Recently in Geek Stuff Category

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.

Definitely not safe for work (unless you have headphones and a low visible-angle display), but hilarious nonetheless. Phil Francis, this one’s for you bud!

The Website Is Down

Notice my nifty table of my public Picasa albums over there on the left sidebar. Pretty cool huh? So do I have to publish in Movable Type every time I add a new Picasa album? No, that would be silly.

Instead, I’m using some clever DHTML javascript to build an N-column table and populate it dynamically with a JSON call out to the Picasa web API.

Read on for instructions and code on how I built mine.

As you can see, the blog is back to a usable and pretty form. The new template engine in MT4 is very easy to use and the widgets and widget sets make customizations a snap. Notice the nifty Picasa gallery widget I built. It uses JSON to make an AJAX call to the Google API and then processes the results into a table which it renders in-line. I’ll try to write up how to do it later.

NOTICE: This weekend I’m going to do an upgrade to my blog.  It may be unavailable intermittently.

UPDATE: The upgrade to MT4 is done. Now I just need to re-prettify the templates. That should keep me off the streets for awhile… This weekend we are expecting snow, if you can believe it; so I’ll be cuddling up with a warm cuppa and my favorite web tools.