On And Off The Rails

How not to return your hire car!!!

Jul 182008

So just got back from a great 2 weeks in California, went to Foo camp, Social Media Camp, Mashable and a couple of other meetups – all excellent. One slight hiccup with the hire car…….. I claim it was the taxi’s fault (of course), although its a bit of a blur to be honest.

On the up side I can highly recommend Enterprise (and taking out the full coverage), they were very helpful and polite. Even offered me a new car – which would of seemed like a better idea if I could move properly!! At least no one was badly hurt.

July 18, 2008
Posted by Scott at 8:22 am
3 Responses
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TweetLists Comedy

Jun 222008

So, couple of pretty funny links creeping up the popular chart over at TweetLists

1) Yahoo Resigner (by Mat Honan)

2) Instant Rim Shot (by Scott Carver)

June 22, 2008
Posted by Scott at 2:52 pm
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Goosh

Jun 212008

One of the top links that came from Tweetlists over the past couple of weeks is Goosh, an online google shell. Its great, well worth checking out. I really like the “translate” mode.

June 21, 2008
Posted by Scott at 10:10 pm
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FCKeditor Plugin 0.5.1 Released

Jun 212008

Thanks to George Chatzigeorgiou there is now a version of the FCKeditor plugin that works with Rails 2.1. I have put the packages on Ruby Forge and updated the repository. If you are interested as to what the issue was check out George’s comments on the previous post.

June 21, 2008
Posted by Scott at 10:04 pm
31 Responses
FCKeditor, Home

Wordle

Jun 192008

My Delicious tag cloud from Wordle very cool

June 19, 2008
Posted by Scott at 3:55 pm
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FCKeditor Plugin 0.5.0

Jun 042008

I created a new release for the fckeditor plugin today. It upgrades the version of the editor to the lastest 2.6 and also fixes the SanitizeHelper include issue which was causing problems with the spell check.

Other than that, little has changed. I think it is all still working ok, although I have only had time to complete a cursory check on the editor’s functionality.

The plugin is available from Ruby Forge or by doing this:

ruby script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org//var/svn/fckeditorp/trunk/fckeditor

June 4, 2008
Posted by Scott at 4:53 pm
20 Responses
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Twitter API: User IDs

May 292008

So, next lesson from TweetLists: the user id given in the xml from the public timeline is not a unique identifier. The screen name is the only way to identify a user. I ended up with 17 different ids for one user!!! Hence, gave up fixed it and dropped the database – too much effort to fix when its only been running for 12 hours.

May 29, 2008
Posted by Scott at 3:31 pm
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TweetLists

May 292008

I released TweetLists last night, well actually this morning (about 3am), the idea being to try and capture a little of the zeitgeist on Twitter by aggregating the links people are talking about. At the moment there are 3 lists, the live feed, a popular feed (the links ordered by the number of times they appeared) and one I have chosen to call Twitterati (quite proud of that!) which is the links ordered by the number of followers people have.

At the moment there is no time aspect to the Twitterati or Popular lists (not relevant on the live one) but I guess I will make them for the last 7 days?

Lesson one form this has been: don’t try and be clever with your scheduling – cron just works. I tried to use the Rufus Scheduler and it had stopped running by the time I got up again this morning.

Anyhoo, I’ve found it to be fun and interesting so far, any ideas for other lists?

May 29, 2008
Posted by Scott at 9:13 am
4 Responses
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Plugin of the Day – GemsOnRails

May 272008

So this plugin by Dr Nik Williams (no link available) does this:

Link or freeze RubyGems into your rails apps, instead of just plugins. This allows you to ‘vendor everything’ – pushing all dependent gems into your rails app thus ensuring your application will be guaranteed to work when deployed. Your application is no longer dependent on the gems that are/aren’t available on your target deployment environment.

I found this very useful, mainly because for some gems I want to see and maybe play with the code, usual I just copy the gem to lib. This provides a simple way of bringing in only one gem. I know there are features in 2.1 that deal with gem dependencies and do some cool stuff, but from what I know (from Ryan Bates) I don’t think they provide this particular functionality.

Its available on RubyForge. Or just by using the “sudo gem install gemsonrails” command.