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Greasemonkey day1
I just got a G1 phone and I was playing around with google charts. Turns out they do QR bar codes. It turns out that the barcode scanner on my G1 reads the QR. So I made a greasemonkey script that adds the barcode to the bottom of every page. (After the body tag until I figure it out more) http://deathbyescalator.com/barcode.user.js I can now just view a site, scan it and bookmark it on my phone.

Db charsets in rails
In case you have set up your db with out utf8 support by default you can change it with active record.

tables = ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute("show tables;")
tables.each{|table|
 create_table = ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute("show create
table #{table};")
 unless create_table.fetch_hash["Create Table"].include?("CHARSET=utf8")
   ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute("ALTER TABLE #{table} CONVERT TO CHARAC... <a href="/main/index/db_charsets_in_rails">[ Read more ]</a>

Rpiratebay dead
Like the real site RPirateBay is dead

Sort or in ruby
I am reading the perl cookbook and they are talking about some fun ways to use sort. I like that they are describing sort_by. I read some where that the concept was coded and posted in perl long ago. I wish they had a sort_by wrapper for it. anyway. I was reading that you can use an or statement in perl so if the first two are even sort it by a second value. I never thought of this in ruby.

array = [{:name=>"zack",:age=>30},{:name=
... [ Read more ]

Palindromes
I was asked to check a file for palindromes. Here is the code I wrote.
# returns an array of matching palindromes in the file
# the words are grouped in arrays
# 
# [['god','dog'],['act','cat']]
#
def find_palindromes(file)
  if !file || !File.exist?(file) || !File.readable?(file)
    raise "Trouble with the file"
  end
  words = File.open(file,"r").read
  words = words.split(/\s/)
  words.uniq!

  palindrome = Hash.new(Arra
... [ Read more ]

On the move
I am working on a pure ruby bittorrent library. I want to use pirate bay and bittorrent to chart out how many people are downloading a file. Then I want to track a new movie and chart that against its box office/dvd sales. Depending on the movie I dont think I will see a correlation between files downloaded and box office sales. I do think that the release of the dvd will have an effect on the charts.

In other good news I think I will cha... [ Read more ]

How to cook four humans
Or How to Stall For Time Because the Site is Broken. I still have a nice fun bug where I only show this months stuff. Sure its no blogger but you know what? I built it. Other then that Duck Confit turned out well.

Bittorrent fun
I was looking around for a pure ruby bit torrent lib. I found rubytorrent but the ruby forge page was not working. I would like to use event machine to create a script to download torrent files in ruby. I have started by parsing torrent files.

After reading wiki pages, c and python code I wrote a class to decode the Bencoded files. The protocol website was down. The bencode breaks down to this. l means array, d means hash, #s means bi... [ Read more ]

More unfinshed works
A new year for new unfinished projects. For example this site. For some reason I made it get the last x in a month. So the first of the month needs a post.

Xmpp4r jabber bots
I have started work on a jabber bot using xmpp4r and eventmachine. Its not much of a bot yet. Its more of a queuing system. People can subscribe to different queues ran off the same bot. For example rubytalk@gmail.com us currently sending out the new links in delicious tagged with ruby or rails. Invite rubytalk@gmail.com to chat and type show queues. Then type join:#{queue name} EX join:ruby rss. You get a little welcome message letti... [ Read more ]