MichaelXavier.net

I'm working on a little utility script that scrapes with the wonderful WWW::Mechanize. I found that I needed to use a proper referrer so less of my downloads would stop coming back 403 Forbidden. I'll do a quick code sample to show how I got past this. Full Article

It's been a little while. I've been completely swamped with school and work, but I realized there wasn't really any code samples I could find for using Rack::CommonLogger in Sinatra. Solution after the jump. Full Article

I can hardly stand to use Firefox anymore. Lately I've only used it for pages that are Chrome bugged or because flash audio wasn't working. Here's how I fixed it. Full Article

Here's how to get all of the elements of an array but the last n without knowing the length of the array. Full Article

I'm working on a project now that requires some state machine features in some of my classes. I tried acts_as_state_machine but I found the documentation to be awful and the library itself to be less feature-rich that state_machine. state_machine claims to support inheritance but I found no examples of this anywhere. Full Article

I found myself bitten by my misunderstanding of how class variables worked and found the actual functionality to be somewhat unexpected. Full Article

Just thought I'd post some copypasta from the Rails documentation. Rails' documentation is massive and they hide this information where it might be hard to find tidbits like this. Full Article

An explanation as to why I stopped writing on the old blog and my promise to write more frequently on this one. Full Article