Drop of Will

rtasklib update: Ruby and external tools

It turns out that one of the reasons Ruby was popular before the advent of Rails was because it was so easy to integrate with 3rd party tools through subprocesses. In fact Ruby has at least 7 ways of executing processes either in the core or the standard libraries and many more user implemented varieties...

Review of: the Quantifying the Value of Open Source Hardware Development

He presents three different equations to evaluate the value of an open source hardware project and several ways to extrapolate into long term predictions. He then shows how to use these as a case study on open hardware, a syringe pump. In the end he predicted the value of the pump to be between 240k...

Mouse Rat: Technical explanation

Technical explanation for a wearable gesture based mouse glove. It used the Arduino Flora, the wearable LSM9DSO accelerometer, and MPR121 capacitive touch breakout, all from Adafruit.

Mouse Rat: Rethinking the mouse computer interface

Design exploration for a wearable gesture based mouse glove.

Review of: Market power and regulation

Regulation of public services produced by monopolies or oligopolies in a way that balances production, innovation, and performance is a really, really hard problem. Jean Tirole has spent most of his academic career studying the ways these power relationships interact generally and then exploring specific...

rtasklib update march 16th

Over the last couple of weeks the overall architecture has been in a state of flux as I have been swapping pieces in out to see what will work best. Now as I approach my original milestone for having this in a working condition things are starting to fall into place. Models for tasks and configuration...

task_time and rtasklib updates March 8th

Last week I talked about how all existing TaskWarrior wrappers were not going to satisfy the requirements for task_time, so I decided to roll my own Ruby wrapper rtasklib and started working on the JSON to domain object marshalling and vice versa. I realized that I was reinventing the wheel a bit...

Open Source Business Models and Implications

The GPL doesn’t actually care what enterprise companies do with the code internally, even if they make changes, distribution only counts if it happens outside of their immediate company. There are four major business models built around open source software: Support Sellers (e.g. give away the recipe...