Blog - Chris Roos

Fri, 26 Mar 10 - Libxml2 Problems When Installing Nokogiri

My solution to the problem of Nokogiri checking for a universal (ppc, i386) version of libxml2 and failing to install.

Tue, 17 Nov 09 - Converting Egg Statements and Transactions to Ofx

I've refreshed the little utility that converts egg html statements to ofx.

Sat, 07 Nov 09 - A Letter to Adrian Gillan at Euroferries

An email to Adrian Gillan at Euroferries, in response to his request that Adem remove one of his posts.

Thu, 17 Sep 09 - Things I Learnt at Interesting 2009

Things I learnt from the talks at Interesting 2009

Mon, 14 Sep 09 - Pouring Factlets Into Your Brain Holder via Your Ear Sieves

An idea for a dynamic audio guidebook on your gps enabled mobile device.

Tue, 21 Jul 09 - Creating a Greasemonkey Script That Applies to the Firefox 'Problem Loading Page' Error Page

Some notes about applying a greasemonkey script to the Firefox 'Problem Loading Page' error page.

Wed, 24 Jun 09 - Down for Everyone or Just Me Greasemonkey Script

A greasemonkey script that inserts a link to downforeveryoneorjustme.com into the firefox page not found error page

Tue, 23 Jun 09 - Apacherb Is Now Hostess

The utility for serving local directories as virtual hosts in a local apache installation has been gemificated and moved to github

Tue, 23 Jun 09 - Introducing Deliciolytics

Introducing a proof of concept service that lets you view an aggregated feed of all delicious bookmarks for your domain.

Fri, 24 Apr 09 - A Greasemonkey Script that inserts a Google Site Search form into every page

A greasemonkey script that makes it really easy to use google to search within the current site. Press ctrl-9 to visit the search form.

Sun, 19 Apr 09 - Rails 2.3 and the ability to update created_at, created_on, updated_at and updated_on timestamps

There was a Rails 2.3 security note that suggested we could now set the AR timestamps. It turns out we've always been able to set the created_at/on timestamps and that updated_at/on are also now assignable.

Tue, 14 Apr 09 - Generating and Inserting a Rel=Canonical Link Into Pages With Firefox and Greasemonkey

A greasemonkey script that allows me to generate permalinks for various web pages and insert those permalinks into the page as links with rel=canonical.

Tue, 31 Mar 09 - CruiseControlrb With Passenger and Launchd on a Mac

Getting CruiseControl.rb running under Passenger (mod_rails) with the builders being started automatically via launchd (on a Mac).

Mon, 30 Mar 09 - Installing Passenger 2.1.2 on CentOS 5.2

I had to re-install apr-util-devel in order to get Passenger (mod_rails) 2.1.2 to install on CentOS 5.2.

Mon, 09 Mar 09 - Hack the Government Day (Rewired State)

An overview of what "team activeplaces" achieved at rewiredstate.

Wed, 04 Mar 09 - Posting Bookmarks to Delicious From My Android G1

By hooking together Email, a simple Ruby/Rack server and the delicious API I'm able to post bookmarks from my G1 to delicious

Tue, 24 Feb 09 - Gracefully Degrade the Google Custom Search Form So That It Works Without Javascript

I default to searching the google index of my site but enhance that functionality with the Google Custom Search when Javascript is available

Sat, 21 Feb 09 - Keyboard Shortcuts for the Link Widgets Firefox Extension

Shortcut keys for the Link Widgets firefox extension

Thu, 19 Feb 09 - Please Publish Full Content in Your RSS and Atom Feeds

I explain why I prefer feeds that contain full content over feeds that contain partial content.

Mon, 09 Feb 09 - Idea - Web Services Could Publish Stats About the Clients That Connect to Them

I wonder if it'd help us determine whether or not a library is still active/compatible.

Tue, 03 Feb 09 - Free Technical Books for Anyone That's Interested

I attempt to give away some books that I've been unable to sell on Amazon marketplace.

Sun, 01 Feb 09 - Test Data for Version 2 of the Amazon Web Services Signing Protocol

I'm hoping this data might be useful for someone else trying to develop code to sign requests to Amazon Web Services

Sat, 31 Jan 09 - Implementing Version 2 of the Amazon AWS HTTP Request Signature in Ruby

A fairly simple example of how to sign AWS requests, with Ruby, using version 2 of the signature spec.

Sat, 31 Jan 09 - Turning Off My National Rail Twitter Bot

I've turned the twitter bot off after being asked/told to do so by a chap at ATOC

Sat, 31 Jan 09 - Lloyds TSB Stole My Money (Kinda)

A little rant about Lloyds TSB

Sat, 24 Jan 09 - Backing Up Jobs in a Print Queue on Windows XP (and Printing .prn files)

I explain how I managed to print some documents that were stuck in the Windows XP print queue.

Thu, 22 Jan 09 - Idea - Firefox Extension to Clearly Indicate the Age of a Page

I find myself getting annoyed when reading webpages, blog posts in particular, that contain out of date information.

Tue, 13 Jan 09 - 24 Hours of Ramsgate Outer Harbour

I stitched together webcam images from a 24 hour period to create a little video of Ramsgate harbour.

Tue, 06 Jan 09 - A Simple Utility to Generate and Preview Html on the Web

I found, what I believed to be, a strange problem with images that had explicit width and heights set. I created a little utility that allowed me to dig into the problem.