Its that time of year again when we all encompass our inner pirate and let it roam free. Thanks to Yahoo! there’s a neat little tweak you can make to your web pages to make them all piratey. Just add the following line to the end of the HTML.
<script src="http://l.yimg.com/d/lib/ydn/js/pirate1252961643.js"></script>
More about it on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog.
Last Sunday I woke early so I started on a project I’ve had in mind for a while but not gotten around to doing. I built a power supply module that plugs in to a breadboard. There are a few kits for these kind of things around from Adafruit and others but I had slightly different requirements.
The first Tuesday of the month is the PHP NW meeting in Manchester. This month I was the warm act for PHP celebrity Derick Rethans. Due to traffic issues Lornajane and Derick were late so I gave my talk first. It was one in a series of talks on Design Patterns being given by various members of the group. Mine was on the Decorator Pattern. The slides from the talk are available for download.
Derick’s very interesting talk was on Test Driven Development in a PHP environment. Derick is the author of XDebug and an expert in PHP QA. It covered the concepts behind Test Driven Development and why it both improves code quality and makes code development more efficient over the long term. It covered the use of PHPUnit, XDebug and CruiseControl. As a fan of quality reusable code this is a great way to develop.
Next month is the PHP NW 2009 Conference held in Manchester. The you can see Derick and some of other great European PHP conference speakers doing their thing. Its fantastic value for money and you get a year’s subscription to PHP Architect Magazine too. Bargain!
Well I have a name for my project of getting ethernet on to my BBC Microcomputer. Its now called Beebthernet. After some prototyping on copper strip-board and testing I revised the schematic for the interface.
In March I went to the first Makerfaire in the UK. The Newcastle-upon-Tyne Makerfaire was part of Newcastle Sciencefest. Its not that far from where I live so I drove up there for the day.
There were lots of kewl stuff as you’d expect. I particularly liked the electro-mechanical fire breathing horse robot. Amusingly I met one of the Microsoft guys who’d demonstrated the Microsoft interactive table at PHP London. He was there with his cheap, home brew, version of the table which used back projection of the image and a camera to detect the finger position. The guy with the UK101s who I’d met at Techadventure was also there.
Naturally there was an O’Reilly stand as they are publishers of both Make and Craft magazines. They had a pile of kits from Adafruit including the boArduino. This is an Arduino clone designed to plug in to a breadboard. There are two versions. One with a USB to Serial adapter on board and one which has a power supply onboard but requires TTL level serial which can be easily supplied by an FTDI lead. I bought one of the latter.
The kit languished on the shelves at my computer workstation until about a month ago when I decided to solder it together and play with it. Its a through hole double sided board which is relatively packed and so requires some experience of soldering. Apart from stupidly soldering in a LED the wrong way around and then having to desolder it and obtain a new one I had no problems. It worked first time! Limor aka Ladyada, who designed it and runs Adafruit makes good stuff.
I videoed it using my G1 phone (hence the poor quality due to low light). I have the Arduino IDE running on my MacBook. The FDTI lead is based around a common part with easily obtainable drivers for Windows, OS X and Linux.
