Blag o' dkam

Went out to race my RC car on the weekend. It broke inside two laps. See Marshall Banana’s posts for pics / details.

If you’re ever looking for a fun flying toy, I can confidently recommend the Syma S026. Flies around for about 5 minutes before needing a charge. With two sets of dual blades, you can rotate it left and right and fly forwards and backwards. Up and down too naturally.  It’s tough enough that multiple crashes didn’t hurt it at all and it’s small enough that it doesn’t actually damage anything if you run into stuff. Well, avoid flowers and stuff precariously balanced. Candles also are best put away. You understand.

Update: Try eBay for even better prices! ( oh wait -- $19.95 shipping!?!)

This is from 2006 – wonder what they’ve done since.

I’ve been playing with Twitter lately – I created a Booko Twitter account to reserve the account name while I consider using it. I’ve got my own Twitter account and I had a bit of a play around with it, but honestly using Twitter via the web seems like a drag. Yet another page to watch. Plus, I subscribed to the MelbTransport guy’s page and all I could think was “Can’t I filter this to show me only the updates I’m interested in?” – apparently no, you can’t. 

I had a look at the applications out there to manage your tweets but all I could think was “Man, another app to run, another distraction.”. I’ve already got email and IM, I don’t really want another app bouncing in the Dock to tell me someone’s posted a message. So, I got to thinking, maybe there’s a way to get Twitter messages to be sent to me via IM?  Had a brief look around but didn’t immediately find anything suitable. A quick Google however netted two interesting Ruby Gems – twitter and xmpp4r-simple, which give you a nice Ruby interface to Twitter and Jabber. So, after a couple of hours of hacking around, getting my Twitter account temporarily rate limited and creating Jabber accounts, I’ve got a very simple Twitter <-> Jabber gateway going.

It will post tweets to your Jabber account & you can reply! Your reply will get posted to Twitter.  As an added bonus I added filtering so I can see only what I want from MelbTransport guy’s updates.  You can easily add your own filters in there – hopefully it’s pretty straight forward. 

Now, I know this isn’t beautiful, elegant Ruby code – feel free to leave constructive criticism in the comments.

[sourcecode language='ruby']
#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require ‘rubygems’
require ‘twitter’
require ‘xmpp4r-simple’
require ‘benchmark’

jabber_user=”sendinguser@jabber.org.au”
jabber_pass=”"

$receiving_jabber = “receivinguser@jabber.org.au”

twitter_user=”twitteruser”
twitter_pass=”"

jabber = twitter = nil

cj = Benchmark.realtime {jabber = Jabber::Simple.new(jabber_user, jabber_pass)}
puts “Connecting to Jabber: #{cj}”

ct = Benchmark.realtime {twitter = Twitter::Base.new(twitter_user, twitter_pass) }
puts “Connecting to Twitter: #{ct}”

def filters(status)
if status.user.name == “MelbTransport”
yield if status.text =~ /Craigieburn|Broadmeadows|Upfield/
else
yield
end
end

def get_tweets(twitter, tweets, jabber)
begin
twitter.timeline.reverse.each do |s|
if tweets[s.id].nil?
filters(s) { jabber.deliver($receiving_jabber, “#{s.user.name} says: #{s.text}”) }
tweets[s.id] = “Sent”
end
end
rescue Twitter::CantConnect
puts “Can’t connect. Sleeping.”
sleep 120
retry
end
end

def post_tweets(twitter, jabber)
jabber.received_messages { |msg| twitter.post(msg.body) if msg.type == :chat }
end

def main(twitter, jabber)
tweets = {}
while true
puts “Action!”
get_tweets(twitter, tweets, jabber)
post_tweets(twitter, jabber)
sleep 60
end
end

main(twitter, jabber)
[/sourcecode]
Edits:Reversed the order of the timeline to match how they should show up in IM (IE – oldest at the top, newest at the bottom.

“Broken gets fixed. Shoddy lasts forever”.  I’ve heard this phrased differently in different places and it’s too often true.  

via DesignAday – Truism.

Javascript is becoming more and more useful as CPUs get faster and Javascript engines get better – John Resig – OCR and Neural Nets in JavaScript. Solving captcha with neural networks in Javascript. It sounds like a pretty small  neural net, but that’s pretty amazing.