Category Archives: ubuntu

Finding and Fixing Broken Images with Ruby

A family members was having a problem with some mixed up image names on a static html site. I could have fixed it manually in a few shakes, but that’s no fun. Instead I used hpricot to scrape, open-uri to test for broken-ness, Find to search and some good old fashion regex to correct.

This was my first time messing around with hpricot and I found it to be powerful and easy to use, two thumbs up. I foresee some scraping and spidering posts in the near future.

On to the code:

My final script was a bit hairy so I broke out the bit I used to find the broken images.

If you run the script it’ll print the offending paths to screen:

ruby image_scanner.rb http://site.com/busted.html

Or you can call the get_broken_images method to get an array back:

require 'image_scanner'
scanner = Image_Scanner.new
broken_images = scanner.get_broken_images "http://site.com/busted.html"

In case you’re interested, I’ve also uploaded the full code that I used to search for and correct the images although it’s implementation specific, riddled with lazy and is poorly tested. Read the disclaimer!

Just run it and be amazed!

ruby image_scanner.rb http://site.com/busted.html /media_folder /busted.html /fixed.html

Download only the broken image scanner
Download the full script

Ubuntu Hardy Heron ColdFusion 8 Oopsie

Somehow I managed to bugger up the ColdFusion installation on my beloved laptop. Whenever I would try to start the cf server I would get the following not-very-helpful message. 

Running the ColdFusion 8 connector wizard
======================================================================
Configuring the web server connector
(Launched on the first run of the ColdFusion 8 start script)
Running apache connector wizard...
=======================================
There was an error while running the connector wizard
Connector installation was not successful

I googled around enough to realize that since it didn’t appear to be a common problem, that it was probably something I did. And it was.

As you may have figured out by now, I’m not a server-config kind of guy. I poked around a little bit and found an interesting looking shell script at /opt/coldfusion8/bin/connectors/apache_connector.sh. Running that gave me a much better error message:

Could not find directory /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

I opened the file and realized that the paths were all boogered up, meaning the paths I entered when installing ColdFusion where all buggered up. In any case, I fixed the incorrect paths and here’s what the file looks like now:

#!/bin/sh

#
# Configure the Apache connector.
#	-dir should be the *directory* which contains httpd.conf
#	-bin should be the path to the apache *executable*
#	-script should be the path to the script which is used to 
#		start/stop apache
#
../../runtime/bin/wsconfig 
	-server coldfusion 
    -ws apache 
	-dir /etc/apache2 
	-bin /usr/sbin/apache2 
	-script /etc/init.d/apache2 
 	-coldfusion

exit $#

And Voila!