Licks

XCode installer is stupid

ac — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 10:26:16 +0000

I was updating my XCode installation today, and got a prompt from the installer asking me to quit iTunes in order for the installer to be able to continue. Trouble was iTunes was not running! It turns out that what … Continue reading →

Post to WordPress with Ruby – update

ac — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 16:19:51 +0000

A while back I wrote a post on using ruby to post content to a WordPress blog. It has been getting a steady stream of traffic since it was posted, so it’s obvious that people are into that kinda thing. … Continue reading →

Simple yet efficient XML Sitemap generator for Rails Apps

ac — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 17:50:30 +0000

Google tells us that every website should have an XML sitemap attached to it, that gives Search Engines meaningful information about its content. The XML Sitemap specification is fairly straightforward and easy to implement, and there are a couple of … Continue reading →

Ruby capitalization for foreign people

ac — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 17:43:42 +0000

If you are building apps in an accented and/or non latin character language, you have probably bumped into the old ‘capitalization doesn’t work for my string’ spiel. The built-in Ruby String#capitalize method only works on latin strings, and will return the input … Continue reading →

Ruby web crawling with anemone

ac — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 13:25:41 +0000

I recently bumped into Anemone, a site-crawling gem written by Chris Kite. We at Humbucker have our own high-performance crawlers written in various languages and geared towards different objectives, but Chris’ solution definitely offers an easy to setup and use … Continue reading →

Rails Permalinks for Foreign People

ac — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 13:39:03 +0000

This world is latin-centric in many ways. Politics aside, I have come across a recurring problem as a developer, as I find myself using new technologies to build internationalized stuff. Every time I create a CMS in any framework, I … Continue reading →

Google Search API for Shopping

ac — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 16:07:30 +0000

Google has recently launched a new API for its merchant product data, that can be used publicly by developers, allowing them to search and retrieve product information (like those appearing in Google Product Search and Product Ads). Another interesting fact … Continue reading →

GeoIP 0.4.0

ac — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 19:49:28 +0000

Version 0.4.0 is now out, and it addresses an issue a colleague brought in while using the gem with Ruby 1.9.*. The problem was that certain characters that geoiplookup spat out were not valid utf-8 chars, and as you might … Continue reading →

GeoIP 0.3.7 update

ac — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 14:00:57 +0000

Version 0.3.7 is now out, and it addresses an issue a colleague encountered which trying to run the installer on an Amazon instance, that did not have sudo installed. The fix ensures that the installer works on systems where sudo … Continue reading →

GeoIP 0.3.4

ac — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 12:00:25 +0000

Version 0.3.4 is now out, including a minor fix pushed by leonid-shevtsov. The fix ensures that the installer works for people that use other means of installing GeoIP, such as debian or redhat packages. You ca view the source code … Continue reading →