Cory Forsyth » projects

Three is a trend

cory — Fri, 08 May 2009 15:39:56 +0000

I'm speaking at Euruko 2009 tomorrow, giving an updated version of the "Who Needs Photoshop?" talk that I gave at Scotland On Rails in March. This will be the third talk I've given this year. The first was when I talked about the Popularity Dialer at Ignite NYC in February. I submitted a talk idea to Ignite because I wanted to have a chance to practice speaking in public before Scotland On Rails. Ignite was a good place to practice. It was a big, energetic crowd. The talks were at 9:30pm in a club and the crowd had been drinking beers for a couple hours by that point and they were in a pretty good mood as a result. I gave my 5-minute presentation and was on a euphoric high the rest of the night. I forgot what a rush it can be to be in front of a big crowd like that. My Euruko talk is probably the one of the three so far that I'm most excited about. Ignite was pretty nerve-wracking, and Scotland on Rails even more so, but I'm feeling pretty good about talking tomorrow at Euruko. I had a lot of doubts about whether my talk was the right subject matter at Scotland On Rails and was very nervous about how it would be received. It's not a Railsy talk at all, and in some ways it's not even very Ruby-centric. What I'm really talking about is my exploration of image math and how I used Ruby as a tool to do so. There's nothing inherently Rubyish about what I'm doing -- Ruby is one tool of many that are applicable. But I think you can say that about almost any code -- you could always swap out a different language here, a different framework there -- so I'm less concerned about that than I was. I kind of went overboard coding up image processing code in ruby to supplement the talk that's open source on github. I hope someone else gets as excited about this stuff as I am and feels like forking it and contributing. I've also had about a month off from looking at this code and now, revisiting it to get ready for my talk tomorrow, I remember how cool all this stuff really is. Watching my code change images still feels more like magic than programming to me, and it's thrilling to see these things come together. I'll post some of the videos and images I've been creating after my talk.

Creating Dynamic Adium Away Messages with Ruby and Applescript

cory — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 02:41:07 +0000

I was messing around with Adium the other day and noticed that if you right-click while writing a custom away message a context menu comes up with an option to "Insert Script >". Any time I see a script in use somewhere, I wonder what interesting thing I could do with Ruby. So, since it's that time of year, I created a script that shows Obama's current lead (or deficit) in the polls on a state-by-state basis. An example dynamically created message is: "In WA, Obama currently leads by 10.3. [source: RealClearPolitics ]." I learned the nuts and bolts of how to add these scripts from Paint the Tiger, Carve the Dragon. Basically, you need to create an Applescript that has a "substitute()" function, put it in "/Applications/Adium.app/Contents/Resources/Scripts/System Statistics.AdiumScripts/", and then edit the Info.plist file (at the same path) to contain the necessary information to tell Adium what to call your script, when to invoke it (what "%_" string to use), and the filename of the script. Since I wanted to do some network calls and some fairly complicated parsing of those results, I delegated the heavy lifting to a Ruby script and had the Applescript simply execute that ruby script as a shell script. To use the script yourself, unzip this file. It contains an applescript called Politics.scpt and a directory called "politics" that includes the "politics.rb" ruby script. Copy both the applescript and the "politics" directory to "/Applications/Adium.app/Contents/Resources/Scripts/System Statistics.AdiumScripts/". You may want to try running the politics.rb file directly to ensure that it will work and you have all the dependencies you need. If anything's awry, you're probably missing the ruby gems hpricot or open-uri. The commands "sudo gem install hpricot" and "sudo gem install open-uri" should fix that. Then edit the Info.plist file in the above directory, adding the text:


   File
   Politics
   Keyword
   %_politics
   Title
   Obama Politics update

Now, after you restart Adium, you should have the "Obama Politics update" option in your "Insert Script" menu when writing your custom away message. Just typing in %_politics directly should work as well. I don't know how to control Adium's refresh rate on the script, it seems to refresh every 15-30 seconds on its own.

checking table existence in Rails' migrations

cory — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 20:24:46 +0000

I just refactored a table and in the migration I created for it I first need to drop the table and then create it from scratch, so the first line of self.up is drop_table :table_name. But when I go back and forth over that migration, the second time around the table doesn't exist (because it got dropped proper in self.down), so I need to check that the table exists before I try to drop it in self.up. Here's the function I created to do that check:


 def self.table_exists?(name)
    ActiveRecord::Base.connection.tables.include?(name)
  end

And here's the new first line of self.up: drop_table :table_name if self.table_exists?("table_name") Clean.

Going Full Lincoln — Bearduary Appearance on Today Show Tomorrow

cory — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 23:00:47 +0000

Tomorrow morning I'm going to be on the Today Show at the NBC Studios. They'll be shaving my Bearduary beard and possibly giving me a free haircut (score!) while the hosts interview the Bearduary founders. The taping is supposed to take place at 10am EST on Tuesday and last for about 45 minutes. I don't know yet if that means I'll actually be on the air at that time or if it will be another day. If anyone has a DVR and wants to record this for me, that would be awesome. Here again is the Bearduary Documentary that Sai and I made in 2006:

Playing with Fire

cory — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 15:11:15 +0000

I'm now 2 for 3 with viral youtube science experiments. Previously I fail to make Mountain Dew glow green and successfully created a spouting diet coke geyser. Yesterday's experiment, and my Thing for ThingADay, was to try to recreate the handheld fireball* on this youtube video. The result? Success! Well, mostly. The fireball heats up and eventually gets hot enough to be very uncomfortable in your hands, but for the first 30 seconds or so you can definitely hold it in your hands. Or toss it between your hands like a hot potato. See my pictures tagged fireball or watch this roughly-edited video:
HandHeld Fireball Take 2 from bantic on Vimeo. I also put up an outtakes reel -- the first time I did this I set the camera too high and you never actually see the fireball, just my goofball reactions to burning my hands. If you're my friend and want to see it, I'll send you the password. * So now I've 1) gotten a tattoo and 2) made a hand-held fireball for ThingADay. Jenny's comment: "that site is dangerous for you."

Thing a Day overview

cory — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 01:17:57 +0000

I haven't been posting every day, but I've been doing things every day. On Wednesday the "thing" I made was a tattoo. On Saturday I took a picture of my sweet electric guitar. Today I made a hand-held fireball (following along with this youtube video). Friday I "made" Manu Ginobili of the Spurs sign a Knicks t-shirt. Photo of Ginobili forthcoming, and separate posts for the tattoo and fireball are also on their way. Yes I realize I'm pushing the envelope of Thing A Day pretty heavily right now.

outside.in switches to rails

cory — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 21:34:25 +0000

I wrote a post for outside.in's official blog a few weeks ago detailing some of the troubles and successes (mostly the latter) we encountered when switching over from PHP to Ruby on Rails last fall. It was kind of a herculean task for Christian and I, but has been well worth it so far. Looks like the post is getting a little traction in the railsy/nerdy community, showing up on 37 Signals' blog and on Y Combinator Hacker News. Neat fact: I have a picture of Jason Fried of 37signals holding up a cardboard sign saying "Go Chronic!" (That's the nickname for the coding team of Christian and Cory.)

Chili fixings

cory — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 04:17:24 +0000

100_2696.JPG, originally uploaded by bantic.

The Thing I made on Sunday was Pork Chili. This is a picture of the garlic, onions and jalapeÃ±os. The recipe is called Tierra Verde Chili, and contains no beans, which I have been told is the authentic way to make chili although I can find no evidence of this in a cursory search online.
Here's the Tierra Verde recipe in case you want to follow along yourself. It's quite good, and goes really well over a baked potato with some cheese.

2lbs pork loin, thin
2 cups water
2 tbsp olive oil
2 large onions chopped
4 large garlic cloves minced
4 large jalapenos, stemmed seeded and diced
4 4-oz cans green chilis, diced
1 14.5-oz can stewed tomatoes, mexican style
1 tbsp oregano
2 tsp ground cumin

pork in pan, cover with water, bring to boil, reduce heat, 
simmer until meat is thoroughly cooked through
separate meat and broth, put meat on a plate, 
put broth into a 2-cup measuring cup
skim fat from broth


heat olive oil in a pot, saute onions, garlic 
and jalapeÃ±os (cook veggies with olive oil)
add cubed pork, green chiles, broth,
stewed tomates (w/ their liquid) + the seasonings, 
pepper to taste, bring to boil, 
simmer 2 to 3 hours for mixture to thicken

Today's Thing is a picture of a Volcom tag. Volcom is my favorite brand.

orange balls (or: I'm doing thing a day)

cory — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 17:44:26 +0000

orange balls, originally uploaded by bantic.

Ok, I'm doing Thing A Day (http://www.thing-a-day.com/) this year!
I missed the official registration deadline, but that's not going to stop me. I'm setting the bar rather low by just planning on taking >= 1 photo per day. Here's a bowling shot I took last night. Click through for some more photos.

Public Art in St. Petersburg

cory — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 18:10:39 +0000

Ji, whom I collaborated with on the interactive version of the Bubble Project, and with whom I am currently working on another, unreleased project, was in Russia recently for a public art project. He has some interesting posts up on this Public Art Russia blog.