I went to download a file and saw the following estimated download times:
Although, DSL and Cable providers have been adding higher speeds to their offerings, isn’t it time to lump them together into ‘broadband.’
My DSL is not that slow
Can we ditch the Fax Machine yet?
I recently needed to fax a document to Apple regarding the iPhone. Here is the comment I added to the fax cover page:
You requested information to be sent via an obsolete technology. Although a fax machine may look nice next to your mom’s 8-track collection, you really should consider using technologies that were developed after the mid-1970’s. Just a thought.
Realtime Log Visualization
Erlend Simonsen put out a program called gltail that creates a graphical representation of your log files.
I saw this a long time ago, but last night I finally started playing with it. It works quite well. I needed to make a small change to support an SSH gateway which you can get here: http://github.com/dshimy/gltail. On OS X, getting started was simple:
$ git clone git://github.com/dshimy/gltail.git $ sudo gem install ruby-opengl file-tail
If you want the dots to bump each other, you need to install the Chipmunk physics library:
$ cd vendor/Chipmunk-4.1.0/ruby $ ruby extconf.rb $ sudo make install
Beyond that, tweak the configuration file and enjoy.
New Twitter Account
So as I mentioned earlier, I no longer show up in Twitter results. I tried to get it fixed, but it’s not worth my time anymore. I created another Twitter account with the same username. The old account was renamed. So if you were remotely interested in the minutia of what I was doing, you will need to re-follow me.
I am still not in the results, but I heard it might take a while for new accounts to find their way.
Update: I’ve made it to search!
I’m Banned from Twitter Search
Being in the Social Media Monitoring space, I often need to test certain functionality with Twitter Search. For my account, this is very difficult. For some reason, none of my tweets ever show up in Twitter Search. Have I been blacklisted? I know twitter search doesn’t access all tweets, but I figured it would have seen one of mine.
Well, I am not alone. Twitter has a help desk article on the subject here. I tried to create a ticket, but it looks like they were hiding the link. No worries, Rails apps have easy to guess URLS, http://help.twitter.com/requests/new.
Submitted a ticket, we’ll see if anything comes from it.
pubsubhubbub Support
Just added support for pubsubhubbub with a WordPress Plugin. Interested to see if my posts will appear in Google Reader any faster. Probably not, but it can’t get much slower. Which hubs are you using?
ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit
This Thursday I’ll be at the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit in Mountain View, CA. If anyone else is planning on attending, let me know.
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SQL Logging to script/console
When running a Rails console session, a true time saver is directing the ActiveRecord logs to STDOUT instead of the log file. This is easily accomplished adding the following to your ~/.irbrc file:
if rails_env = ENV['RAILS_ENV'] # Called after the irb session is initialized and Rails has # been loaded (props: Mike Clark). IRB.conf[:IRB_RC] = Proc.new do ActiveRecord::Base.logger = Logger.new(STDOUT) ActiveRecord::Base.instance_eval { alias :[] :find } end end
If someone knows the original author of these lines, let me know and I’ll give them proper attribution.
Error Handling with XML and Authlogic
I was helping a friend integrate an API into the application. He is running Rails 2.3.4 with Authlogic. His authentication check method was the following:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 | def require_user unless current_user session[:return_to] = request.request_uri flash[:notice] = "You must be logged in to access this page" redirect_to new_user_session_url return false end end |
Although this worked great for the HTML requests, the XML requests were getting HTML response with a redirect to the login page. Not what we were looking for. Instead, the require_user method needed to be aware of the mime-type and return an appropriate response.
Here is the block that responds to the mime-type. Instead of getting an HTML response to an XML request, an XML error reponse with the correct HTTP status code is returned.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 | def require_user unless current_user respond_to do |format| format.html { session[:return_to] = request.request_uri flash[:notice] = "You must be logged in to access this page" redirect_to new_user_session_url } format.xml { user = User.new user.errors.add_to_base("Authentication is required.") render :xml => user.errors, :status => 401 } end return false end end |
Hex Color Picker
One thing missing from the color picker in OS X is the ability to see the hex code for a color. An absolute must for web development. Luckily, there is a handy extension to add a pane to the color picker to view the hex code.
