum like Pittsburgh.

Fundable allows you to create a “group action” that people can contribute money towards. Say it’ll take $1000 to get The Long Winters to make a stop in Pittsburgh during their next tour:

1. Create a group action with a goal of getting them to play here in Pittsburgh.
2. Allow the advance purchase of 100 tickets to the show for $10 apiece.
3. If the group action gets 100 people to contribute, the $1000 is “turned on” and the group leader can then withdraw the money and set up the show.
4. If the action doesn’t get enough contributors, everybody’s money gets refunded.

Its a neat concept and I think it could be great for setting up “bounties” for open-source projects or for starting advertising campaigns for non-profit groups.

So go check them out and let me know what you think.