OMB

Purely to stop you making this error. Nothing useful comes up when searching for:


NoMethodError: undefined method `assert_flash'


The assert_flash method is now deprecated. If you are trying to run functional tests in Rails, what you are probably looking for is:


assert_flash_exists
assert_flash_not_empty
assert_flash_has 'hello'
assert_flash_has_no 'stds'
assert_flash_empty
assert_flash_has_no 'hello'
assert_flash_has_no 'qwerty'
assert_flash_equal 'my name is inigo montoya...', 'hello'


I just heard about Geek Tool, a nice little app for Mac OS X that will output a local text file, standard out or a local or remote web page onto your desktop. Its kind of like Conky on acid. So what have I done with the world of possibilities that this app presents and my all too short lunch hour? See for yourself:

Click to see a full screen version

I have a few windows that output some shell commands, then two images that Geek Tool grabs from the web, one of the left from BlairClock, which counts down the days until Blair’s expected leaving date and another from OSM’s image of the week. The saving you from terrorism bit comes next. I grabbed a feed from the Terror Alert website, ran it through a ruby script that outputs to stdout and bingo! Live terrorist information on my desktop. Now all I need is for the guys at Terror Alert to update their feed and I will be safe from the threat of International Terrorism.

(If anyone can suggest why my script won’t read the dates from the feed when it runs on my Mac, but will on Ubuntu, that would really make my day.)

Delicious, part Flickr, part Platial. The idea is that you login and tag a place, associating it with keywords, which can be searched via a Delicious style tag cloud. The site also lets you associate an image with the location. The magic that is Ruby on Rails means that whereas sites like Delicious and Flickr, which are owned by Yahoo, or Platial have significant budgets, Places2Go is seemingly a one man job.

Beyond representing a plethora of Web2.0 technologies, its hard to see what Places2Go is all about. The funtions that it supports alrady exist in one way or another with services Flickr and Platial. Tag clouds are nice to see in a geo app and it will be interesting to see how they develop as the site attracts more visitors. As for the data that is gathered, it could potentially be extremely useful - information about people’s favourite places around the world, with no limits on what can be entered - only problem is that they are all derived from Google’s map data.

The sites designer, Pedro Costa, makes it clear that this is very much a beta site, so we’ll have to wait and see how it progresses.