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GEICO Music

I hate to admit it, but GEICO commercials have a pretty good track record for featuring good pop music. Whether it's 3 Doors Down, Royksopp, or The Sounds, the songs in GEICO's ads are usually pretty good.

The latest that I like is "Somebody's Watching Me" by Mysto & Pizzi. This song is featured in the ridiculous "Kash" commercials. You can download it for free. While you're there, check out the "making of" video. It's surprisingly entertaining.

I don't like the commercials, and I'm not about to switch insurance providers, but, in general, if you hear a song in a GEICO spot, you can probably add it to your library with no regrets.

Spotlight does Math

I just discovered that Leopard's Spotlight does math. Try it. Bring up spotlight with ⌘+space. Then start typing something like
7pi*8.3 or
sqrt(2)
and the answer is the first search result.

This isn't quite a powerful as the Google calculator. It doesn't appear to do base conversion, and it doesn't let you copy the result for pasting into an application, but it seems handy nonetheless.

Mac OS X handy bash aliases

Here are a few handy aliases that I keep in my .bashrc in OS X:

alias cppwd='eval "echo `pwd` | tr -d \\\\n | pbcopy"'

This copies my current working directory to the OS X pasteboard so I can Cmd+V it into another terminal. Often I want several terminals open in the same directory at once.

alias burn='drutil burn -noverify'

This one lets me type

burn mydisc.iso

to burn an ISO disc image to CD or DVD without having to open Disk Utility.
And a variation:

alias vburn='drutil burn'

This does the same as the other but also does the disc verification step.

A Gun for the Time Hole

An ordinary AK-47 Kalashnikov automatic rifle would not be allowed through the time hole. One made of bacon, however, is an ideal candidate for the time-traveling freedom fighter.

FiOS at Work

Finally.

Handling HTTP Redirection in Ruby

I have a Ruby project where I'm dumping a bunch of bookmarks from delicious.com, then fetching each bookmarked page for analysis.

One of the problems I encountered early on is that the some of the web pages bookmarked would redirect to some other location. Simply checking for HTTP response code 200 was insufficient. I needed to check for redirection as well.

A quick Google search for "ruby follow http redirect" yields lots of results. Unfortunately, they're all very similar, and not quite right. In general, the examples you come across (even the one in the official Ruby documentation) don't handle the case when the redirected location is path relative to the original location. So you end up doing a get on a URL that looks like "../../redirected/location/index.html," which clearly won't work.

It turns out that detecting relative redirection is fairly straightforward:

 until( found || attempts>=@@MAX_ATTEMPTS)
     attempts+=1
     http=Net::HTTP.new(url.host,url.port)
     http.open_timeout = 10
     http.read_timeout = 10
     path=url.path
     path="/" if path==""

     req=Net::HTTP::Get.new(path,{'User-Agent'=>@@AGENT})
     if url.instance_of? URI::HTTPS
       http.use_ssl=true
       http.verify_mode = OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_NONE
     end
     resp=http.request(req)
     if resp.code=="200"
       break
     end
     if (resp.header['location']!=nil)
       newurl=URI.parse(resp.header['location'])
       if(newurl.relative?)
           puts "url was relative"
           newurl=url+resp.header['location']
       end
       url=newurl

     else
       found=true #resp was 404, etc
     end #end if location
   end #until

The trick here is to ask the redirected url object if it is relative. If it is, then add the redirected path onto the old url object. the URI class overrides the '+' operator (what is this, C++?) so that you can concatenate the new path onto the old URL, by doing:
newurl=url+resp.header['location']