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Hey, whoa, Aaron Patterson’s got a great hack! Check this out: he just put out a library called BetaBrite, for programming LED signs. Well, the kids on Ruby-Talk were like, “Except, we don’t have those signs.” So enterprising Aaron set up a webcam hooked to DRb and… seriously… you guessed it!

 require 'drb'
 require 'rubygems'
 require 'betabrite'
 DRb.start_service()
 obj = DRbObject.new(nil, 'druby://eviladmins.org:9000')
 File.open("out.jpg", 'wb') { |a|
 a.write obj.write_simple(";D thx aaron!")
 }

That’s can-do spirit, gents. My favorite angle on this: Aaron gets to sit there and watch everybody use his lib in realtime all day. Now I want a marquee for svn checkins.