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Lemur pick pocket

Note: 1 of this post’s 3 links is now broken — mostly deleted or made-private Flickr photos, dead Flickr farmN subdomains, and defunct feed-syndication infrastructure. Left as originally published.

Lemur pick pocket
Originally uploaded by Alastair Montgomery

Via Flickr:
Lemur pick pocket at North Yorkshire Wildlife Park.

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Note: 3 of this post’s 10 links are now broken — mostly deleted or made-private Flickr photos, dead Flickr farmN subdomains, and defunct feed-syndication infrastructure. Left as originally published.

Alastair Montgomery’s Photography

Main Page My Shop at Zazzle DeviantArt Account Red Bubble Account

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Spider monkey card

Note: 8 of this post’s 13 links are now broken — mostly deleted or made-private Flickr photos, dead Flickr farmN subdomains, and defunct feed-syndication infrastructure. Left as originally published.

Spider Monkey by doodle_m
make your own greeting card on zazzle

Spider monkey by doodle_m
Shop for another postcard design from Zazzle

Alastair Montgomery's Photography

Main Page My Shop at Zazzle DeviantArt Account Red Bubble Account

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Problems running Firefox 5 from watir-webdriver on Mac OS 10.5

Finally decided it was time to update my watir-webdriver development environment to the latest version of Firefox. I have been happily using Firefox 3.6.19 on my 64bit Intel Mac 10.5 and yesterday made the jump to Firefox 5.

To my horror there is a bug in Firefox 4 and 5 which causes problems when attempting to start Firefox from the command line (basically what watir-webdriver does).

Thankfully with the help of Jarib Bakken I was able to use the workaround detailed on this blog post.

The work around is to strip the x86_64 part from firefox-bin using ditto:

cd /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS
mv firefox-bin firefox-bin.original
ditto --arch i386 firefox-bin.original firefox-bin

This will solve the problem until we can upgrade to a later version of Mac Os.

Doodle's Geek Monkey by Alastair Montgomery

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Ruby and RSS

Note: 1 of this post’s 4 links are now broken — mostly dead 2008–2013 feed-syndication infrastructure (FeedBurner, Gawker, AOL’s old blog network, Pheedo, Yahoo Pipes). Left as originally published.

Started looking into access RSS from Ruby discovered it pretty much already built in as described in this article Consuming RSS Feeds with Ruby, full docs are available in the Ruby Standard Library.

Accessing an RSS Feed is as simple as the following code snippet.

require "rss"
rss_feed = "http://meekgonkey.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss"
rss_content = ""
open(rss_feed) { |f|
rss_content = f.read
}
puts "Bytes read #{rss_content.length} from feed"
rss = RSS::Parser.parse(rss_content,false)
puts "Title: #{rss.channel.title}"
puts "RSS URL: #{rss.channel.link}"
puts "Total entries: #{rss.items.size}"
rss.items.each { |item|
puts item.title
puts item.link
puts item.date
puts "---"
}

Which when run produces something along the lines of;
Bytes read 115009 from feed
Title: Geek Monkey
RSS URL: http://meekgonkey.blogspot.com/
Total entries: 25
Twitter from Ruby
http://meekgonkey.blogspot.com/2011/07/twitter-from-ruby.html
Thu, 21 Jul 2011 13:20:00 +0100
---
Github
http://meekgonkey.blogspot.com/2011/07/github.html
Mon, 18 Jul 2011 13:59:00 +0100
---
Google Plus
http://meekgonkey.blogspot.com/2011/07/google-plus.html
Fri, 01 Jul 2011 10:50:00 +0100
---
WATIR makes a tester's life easier.
http://meekgonkey.blogspot.com/2011/06/watir-makes-testers-life-easier.html
Wed, 29 Jun 2011 14:36:00 +0100
---
Setting browser size and position with watir-webdriver
http://meekgonkey.blogspot.com/2011/06/setting-browser-size-and-position-with.html
Thu, 23 Jun 2011 09:22:00 +0100
---

Doodle's Geek Monkey by Alastair Montgomery

Articles

Twitter from Ruby

Just been looking at Ruby Twitter gem by John Nunemaker during my lunch break.
Looking good so far, got my Twitter Dev key setup and have made a test post from a Ruby script.

1. Tweeting from Ruby
2......
3. Profit!!!

Doodle's Geek Monkey by Alastair Montgomery

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Hand drawn fractal tree

Hand drawn fractal tree, originally uploaded by Alastair Montgomery.

Via Flickr:
Posted via email from Rankle's posterous

Doodled with waiting for my computer to unfreeze.

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Github

Finally got round to uploading some of my stuff to the GitHub site.
If you want a laugh have a look at my code alastairhm@github ;)

Doodle’s Geek Monkey by Alastair Montgomery

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US Army Jeep Detail

Note: 5 of this post’s 6 links are now broken — mostly deleted or made-private Flickr photos, dead Flickr farmN subdomains, and defunct feed-syndication infrastructure. Left as originally published.

Via Flickr:
US Army Jeep detail, taken at the Wath Street Fair 2011

Available as a post card.

US Army Jeep by doodle_m
Shop for another postcard design from Zazzle

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Studley Royal, Near Ripon

Note: 12 of this post’s 22 links are now broken — mostly deleted or made-private Flickr photos, dead Flickr farmN subdomains, and defunct feed-syndication infrastructure. Left as originally published.

A few photographs from a recent dog walk round Studley Royal near Ripon.