Hack to Learn

I’ve used SmartWhois at all-nettools.com for years. It is usually very fast and returns pertinent data, yet leaving out the normal ARPA registration junk that I don’t often care about.

Here is a Ruby script that will post an IP address to the online tool and parse the results for the command line, showing information about the party that owns the particular IP being searched. It will also accept hostnames.

You’ll need Hpricot and hpricot_helper.rb along with some other standards.

You can script it using a list of ip addresses like this:

cat iplist | while read ip; do
    ./smartwhois.rb $ip
done

Enjoy

Cody Fauser has published a nice eBay gem to integrate your RoR app with eBay. I started using it this weekend and find it to be a no-brainer to make any eBay API calls and receive data. Well done Cody, and thanks man!