I’m using the ruby client to launch Hadoop jobs on Amazon’s Elastic Map Reduce framework. Things have gone very nicely until I tried scripting a job which draws input from multiple buckets. You can’t use the ‘-input’ option twice and the advice around the internet is to use –args. So, I added: –args -input,s3n://SomeOtherBucket to [...]

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A while ago I put together a very simple php script that dumps any HTTP Post it receives: To my great surprise, people have actually started using it! I also found myself using it more and more in my own debugging and so I have added two features which further my original mission of maximizing [...]

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Let me present two lists of programming languages. List One List Two COBOL (1959) BASIC (1964) Fortran (1957) C (1973) FoxPro (?) C# (2001) Lua (1993) Java (1995) MATLAB (late 1970s) PHP (1995) PL/I (1964) Python (1991) RPG (1959) Ruby (1995) Smalltalk (1972) Complete list on Wikipedia Unfortunately SEO dictates that the title of this [...]

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This past week I found myself writing code that had to submit some data to a webservice via an HTTP POST request. Not a particularly difficult task but it was on a platform I didn’t have much experience with and I wasn’t sure if I had formed the packet properly. In order to validate my [...]

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I just made a simple mistake which I figure would be good share with anybody new-ish to Ruby. I wrote the following code to create an array of hashes and fill in some values. Can you guess what the output is? #!/usr/bin/env ruby testArray = Array.new(5, Hash.new) 0.upto(4) do |i| testArray[i][:value] = i end 0.upto(4) [...]

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Like all things with Facebook Platform API, creating infinite sessions is really easy. However, there seems to be a lot of confusion and misinformation on the web about how this works. Part of this could be the fault of Facebook’s documentation. They provide a pretty good explanation of the authentication process but then the example [...]

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