Author Archives: blackrat

About blackrat

Paul McKibbin does not exist as either a human or a corporate entity.

Executing the Unix find command to determine real file types from ruby

Posted on July 20, 2009 by blackrat

I recently needed to make sure all my files were named according to their content rather than to an arbitrary extension that had been added to them. This resulted in extending the ruby FileUtils to use the Unix file command … Continue reading →

Posted in ruby | Leave a comment

Automatically creating . for Ruby Hashes

Posted on April 21, 2009 by blackrat

I recently had to so some testing of an in-memory OLE object, which also allowed persistance to an XML file. The structure of the two (in-memory and in-file) were similar enough for me to look at XMLSimple, which creates a … Continue reading →

Posted in ruby | Leave a comment

Enhancing Streamlined Enumerations

Posted on March 26, 2008 by blackrat

Recently, I’ve been looking at the Streamlined framework. For those of you who don’t know, Streamlined is an Ajaxified Scaffold currently under development. The edge version shows promise and is stable enough for my personal use as an administration tool. … Continue reading →

Posted in rails, ruby, rubyonrails, streamlined | Leave a comment

Realplayer streaming BBC to mp3 files

Posted on August 2, 2007 by blackrat

The BBC listen again facility allows you to play back audio broadcasts up to seven days after they originally air. That’s fine, unless you listen to most of your radio in the car, or away from your computer. OK. So … Continue reading →

Posted in PAR, PVR | Leave a comment

Rails IDE – Komodo 4.1

Posted on May 23, 2007 by blackrat

I’m a great believer in free software, most of my systems are run using Apache, MySQL, Linux, and Ruby, as I’m sure quite a lot of you are running also. I’m also a great believer in the right tool for … Continue reading →

Posted in rails, ruby, rubyonrails | 5 Comments