3 Character to 2 Character Country Codes

For anyone else who needs to map 3 character to 2 character country codes in ruby, I have provided the following class based on the ISO_3166-1 country code list found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1#Current_codes

Google-api-client Authorizing with an API Key in Ruby

The documentation for the Google RESTful APIs is generally pretty good, however when playing with the google-api-client ruby gem, developed by Google to trawl their APIs, I ran into a few issues, particularly when authenticating using an api key (rather than OAuth).

After installing the google-api-client gem, getting a Google API Key (https://code.google.com/apis/console/), and setting up a custom search account (with its prefs widened to all web pages - http://www.google.com/cse/)....

The following allowed me to trawl google search results (copy paste into irb, then inspect response when finished):

  require 'openssl'
  OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_PEER = OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_NONE

  require 'google/api_client'
  client = Google::APIClient.new(:key => 'your-api-key', :authorization => nil)
  search = client.discovered_api('customsearch')

  response = client.execute(
    :api_method => search.cse.list,
    :parameters => {
      'q' => 'the hoff',
      'key' => 'your-api-key',
      'cx' => 'your-custom-search-id'
    }
  )

THE MOST IMPORTANT BIT was the :authorization param when constructing he client.... this ensures the api key is used when calling, in preference to oauth. Without it you will get 401 Unauthorized response status everytime.

ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using password: YES)

Somehow my root account lost its 'ALL PRIVILEGES' option, and instead was listing all individual privileges when running

show grants;

As root instead of:

+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Grants for root@localhost                                                                                                              |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY PASSWORD '*76854B38A7923CC05E7857229F508E66E89D69AD' WITH GRANT OPTION |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

This was preventing me from assigning all privileges to *.* to other users....
The solution for me (in OSX 10.6.8) was to run in terminal:

mysql_upgrade

which rebuilt my grants table, then after logging into mysql as root, retrying the grant cmd:

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'myuser'@'localhost'