» Ruby, The Geek Enabler

Jakki and I are both waiting with bated breath for the results of her nursing boards. As a Geek, I grew weary of manually refreshing the Dept. of Health website. Enter Ruby. Without Rails, Ruby is still a fantastically useful scripting language. In about thirty minutes, I was able to write a script that grabbed the DOH page, parsed it with a handy rubygem called hpricot, checked to see if the status has changed, and if not, it goes to sleep for 5 minutes. When the the status does change, the script will launch FireFox and browse to the page. Maybe I’ll make it send me an email or a text-message too. Right now it’s a whopping seven lines of code.