Thu, 20 Jan 2005
Check the Competition With project-name
While reading through Red Handed,
a Ruby blog, I stumbled on to an
entry about Akira Tanaka's
CVS repository.
If you like Ruby then it's well worth spending ten minutes having a look through his projects, while the code does what it's supposed to some of his little tools are real niche fillers; and project-name is an ideal example.
When run with a single argument project-name goes away and queries a number of different sites, it checks the availability of domain names that consist of the query string and a number of different .tlds, it polls SourceForge, Savannah, the Ruby Application Archive, Freshmeat (but only checking the string against existing projects short names, not the full names!) and does a google count of the term you're searching on. Ground breaking? Nah, useful? Heck yes.
Like this post? - Digg Me! | Add to del.icio.us! | reddit this!
Posted: 2005/01/20 21:57 | /tools/commandline | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Threat Warning One Liner
Any attempt at explaining why I wanted to do this will sound odd so for now
I'll just post the one liner...
perl -MLWP::Simple -e 'get("http://www.dhs.gov/") =~ /dhs-advisory-(\w+)\.gif/;print "Threat level is $1!\n";'
This gets the current threat level for the US and prints it to standard out.
Like this post? - Digg Me! | Add to del.icio.us! | reddit this!
Posted: 2005/01/20 21:30 | /perl | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Tada Lists -- A New Toy
I've just discovered Tada Lists (via Jim Weirich's
blog and I'm very impressed, while I've seen the Rails video and read
the hype it's only when i use an application like this, written in 579
lines of Ruby code that it becomes clear how powerful Rails is.
Tada Lists itself is a very neat site in both the technical and design stakes, it uses XMLHttpRequest (which seems to be very popular at the moment, thanks Google!) to interact dynamically with the host and cut out the submit, delay, refresh phases. It's UI is very polished (reorder a list and watch the element fade) and it provides both RSS feeds and the ability to Email yourself copies of the list. Add the ability to share public, shared write or shared read only lists and you've got most requirements covered.
Any down-sides? Well two and they are both small, firstly where's the source code! I want this on my laptop and I want to see how it actually works! I assume that we won't get the code due to the projects relationship with Basecamp but fingers crossed. Secondly the custom description doesn't display in the RSS feeds. However I can live with these if it means I get to use such a pleasant (and free) site!
Update: I managed to cause a small problem (I'm good at that :)) and I got a fix and an email telling me everything was fine with in a couple of hours; I'm impressed.
Like this post? - Digg Me! | Add to del.icio.us! | reddit this!
Posted: 2005/01/20 10:21 | /tools/online | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Copyright © 2000-2005 Dean Wilson
