AvantBlog

Today’s reason why I love Ruby: I had a text file and I wanted to take each line and use its content as a string to construct list items as HTML output. Here’s what I wrote:

File.open(“/Users/gabe/file.txt”).each { |line|   puts “\t<li>” + line.slice(0..-2) + “</li>”   #using slice to knock off the \n from the end of the line }

Ruby should take a hint from Staples and adopt a new motto: “That was easy.”

I just signed on to AIM today and saw:

[09:51] AOL System Msg: AIM added a new AIM Bots group to your Buddy List. [09:51] AOL System Msg: Send IMs to moviefone and shoppingbuddy for great holiday flicks and gift ideas. (To remove ‘em, just right-click and delete! Learn More)

Is this part of AOL’s attempt to improve their image, by giving me new buddies (albeit virtual ones)? I’m so thrilled.

I’ve always wanted to remap Firefox’s key combos for the next/previous tab commands (mostly because I like Safari’s key combos better). Finally, I figured out how:

1. Install the Keyconfig extension.
2. Go to Tools -> Keyconfig
3. Click ‘Add a new key’
4. In the top box, give your new key combo a friendly label, like ‘Prev Tab’ — In the bottom box, enter this: gBrowser.mTabContainer.advanceSelectedTab(-1);
5. Click OK
6. Click in in the bottom textbox and enter the key combo you’d like to use for ‘Prev Tab’
7. Click Apply
8. Repeat steps 3 through 7 for ‘Next Tab’ and use this for the bottom box in your definition for ‘Next Tab’: gBrowser.mTabContainer.advanceSelectedTab(1);

That’s it. It appears to work just fine, except that the key combos don’t seem to work on new (blank) tabs, but once you load a page in the tab, it works great.

So, it’s my first day back from vacation in LA, and I’ve already got a nerd tip to start your year off with a bang: Google SMS.

Google SMS (Short Message Service) enables you to easily get precise answers to specialized queries from your mobile phone or device. Send your query as a text message and get phone book listings, dictionary definitions, product prices and more. Just text. No links. No web pages. Simply the answers you’re looking to find.

There’s lots of query types, from business info to calculations to zip code lookups. So the next time you’re on the go and need the number for that resturant that you’d like to make dinner reservations at, or you’re wondering if $20 is a good price for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, or you don’t know what the word ‘peloria’ means, try Google SMS. Of course, read the instructions and examples so that you know what you’re doing. =-)

Quick PHP tip: If you have a string value that you need to test to see if it’s an integer (like $str = “69″), you’ve got to turn the string into an int by referencing it in a mathematical context somehow. The easiest way I can think to do this is to add zero to it. Then, you can use is_int() to check to see if it’s an integer. Here’s my sample code:

$string = "69";
echo strIsInt($string);

function strIsInt($str) {
     if(is_int($str + 0)) {
              return("TRUE");
     }
   else {
              return(0);
  }
}
// The above code will output "TRUE"

Pretty useful for validating variables in your query string that you expect to be integers (like for database queries, ya know).

See also: - PHP: Type Juggling - PHP: String conversion to numbers

Parts of the blogosphere have been buzzing about javascript text input autocompletion lately. Here’s a collection of links for my (and everyone’s) reference:

• Brian at Sweeting.net is offering $50 to iTMS or Amazon for the first person who can reproduce Gmail’s javascript autocompletion
• Sitepoint article on JS autocompletion
• Simon Wilson’s post about Sitepoint article, with comments
• Codeproject.com has a different autocomplete script
• Another Codeproject.com js autocomplete method and here’s a working demo of this code
• Inner Geek thoughts on js autocompletion
• Another dropdown-like autocomplete example (hosted here)

So I needed to build Ethereal from source on Windows XP. It wasn’t as easy as building from source on *nix or MacOS X, so I’ve compiled some info about how I did it, in case anyone else will find it useful.

Read more to see the steps that worked for me (and others). (more…)