Great movie – O Kadhal Kanman

Great movie – O Kadhal Kanman
Watched a movie, O Kadhal Kanman, enjoying its music, love story, gaming and arts.

Hello world on HomeKit

I just setup a HomeKit apps on my home, using Apple Siri to control my television.

First, need a smart home device, for example Sony Bravia TV which connected to a home WIFI. Second, requires a HomeKit Server talking HomeKit Protocol. This server will interact with other smart home device registered as accessories. Third, requires a HomeKit client installed on mobile, which talking to HomeKit Server, adding any accessories available from HomeKit server. In usual setup, HomeKit server can installed on Raspberry PI, but I don’t have, use my Mac to host it.

The following procedures will help to setup.

1) Get a Mac with Node JS installed. Get a Apple licensed developer program.

2) Download a HomeKit Demo Swift based project, run it on your mobile. Download at https://github.com/KhaosT/HomeKit-Demo.

3) Download a HomeKit Server, I am homebridge. It is a Node.JS based server. Download at https://github.com/nfarina/homebridge.

4) Download Bravia Controlled library which is also Node.JS based. Download at https://github.com/alanreid/bravia.

5) Follow instruction on how to control Bravia TV by using the library. And then, you may build a HTTP based interface around the Bravia library. And then, you may program HomeKit server apps, add a new accessories, and then send the command requests to Bravia Server via HTTP (Turn on/off TV). The last part is much more tricky, to setup HomeKit client talks to HomeKit server.

6) Important note, once you had HomeKit client installed, navigate to one of accessories, look for the service name, this is the name Siri will look and map into. Name it as “television”, or some fancy name, which you will tell Siri to look for and do the action.

7) After that, if everything goes well, you can turn on your Siri, and say “Siri, turn on television”. Then your television magically turned on. Enjoy.

The Great Movie: Fast & Furious 7

Fast & Furious 7
The great movie, for Paul

I watched the movie initially on 2 April, and I knew it was crazy as I had the second round on 8 April. This is mark the first movie in Cinema I watched twice.

The problems on installing node-ffi on Mac

I am installing NativeScript on my local Mac and requiring install node-ffi.

I am facing problem as could not recognize libtool -static during installation of node-ffi.

I found out that I had two version of libtool installed, one is for GNU libtool installed via brew install libtool (required by ARDrone3 SDK), and then another one in XCode developer tool. So I had to find way to switch into XCode developer tool.

On my Mac, I had to unlink or remove /usr/bin/libtool and /usr/local/bin/libtool, and then build symlink again as

ln -s /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/bin/libtool /usr/bin/libtool

Then rerun npm install -g ffi, finally, it succeeds.

This is the error screen.

This is the success screen.

This issue takes me 4 hours of findings, googling, uninstall / reinstall libtool, node-gyp and finally found the root cause. I even tried to install it in Cloud9, but found that Cloud9 is a Ubuntu and not Mac, so the installation result do not have Mac built binaries, so cannot just copy the result from Cloud9 to my Mac. Everything must be built well on the Mac.