Category Archives: Internet

Ruby On Rails and a Woolies Queue

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I’ve been spending some of my copious free time learning something new, Ruby On Rails. Before everyone gets excited and says “Oh no not another blog about RoR and how wonderful it is…” this is not one of those kinds of posts, in fact its got nothing to do with RoR actually.?

Anyway, I’ve been reading a lot about RoR and trying various things out with it to see what can be done, how easy it is and is it actually something that I should try learn. I’ve got a few crazy ideas for some “web-enabled” applications and am looking for an easy way to rapidly develop the applications.

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Invalid Last Name

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After Tuesday’s new MacBook announcement, I desperately wanted to find out when the new MacBook’s would be available in South Africa. I went to the official SA distributors website (http://www.core.co.za) and rummaged around trying to some kind of “contact us” email address. I finally decided, after not finding any other electronic contact method to use the feedback form. I filled in my details, wrote up a nice little message asking when the new MacBooks would be available and then clicked the “Submit” button and thats when the error message pop’d up. “Please Enter a valid lastname. A minimum of 6 characters are required” obviously this shook my world as I was suddenly being told that my lastname which I’ve had for 20something years is invalid… after some deep soul searching I decided I would change it to “Nunns.” and the feedback page accepted it. I do feel sorry for those people who’s names won’t be made valid by simply adding a character

Firefox 3.0 – Stop auto hiding the toolbars in full screen mode.

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I’m running Ubuntu 8.04 – Hardy Heron on my Asus EeePC 2G Surf with Firefox 3.0. The problem I have is that by default in Firefox 3.0 if you fullscreen Firefox (F11) it now auto hides the toolbar and address bar which gets a little annoying if you’re like me and have lots of tabs open or like using the address bar for things alot.

A bit of googling and I found the solution, which I’m writing down here in case I forget it. You need to go to the about:config page in Firefox and change browser.fullscreen.autohide to false. (Just double click it.)

Google Notebook API

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Anyone know if there is an API to access notes in Google Notebook ? I’ve been using the notebook alot lately, as I’m normally on one of 4 computers (sometimes 5) and its nice to have a central place to put all my notes about stuff or sites I want to visit etc.?

The other day though I came up with a crazy idea for a little application that I would love to link to Google Notebook (essentially I want to read & write notes) but I haven’t found an API for it yet. I guess I could perhaps reverse engineer the Firefox plugin ??

If anyone knows where to look… leave a comment.

EDIT: I was really stupid 🙁 Typed “Google Notebook API” into Google and I found this only problem is that the official API only allows reading of the public notebooks.?

Would it be possible to impersonate a user in a browser to read/write notes? Or is that just too complicated?

Google Chrome

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I’m jumping on the current big “band wagon” and going to review the new web browser on the block, Google Chrome. I’m a long time Firefox user, who’s tried Apple Safari and various other browsers over the years. On my Windows XP machine I mostly use Firefox 3.0 and Apple Safari.

Today I installed the new Google Chrome, after a friend said it was really cool.?

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A new way to stalk friends, family and ex-girlfriends.

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FacebookSo do you sit and Google friends and family to see if they’re still alive, arrested or done anything worth knowing about? (If you don’t… then neither do I and all this is a thought exercise.)

Well now from the socially enabled, Web 2.0 world comes the greatest tool since the creation of the web and Google in helping find lost friends and family that you can “web stalk”… Facebook.

Hello My Name is Dale and I’m a Facebook Addict. (mmh wonder if there is a group on Facebook for Facebook addicts….)

Every day starts and ends with me checking Facebook to see if I have any new friends, who’s poked who and who uploaded what. I haven’t gotten to the point that I update my status every five minutes… yet. But I am running out of people to search for and add to my friends list. So if you know me, met me, or like me… and are single and female 🙂 add me to your friends list.

Google add’s face recognition

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Rachael Leigh CookIf you spend alot of time online you’ve probably read about this…

Google has added face reognition to Image Search. It’s not officially available yet but you can enable it with a change to to the search url.

What exactly does it do? If you do a search for say Rachael Leigh Cook you’ll see that you don’t only get pictures of people but other odd pictures too, but if you do the search again with the modified url you’ll see that you only get pictures of faces, and the pictures are mostly of her, that s pretty awesome. You can tell it worked because the number of items found have substanously decreased from 24,200 to 3,130.

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LOL Cats

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LOL CatIf you’ve spent any time online lately you’ve probably noticed or seen something about LOL Cat’s. (Wikipedia Entry) Last night I found an awesome site with tons of pictures…

So if you’re mad about cats (and a few rabbits, hamsters, mice, dogs and other furry things.) its an awesome waste of time. Go to:

I Can Has Cheezburger?

K2 & WordPress 2.2

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If you’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.2 and use the latest K2 theme you’ve probably noticed some oddities. On stuff.za.net only the header loaded, a temporary fix was go back to an older version of the K2 theme.

After a quick search I found the cause of the problem, its the Sidebar widgets. Turns out that the code that K2 use for the sidebar widgets and a new feature in WordPress 2.2 are slightly incompatible and this ends up breaking everything. But as usual someone else has got a fix, just took me a few minutes to find and apply.

You need to download and install this plugin which when activated disables K2’s widgets. As usual let me know if things appear broken or don’t work properly.