Musings of an aging computer nerd hitting 0x32
Citroen Deauville
Note: 8 of this post’s 12 links are now broken — mostly deleted or made-private Flickr photos, dead Flickr
farmNsubdomains, and defunct feed-syndication infrastructure. Left as originally published.
Spider monkey face
Note: 4 of this post’s 8 links are now broken — mostly deleted or made-private Flickr photos, dead Flickr
farmNsubdomains, and defunct feed-syndication infrastructure. Left as originally published.
Yellow Mongoose
Note: 4 of this post’s 8 links are now broken — mostly deleted or made-private Flickr photos, dead Flickr
farmNsubdomains, and defunct feed-syndication infrastructure. Left as originally published.
Lemur pick pocket
Note: 1 of this post’s 3 links is now broken — mostly deleted or made-private Flickr photos, dead Flickr
farmNsubdomains, 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.
Note: 3 of this post’s 10 links are now broken — mostly deleted or made-private Flickr photos, dead Flickr
farmNsubdomains, and defunct feed-syndication infrastructure. Left as originally published.
Alastair Montgomery’s Photography
Main Page My Shop at Zazzle DeviantArt Account Red Bubble Account
Spider monkey card
Note: 8 of this post’s 13 links are now broken — mostly deleted or made-private Flickr photos, dead Flickr
farmNsubdomains, and defunct feed-syndication infrastructure. Left as originally published.
Alastair Montgomery's Photography
Main Page My Shop at Zazzle DeviantArt Account Red Bubble Account
Problems running Firefox 5 from watir-webdriver on Mac OS 10.5
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
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.
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
Twitter from Ruby
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
Hand drawn fractal tree
Via Flickr:
Posted via email from Rankle's posterous
Doodled with waiting for my computer to unfreeze.









