Irrigation 2.0 with Rain8Net

The problem: Automatic sprinklers are great for convenience but waste a ton of water. You see businesses and neighbors running sprinklers during a rainstorm all the time–right? Rain conscious individuals can turn their sprinklers off when not needed, but you lose convenience and sometimes it is a pain to get back on track.
The solution: Rain8Net [...]

RFC_READ_TABLE with Ruby and SAP::Rfc

Warning: another code sample is included in this post.
I spent a few hours this morning trying to use Piers Harding’s SAP/Rfc library for Ruby to read a table from SAP. I found several examples using other languages (Perl, VBscript, PHP, etc.), but the only Ruby example I could find reads the entire table. Figuring out [...]

Hostmonster on Rails

A client of mine recently moved their web hosting to Hostmonster, and I was tasked with migrating a Ruby on Rails application to the new server. I ran into a few snags.
First of all, I followed their tutorial.
The default rails welcome page worked fine, but I kept getting “Application Error” on everything else. The logs [...]

Converting DivX files to mpegs for an NTSC DVD

Problem:
You have a bunch of DivX avi files and want to put them on a DVD for a friend. The friend wants to play the final product on a DVD player (not on a PC).
Solution:
Believe it or not, my first inclination was to fire up my old Windows XP computer because it has [...]

Scripting Access to America First Credit Union

Here’s a little script I thought might be useful for others out there. I run it each morning using a cron job. It logs in to my account at America First Credit Union and sends me a summary of recent account activity. (You’ll need to change some of the variables if you decide to use [...]