I guess that Wii Remote hacks are a bit old hat now, but Johnny Chung Lee has come up with a few nice demonstrations which impressed me a fair bit.
It turns out that (for those like me who didn’t know..) the Wii Remote not only has a 3D axis accelerometer, it also has an infra red camera, which I’d assumed was just a simple infra red emitter. The IR camera is a 1024×768 (1MPixel) with a scan rate of 100hz, which allows you to do some fairly cool things.
In my favourite project Johnny has setup an IR emitter in front of the Wii Remote so that reflective objects will be seen more clearly by the IR Camera in the Wii Remote. Add a couple of finger reflectors to your left and right index fingers and hey-presto you have a functional multi-touch interface for around $50 (£25).
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/
December 22nd, 2007
I'm using Trac on a fairly large project, one of the main obstacles for usage is having to use the Web interface to write tickets, wiki-pages so on...
The majority of the 30+ strong team haven't used Trac before, and with all tools, uptake is the most important factor. A large proportion of the team are all Mac based so I'm initially creating tools on that platform.
TextMate a very popular text editor, a favourite of Ruby on Rails developers world-wide, has a bundle (or in regulo-speak, a plugin) for Trac wiki text.
I'm using this a starting point and adding some helper utilities to make the process of using Trac less of a bother.
The first one is the simplest, generate an HTML preview of wiki text from TextMate
If you have TextMate installed and have added the Trac Wiki bundle you can open the Bundle editor and add a New Command (call it Preview, if you like).
Insert the following ruby code :
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
##################################################
# Trac Wiki Previewer for TextMate
# (Uses Trac XMLRPC method 'wiki.wikiToHtml')
##################################################
# jason@mentalaxis.com - Released under MIT Licence
##################################################
$LOAD_PATH << "#{ENV["TM_SUPPORT_PATH"]}/lib"
require 'xmlrpc/client'
##################################################
# In TextMate preferences setup the following vars...
#
# TM_TRACURL : Typically 'http://your_trac_env_url/xmlrpc'
# TM_TRACUSER : trac username
# TM_TRACPASSWORD : trac password
#
tracServer = XMLRPC::Client.new2(ENV["TM_TRACURL"])
tracServer.user = ENV["TM_TRACUSER"]
tracServer.password = ENV["TM_TRACPASSWORD"]
puts tracServer.call("wiki.wikiToHtml", STDIN.read)
As you'll notice in the code, you need to setup 3 environment vars to make the script work. You'll also need web access to a Trac environment
- TM_TRACURL : Typically 'http://your_trac_env_url/xmlrpc'
- TM_TRACUSER : trac username
- TM_TRACPASSWORD : trac password
Set the command options for Selected Text or Document and output to HTML
You can now view your Trac wiki text as plain HTML from within TextMate
July 23rd, 2007
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