Binary Lottery 2008
This year at MountainWest RubyConf 2008 we had a slew of books and t-shirts to give away to attendees. Like last year we printed each attendee's unique number on their badge in base 2 (binary). We would then randomly select a winner from the attendee list. But we would use their binary number in the reveal, showing only one number at a time. It might be cheesy, but we really enjoy it so deal. :)
This is what the badges looked like:
Last year I wrote a command line app that used figlet to display the winner. You can see the video of last year's Lightning Talk where I show the code if you are interested. This year I wanted to mix it up a bit, and I decided about 10 hours before the conference to try my hand at using _why's Shoes to build a GUI version. So here it is:
1 require 'yaml'
2
3 # The source of much evil...
4 def update_digit(p, cnt, dig, wnr)
5 if cnt < dig
6 p.replace rand(2)
7 else
8 p.replace wnr[8 - dig].chr
9 p.style[:stroke] = red
10 end
11 end
12
13 # Use the full path because either Shoes is easily confused, or I am
14 users = YAML::load(open('/Users/blowmage/Lottery/users.yaml'))
15 winner = users[rand(users.size)] until (winner and winner[:eligible])
16 count = 0
17
18 Shoes.app :width => 900, :height => 700 do
19 keypress do |k|
20 count += 1
21 end
22 stack do
23 para "MountainWest RubyConf 2008 Binary Lottery\n",
24 "And your winner is...", :font => 'Helvetica 48px'
25 lbl_name = para '', :font => 'Helvetica 128px'
26 flow do
27 a = para rand(2), :font => 'Helvetica 192px'
28 b = para rand(2), :font => 'Helvetica 192px'
29 c = para rand(2), :font => 'Helvetica 192px'
30 d = para rand(2), :font => 'Helvetica 192px'
31 e = para rand(2), :font => 'Helvetica 192px'
32 f = para rand(2), :font => 'Helvetica 192px'
33 g = para rand(2), :font => 'Helvetica 192px'
34 h = para rand(2), :font => 'Helvetica 192px'
35
36 animate(60) do
37 update_digit(a, count, 8, winner[:number])
38 update_digit(b, count, 7, winner[:number])
39 update_digit(c, count, 6, winner[:number])
40 update_digit(d, count, 5, winner[:number])
41 update_digit(e, count, 4, winner[:number])
42 update_digit(f, count, 3, winner[:number])
43 update_digit(g, count, 2, winner[:number])
44 update_digit(h, count, 1, winner[:number])
45
46 if count >= 8
47 lbl_name.replace winner[:name]
48 end
49 if count > 8
50 # Click one more time to flag the user so they won't win again.
51 lbl_name.style[:stroke] = red
52 winner[:eligible] = false
53 open('/Users/blowmage/Lottery/users.yaml', 'w') do |out|
54 YAML.dump users, out
55 end
56 end
57 end
58 end
59 end
60 end
Here is a sample of what the users.yaml file looked like:
1 ---
2 - :number: "00000000"
3 :name: Jonathan Younger
4 :eligible: true
5 - :number: "00000001"
6 :name: Brian Cooke
7 :eligible: false
8 - :number: "00000010"
9 :name: Justin Kay
10 :eligible: false
Here is what the app looked like while running:
Logan Barnett also wrote a GUI using JRuby and MonkeyBars. I really hope he releases his version as well. Here is what the app looked like on the third draw, sort of an easter egg I discovered during the conference:
