Sounds Like Weird
15 June 2005
It used to be that I never got any endorphin kick from exercise. Apparently, some time in the last couple of years, that’s changed. Of course, I wasn’t doing a lot of working out, so I didn’t notice.
The gym I’m currently going to has machines I’ve never seen before, though I’ve worked on their free weight counterparts in the past. So, it’s my new resolution to try out one new torture device machine each trip.
14 June 2005
Well, in the vein of “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” there are four Rails-like implementations in other languages that I know of — and I haven’t been looking.
Castle Project works on .Net with Ajax support.
Cake is a Rails-like framework for PHP, and Biscuit is another.
Lest the Java folks feel left out, there’s also Trails.
Speaking of Java and Rails, I was talking with a coworker today about RoR and why I thought it was cool. He asked if I’d seen Trails. Well, I haven’t “seen” it, I just know that it exists. I’m sure it’s very cool.
I mentioned, though, that one of the things I liked about RoR was some of the implicit definitions. For example:
@submission = Submission.findby_marketidandmanuscriptid(params[:marketid], params[:manuscript_id])
I didn’t have to create the function findby_marketidandmanuscript_id — it’s implied. That’s what I like about RoR: the power of implication.
My coworker pointed out that you could write a function in Java, yada yada yada. Yeah, but the point is that you don’t write one in RoR. Same thing for setters and getters. For setters and getters:
attraccessor :firstname, :lastname, :homeph
For getters only:
attrreader :firstname, :lastname, :homeph
Done.
13 June 2005
I’ve gotten all of an hour and a half to work on my Rails project since June 9th. I belatedly realized that I’d started at the hard end of the application: that part that connects all the pieces and has a bunch of joins. While I got that working for the list view, I have a lot more work to do before the rest of the CRUD functions work.
I’m taking a brief hiatus from that.
So instead, I’m working on the CRUD functions for the lookup tables right now, which I should be able to bang out fairly quickly.
One thing I wanted to comment on: I really like some aspects of the Rails design. For example, there’s an application.rhtml that’s the template for the site as a whole, but it can be overridden for any controller by creating a layout for it (e.g. for the controller submissions.rb, you’d create submissions.rhtml to override the application’s defaults).
It’s making me rethink how I was going to implement one feature….
13 June 2005
Last week, when I heard that Macs would be moving to Intel processors, I really only had one visual that came to mind.
When I worked for Be, one cube held a bunch of miscellaneous hardware. At the entrance of the cube was an inflatable Muench’s Scream wearing a grey “Intel Inside” t-shirt that had been patched to read “Intel Instead.”
So, with that in my hindbrain, what else could I see, really? As others have said, I don’t personally care what hardware a Mac runs on as long as I still get the user experience.
12 June 2005
I’m horribly overdue in writing this. I know. ::hangs head in shame::
Sunday morning, we had a great panel about Villainy, including Neil Zawaki, author of entertaining books about villainy, and Ed Muller, who is way more devious than I’d ever given him credit for.
Easily the highlight of Sunday (being one of two panels I got to sit in the audience for) was BayCon’s traditional “A Shot Rang Out” panel. It’s a simple concept and it depends so much on the people involved. This year, we had Hilary Ayer, Jane Mailander, Martin Young, Writer Guest of Honor Jay Lake, and Lee Martindale.
The concept: The story begins with “A shot rang out.” Each panelist must draw a slip out of a box and end their turn with that line. Anything in the middle goes. Jay Lake, when pulling one of his slips, asked, “Does this have to make any sense at all? The other panelists assured him not.
A few moments were especially worth noting.
Once, Martin ended his turn so spectacularly that Jay Lake, master of improv writing, couldn’t find a way to follow him. Jay ran across the stage and kissed Martin on the head, saying, “I have come to pledge my love for you, for no man has ever left me in such a hard place.”
Later, Martin pulled a slip and said, “Oh, f*, that’s a long one!”
Jay quipped, “Are you sure you said those words in the right order?”
For a few moments, no one could continue on, they were laughing so hard. Perfect retort.
During one of Martin’s turns, Jay’s daughter Bronwyn said something from the front row. Martin turns to Jay and says, “that’s yours, isn’t it?”
My sides ached.
By the time the themed reading rolled around at 7, I’d almost completely lost my voice, so I only read a page and a half.
On Monday, we had the now-traditional Tiki panel, joined by Chris Garcia as the panel newbie. He definitely has a love for things Polynesian. I’m sure we’ll have it next year, because James Stanley’s the toastmaster.
Maybe we’ll figure out a way to get that inter-dimensional rift to WisCon up for next year….
12 June 2005
Well, I hope I don’t need to do that again.
Because I installed different packages, and in a different order, than my last Debian system, I wound up with the problem of some users having been created in a different order, thus creating some knotty permissions problems. I fixed these in /var/log/mysql, /var/run/mysql, and for the new stuff in /var/lib/mysql. This solved the reported problem:
Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock’ (111)
Fine, on to the next problem. Because I rsynced over my old databases, including my root db password, I’d nuked the grant for the debian sysadmin script. I should note that I hadn’t had this problem before because the last time, I’d also rsynced most of /etc as well. After a brief hunt through google, I found that the location for the password is in /etc/mysql/debian.cnf, so I just granted the privileges to ‘debian-sys-maint@localhost’.
After stopping and restarting mysql, I verified that it was all happy again. Blogs for everyone.
12 June 2005
Yesterday, I migrated my server to a larger hard drive. Mostly.
Despite having done a lot of Linux installs, this one took me 15 hours, in part because there were two bad hard drives involved. The second one actually got an install onto it, but rsync took it to a high load average, implying a high error rate. So I decided to do another install onto a third drive.
During this rather frustrating experience, I remembered why I switched back to MacOS for my desktop machine. Gah.
Everything but the web part of mailman, WebObjects, and mysql is up (and mysql is needed for WebObjects anyway).
Today was a long meeting about a WeaselWare project and its requirements and a bit about its timeline. After that, I fell over for an hour and a half and slept.
10 June 2005
…from the back yard tonight, but it didn’t sound like a cat. Nevertheless, it was a cat, as Rick found out when he went out there — our neighbor’s older orange-and-white cat, who was yelling out for rescue. A cat that wasn’t otherwise moving. Rick thought it had just died after he first saw it, but the silly city boy didn’t think to check for breathing.
Neighbors weren’t home.
Seeing no obvious injury, illness, or disease and noting that the cat appeared paralyzed, I checked one of its hind legs, which was cold. Not good. After checking it out, I decided that we should move the cat, so I got an appropriately-sized box and an old towel I didn’t care about, and we put him in the box. So far, so good.
Once he got in the kitchen (I know, but the old guy is paralyzed, so it’s not like it’s not a contained threat), his feet warmed up and his breathing improved. Over time his breath got more raspy and sporadic.
Rick and Cheryl went over to see where the neighbor’s daughter works. We also called where the neighbor works. So far, it’s been an hour, but we haven’t heard a peep out of anyone.
But at least the poor guy has some company.
Update: about a half hour after his breathing became sporadic and raspy, his whole body shook, then he died. About fifteen minutes after that, one of the neighbors came over and took the box with their kitty.
No one had seen him at all yesterday, and the day before he’d been refusing food and water, so my initial guess of renal failure may have been correct. My friend Elisa thought he was dying from a series of strokes (the yowling and the paralysis), but it could just as easily have been a series of strokes brought on by the end stages of renal failure, too.
Rest well, old lad.
10 June 2005
RoR has quite a nice little stylesheet link helper, stylesheetlinktag, which generates a stylesheet link if invoked like so:
<%= stylesheet_link_tag ‘style’ %>
I just checked out the rails trunk and, sure enough it’s only a choice of screen or all, rather a problem for those of us who also like to generate print stylesheets (traditionally, I haven’t bothered, but it’s become one of my grumpy points lately). It also really annoys a friend of mine who uses a braille reader.
So I made a little print media thingy for my site (stuck it in helpers/application_helper.rb), and it works, but what I’d rather do is figure out what I need to do in order to submit a patch to rails so that other types can be supported by the framework. This will mean understanding unit testing in rails, which I haven’t quite gotten to yet.
Catch is, there is no canonical list, so it’s not like you can have a unit test double-check against a specific list of types; someone can go and define a media type of “beelzebub” and you’ve gotta be able to generate that.
I’ll probably be able to do this tomorrow.
10 June 2005
There’s a lot of misinformation about fibromyalgia, in part because it’s more a collection of symptoms than a disease per se.
However, largely, there seem to be three things I think are worth noting:
Most people I know with fibromyalgia have it far worse than I do, so I feel fortunate that it only really bites me every once in a while. My current long-term plan is to get on a better exercise program.
One of the better articles I’ve read about FM can be found here. Personally, I’ve never been able to bring myself to acupuncture, but I find acupressure quite helpful.
As for something that starts the entire FM process, I’ve been suspicious about zonulin ever since I read about it.
09 June 2005
You know what it’s like when one dog in the neighborhood starts barking, then all the dogs bark and you can’t get any peace?
That’s what having fibromyalgia’s like. You have some specific ache, then every other part of you that hurts (and there’s several) starts aching, and it goes into some feedback loop from hell.
It doesn’t happen to me very often, but I lost a lot of Thursday to it. Woke up feeling like I was going to toss my cookies (had I eaten any, which I hadn’t). All because I strained my back a bit over the weekend and it had started hurting. So I came home from work early, took a bath with some epsom salts, then went to bed.
Finally woke up, woozy, about 10 p.m. I did have some really excellent dreams about trekking in Greenland, though. I have no idea what that was all about, other than I’m probably not going to actually get to go there this summer.
Later, about 1 a.m., got the tiniest bit of work done on Submissions, but I’ll save the info on that until my next post, because there’s something I want to check out.
07 June 2005
On Friday night, I decided to finally drop in on #rubyonrails on irc.freenode.net. It turns out that I couldn’t have arrived at a better time, chronologically, as Ruby on Rails day was about to start. The room (yeah, I know it’s technically a “channel,” get over it) was full of enthusiasm about the impending start.
People started getting their emails for their Subversion repositories and their mysql databases.
A few pointers for people doing this next year (there will be a next year, right?):
I haven’t seen all the railsday projects, but there’s two I thought stood out: Tally by Technoweenie, dpiddy and caseygollan; the other was Clockwork from Maylo. Clockwork had some really beautiful design on the front page.
More railsday apps are out there, of course, but those were the two that struck me as particularly nifty one-day apps.
04 June 2005
So one of my frustrations the last few months has been the discovery that my previous favorite line of socks has been discontinued.
See, when I buy socks, I buy an entire drawer full in the same color. That way, I never have to worry about whether or not they match. Pull two socks out, voila.
My preference in socks is fairly simple: crew length (though not the super-tall crew length currently in favor in men’s socks), navy, thin (dress-sock weight), mostly cotton with some spandex content. Anything else makes my feet sweat, and that makes me unhappy.
My prior batch of socks, well, their spandex has completely lost its mojo. However, I’ve been searching for a couple of months and have found nothing that makes me happy.
Most “girl” socks are “trouser socks,” which is a euphemism for “these won’t last and the nylon content will annoy you.” Ugh.
And why must casual socks be available invariably in black or white? What’s up with that? I think white socks look stupid unless one is wearing all white — and black isn’t a color I choose to wear.
I’ve searched in stores and I’ve searched online. There is simply nothing that fits into that category that fits my feet. I even went to a wide shoe store today, bought their socks — well, they fit my feet, but I have to fold them because they don’t fit above the ankle. Did I mention that they are supposedly non-binding at the top? Yeah, right.
Still, as they met all my other criteria, I bought ten pairs.
Rick says that pockets are a feminist issue. I think he’s going to have to add socks to the list.
03 June 2005
Virtually the only thing I’ve accomplished this week is migrating deirdre.net to Textdrive.com, which offers a bunch of cool things including Ruby on Rails hosting.
Anyhow, the main reason I moved from he.net was simply capacity — my prior account only offered 2mb of space. Since I was looking at upgrading, I thought I’d look for a host that had better features.
I’ll be migrating the non-blog pieces of the site over slowly, so if there’s a page you haven’t found, that’s why. In the meantime, it’s probably mirrored at deirdre.org.
Next up on the list: rewrite rules for the old blog (deirdre.org/blog/) to redirect to the new one (deirdre.net)
30 May 2005
About the time I’d noted that my feed was broken, it was announced that this was a bug with WordPress 1.5.1. I’ve now had a time to apply the changes, so it’s now fixed.