From: Just Another Victim of the Ambient Morality <ihatespam@...>
Date: 2006-07-19T20:50:15+09:00
Subject: Net/HTTP is flaky?

    Inexplicably, the following code fails:


http = Net::HTTP.new("somesite.com")
puts http.get("/")[1]


    ...with this error:


ruby/1.8/net/http.rb:925:in '[]': undefined method 'downcase' for 1:Fixnum 
(NoMethodError)
        from web.rb:5


    Now, I do have access to a Linux system with Ruby 1.6 and it sometimes 
succeeds but often fails with this error:


/usr/lib/ruby/1.6/net/protocol.rb:221:in `error!': 403 "Forbidden" 
(Net::ProtoFatalError)
        from /usr/lib/ruby/1.6/net/http.rb:1217:in `value'
        from /usr/lib/ruby/1.6/net/http.rb:605:in `get'
        from ./web.rb:16


    How is this possible?  How can it sometimes succeed and sometimes fail? 
Why can't this reliably work?
    Thank you...