Sunday, September 25, 2011

Build your own (killer) Drone

Droning On Towards A Date With Destiny? is a thought-provoking post that "connects the dots" with a number of stories I've seen recently, pointing out that Drone technology is quickly becoming a commodity.

DIY Drones gives you step-by-step instructions for building your own drone.

Can't easily acquire a part? Then use one of those new 3D printers to print your own drone. (It is going to be a real issue in the near future for governments and law enforcement to prevent people from "printing" all sort of dangerous or illegal things.)

Friday, September 16, 2011

The Ultimate Base Class

An interesting proof-of-concept ruby library called Base (source) was released last week - at least I hope it is not a serious project!.

The author describes it like this:

People love Base classes! They have tons of methods waiting to be used. Just check out ActiveRecord::Base's method list:

>> ActiveRecord::Base.methods.length
=> 530

But why stop there? Why not have even more methods? In fact, let's put every method on one Base class!

Yep, I've got to agree that many developers I've worked with love making beefy base classes.

So how does Base work? First, you create a class that inherits from Base like so:

class Utility < Base
end

and through the magic of ruby's method_missing it will effectively attach every method of every Module in its runtime environment (which will be quite a few if running under Rails, for example) to your class.

And what happens if two or more modules have the same method name? You'll get the first one that was loaded!

I like it! Now we need one database table to rule them all!

Now he is no longer CEO of Apple, what does a typical day for Steve Jobs look like?

Courtesy of The Joy of Tech :