Presence Display Mark II

I've been re-designing and re-implementing my arduino - ruby - skype - growl auditory display (see ICAD 2007 paper) and I've ended up starting almost from scratch on a lot of it. However, I've just about gotten a Rails-Skype display working as some form of RESTful Read-Only Resource service but I spent ages having serious fun with BackgrounDRb (see this intro) but it just wouldn't do what I wanted so I've ended up with a looping ruby program with some funny headers. This runs in tandem with a standard Rails app which is the more Restful bit.

require 'rubygems'
require 'rb-skypemac'
require 'rexml/document'
require 'active_record'
require 'YAML'
require 'appscript'
include Appscript

I never thought I'd been starting and querying Skype based on configuration data and then also using this to update a database! The code is still being debugged and cleaned up so once its finished I'll stick it online but at the moment, even after yesterday's head banging, Rails and Ruby are still the best full-stack framework for developing database-backed web applications that I've come across and has saved ages in development time. I used use vanilla PHP with some PEAR extensions but they are not half as sweet as Rails.

The first iteration of the second version looks a bit like this.