http://blog.jayamster.com keeping things simple (hopefully) Fri, 19 Feb 2010 20:03:04 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Had some issues installing Nokogiri this morning on my slicehost account running Ubuntu (Hardy 8.04). Every time I tried installing the gem, I would get this : sudo gem install nokogiri Building native extensions. This could take a while... ERROR: Error installing nokogiri: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension. /usr/bin/ruby1.8 extconf.rb ... http://blog.jayamster.com/issues-installing-nokogiri/2009/02/14/ [gist id="64128"] http://blog.jayamster.com/a-little-snippit-to-tell-if-its-unix-time-1234567890/2009/02/13/ Some scraping code I did for fun last night. I used Nokogiri and Ruby to scrape this site for the names and photos. Take a look at the code if you want to mess around with it. I wrote this is code b/c I didn't want to click ... http://blog.jayamster.com/top-100-greatest-movie-characters-scraped/2008/12/16/ I recently needed to divide a signup form into to 2 separate pages in order to neatly organize the flow. I went through a bunch of different techniques before I came up with a solution I was happy with. Below I outline each of those techniques. My initial thought ... http://blog.jayamster.com/handling-a-multi-page-signup-form-in-rails/2008/09/23/ When trying to start out with using scRubyt, I started immediately got slammed by a stupid gem dependency error. This happened to me a few times a while back and I forgot how to fix it. I remember one time I had to uninstall a particular gem version ... http://blog.jayamster.com/scrubyt-and-the-stupid-rubyinline-gem-error/2008/08/22/ Yesterday I stumbled across one of the most moving lectures I've ever seen. Randy Pausch, a professor of Computer Science at Caregie Mellon, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and was told he only had 3 to 6 months to live. This lecture follows that diagnosis. I would be doing ... http://blog.jayamster.com/really-achieving-your-childhood-dreams/2008/05/22/ Finally after a few months of nonstop, round-the-clock coding we've relaunched BeenVerified. Check out the BeenVerified Blog for details. Oh, and check out the new look and feel of BeenVerified as well... http://blog.jayamster.com/weve-relaunched-beenverified/2008/04/23/ Browsing around Facebook and LinkedIn today I noticed that there are some people that just have way too many friends. How many people can you possibly be friends with... for real? And then a funny thought came to my mind: "The more friends you have within online social ... http://blog.jayamster.com/the-law-of-inverse-online-friends/2008/01/10/ This was a good post in getting GMail set up in Rails. But if you follow it exactly you'll run into a a hiccup if you're running Rails 2.0. Rails 2.0 has depricated the ActionMailer::Base.server_settings= function and opted for the more aptly named smtp_settings. So just use this for ... http://blog.jayamster.com/using-gmail-in-rails-20/2007/12/15/ Needed something to generate random numeric strings that were 9 characters long [sourcecode language='ruby'] def random_numeric_string length = 1000000000 (rand(length)+(length)).to_s[1..9] end[/sourcecode] If anyone has a better way, please let me know. http://blog.jayamster.com/random-numeric-string-of-a-specific-length-in-ruby/2007/12/15/