Confession of a arduino newbie

So one of the side effect of hanging around with hackerspacekl too much is, one begin to develop feeling toward hacking hardware... Which in one of my post shows their project creating their own arduino severino.

I got myself freeduino thanks to Kakeman, our resident hardware guru in hackerspacekl. It is not the latest, but it is good enough. After following the tutorial, I begin to feel to blink a LED, which built into the board
link.



Then I play around with the serial library,
link


In the end of the day it is fun, much before I continue, I need to find time to get a breadboard and more components, like LED,transistors, resistors etc, to make more stuff. Think i am going to play with this for a long time to come

Software Freedom Day KL status

It is a while since I actually started Software Freedom Day in KL. Since I am like swarmed with job. So finally get a few thing done
A bit of a status report for Software Freedom Day KL 2010

What we have:

• 17 attendee registered
• A space, in hackerspacekl
• A switch for the LAN party
• A site at https://sites.google.com/site/sfdkl2010/
• And aircond(ok...hackerspacekl have it for sometime)

What we don't have,

• Speakers, for the sessions
• Helpers to help, not that the event need many people

So what next, if we have speaker, we just continue as planned, else, we might reschedule the whole thing it depends on how.

Doing ajax with django models serialization: jquery part

We have finished(somewhat) with our json source, now we can do ajax. With the help of jquery, we can use the data source to create something interactive. One of the key ingredient is the jquery ajax function, there is a few such as, $.post, $.get, $.getJSON etc. Here I use $.getJSON, because

Lets start with load data to a table from a json source last post. 

Loading data into table alone is not that exciting, and you can do that using django templates, but this shows a example of loading data using json

You can get the example project here
http://github.com/sweemeng/Sweemeng-django-example/tree/master/djangoajax/

Software Freedom Day @ KL

Another year, another Software Freedom Day

I have registered a team for sfdkl, and the page is at https://sites.google.com/site/sfdkl2010/

It will be held on 19 Sept 2010, a Sunday, at hackerspacekl

And with the help of hackerspacekl, i borrowed the space for software freedom day. Which is cool, because there is a few place to eat there.

What we plan to do

1. Have a gathering of foss geeks on the day itself, 
2. Someone will give a talk on the day itself
3. Frag fest aka Lan party of foss game, in the end of the day, this is the only event that is confirmed
4. t will also be held with a unix-g33kz session which  is part of hackerspacekl own project, while this is payed project, the rest of the event is not

What we need now, speaker, well attendee. And last but not least, participant for our Frag Fest(we even got a switch ready),
you can register on the google site page, add your talk there as well.
https://sites.google.com/site/sfdkl2010/

Doing ajax with django models serialization: json part

Finally a technical post after a long while, here goes

On my new job, the site requires a crazy level of interactivity, probably for the wrong reason, but lets not go there now.

Along the way, we decide to use a mix of javascript, and html, with a help of json. Thats is where, django serialization comes in. What it does is, it serialize a django queryset into xml or json. If i need to use that to generate json for django queryset, because simplejson cannot do it, not directly.

To output a queryset to json is pretty easy.


from django.core import serializers
data = serializers.serialize('json', queryset)


where queryset your djangoqueryset


in a sample database, in a called addressbook





to play around with the django shell, assume that data already there


>>> from django.core import serializers
>>> from addressbook.models import Contact
>>> serializers.serialize('json', Contact.objects.all())
[{"pk": 1, "model": "addressbook.contacts", "fields": {"phone": "012345678", "post_code": "68100", "name": "sweemeng", "address": "somewhere in selayang"}}]


To make it useful for my purpose to use in a javascript, i need to put this into a views, point your urls.py to the views, and run the server, and point your browser to it, you should able to see a json output





But here is the catch, one, this is strictly only for serializing django queryset, you can still use simplejson for other type of data. two it seems that django serializer don't serialize a single model instance.


Next post, using it with a jquery

more information on django serialization

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/serialization/