Ammar's Techno Babble

So today I spent about 4 hours trying to get my MacBook Pro's iSight camera to work with sites that use webcams via Flash, sites like yFrog.com and Justin.tv.  After updating Flash to the latest version 10.6.5, everything iSight related stopped responding, no matter what browser I tried, Firefox, Safari or Chrome, all had the same problem.  I tried uninstalling and installing other versions of Flash without luck.

So then I came across this article in MacWorld, http://www.macworld.com/article/156357/2010/12/isight_flash.html, it seems that this is a pretty big problem that has been affecting many Mac users!  The first thing the article said was to run GoogleVoiceAndVideoUninstaller.app in /Library/Application Support/Google, the second I did this it fixed my problem!  So there seems to be a conflict between Google Video and Flash, something that screws up the iSight driver.  Hope this article solves your issue if you are having trouble.

So I wanted to get the Top Stories from Google News, to my surprise I found out that there was no API available for Google News, I had to resort to a brute force method and scrape.  Here is the scraper the I wrote in about 10 minutes.

require 'rubygems'
require 'nokogiri'
require 'open-uri'

url = "http://news.google.com/"
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open(url))

doc.css(".topic").each do |topstory|
  item = topstory.at_css("a").text
  puts item
end

This produces a nice list for me:

Spider-Man
Dow Jones Industrial Average
Network neutrality
North Korea
Missile defense
Human rights
Los Angeles
Philadelphia 76ers
Green Bay Packers
Lindsay Lohan

So today while at work I was trying to debug a bit of code and see the contents of an Ruby object, which is a simple enough task.  I used the 'inspect' method to print a string representation of the object, this worked perfectly and I was able to see all the attributes of the object in the console.  Then later tonight I was working on Shoutreel and used 'inspect' again, but this time in the View, something that I had never really tried before, and to my surprise it failed to print a string representation of the object.  A hash sign was printed out.  Why is this?

So is this a bug in Rails, does the 'inspect' method in the view not work for model objects?  My guess is that the inspect method in ActiveRecord, which is what the model object inherits from, has a bug.

I'll investigate this and write back soon.

This is the code I had in the view:

<%= reel.inspect %>
<%= [ 1, 2, 3..4, 'five' ].inspect %>

The top line printed the hash, while the bottom line printed out the array as a string.