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• App for family tech support tracking?

  - by slothbear

  I do tech support for several groups within my family. They usually have a document or notebook of questions for me. They often record my advice, but then ask me again later. Some communications are by email (nice record for me, although they never think to search). Some sessions are in person, usually with a followup email from me for the record. Which they forget about. I'm not trying to force them to be more 'professional', but I would like to streamline my support a bit, and give them a place to look for past answers. Some of them would like a standard place like that, rather than reasking me the same questions. The solution has to be free. And web-based, although email-in for questions would be great. I'll be doing most (all?) updating of the system. Mobile/iPhone access would be nice, but not required. Ideally, a system with topics and responses would be good, but I'd need a way to promote one response as 'the answer'.

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• Utilities for finding x/y screen coordinates

  - by slothbear

  I have an application that needs the user to enter the x and y location of a couple of items on the screen. [Yes, this is crap and I'll replace it, but for now...] On Mac OS X, I'm using Snapz Pro X. When I choose to take a snap of a selection, the interface displays the mouse cursor location. This is OK for my personal use, but I can't ask users to buy a $69 program for this function. I thought I had a solution with the built-in program "Grab", but it reports the coordinates from the bottom left, and I need it from the top left. I don't have access to Windows; not sure what to use there. I've not even been able to come up with good search terms since mouse and coordinates and x/y are so common. Ideas are welcome there. Extra credit: same x/y finder for Linux. A Java program would be OK too, since the main application is in Java.

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• Represent multiple Null/Generic objects in an ActiveRecord association?

  - by slothbear

  I have a Casefile model that belongs_to a Doctor. In additional to all the "real" doctors, there are several generic Doctors: "self-treated", "not specified", and "removed" (it used to have a real doctor, but no longer does). I suspect there will be even more generic values in the future. I started with special "doctors" in the database, generated from seed. The generic Doctors only need to respond to the "name" and "real_doctor?" methods. This worked with one, was strained with two, and now feels completely broken. I want to change the behavior and can't figure out how to test it, a bad sign. Creating all the generic objects for testing is also trouble, including fake values to pass validation of the required Doctor attributes. The Null Object pattern works well for one generic object. The "name" method could check casefile.doctor.nil? and return "self-treated", as demonstrated by Craig Ambrose. What pattern should I use when there are multiple generic objects with very limited state?

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• architecture and tools for a remote control application?

  - by slothbear

  I'm working on the design of a remote control application. From my iPhone or a web browser, I'll send a few commands. Soon my home computer will perform the commands and send back results. I know there are remote desktop apps, but I want something programmable, something simpler, and something that I wrote. My current direction is to use Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) as the message bus. The iPhone places some messages in a queue. My local Java/JRuby program notices the messages on the queue, performs the work and sends back status via a different queue. This will be a very low-volume application. At $1.00 for a million requests (plus a handful of data transfer charges), Amazon SQS looks a lot more affordable than having my own server of any type. And super reliable, that's important for me too. Are there better/standard toolkits or architectures for this kind of remote control? Cost is not a big issue, but I prefer the tons I learn by doing it myself. I'm moderately concerned about security, but doubt it will be a problem. The list of commands recognized will be very short, and only recognized in specific contexts. No "erase hard drive" stuff. update: I'll probably distribute these programs to some other people who want the same function, but who don't have Amazon SQS accounts. For now, they'll use anonymous access to my queues, with random 80-character queue names.

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• Running a Ruby interpreter on iPad

  - by slothbear

  I'll be taking a trip soon with my iPad, without my laptop. I'd like to continue to tinker with Ruby while I'm on the road. I have an iPhone developer program membership, and I'm not interested in submitting this stuff to the app store. I found the shinycocos project, which appears to embed a Ruby interpreter in an app. But I can't get it to run, and it seems pretty customized for running cocos2d stuff. My first goal is to run an interactive command line like Try Ruby!. After that, I'd like to enter small programs in a UITextView and run them. I'd appreciate any clues, tips, or existing projects you might know of.

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