afongen

I mentioned a while back that I couldn’t get Rails installed on Jaguar. Actually, RubyGems was the problem. Something I’d read led me to believe it was a core ruby problem, but after a bit of thinking that just didn’t seem right. So I kept trying different things, and still kept getting a message “stack level too deep”.

At this point two things became clear:

1. I’ve been slacking off on my Unix skills, because this should be more obvious; and
2. late-night hacking isn’t doing much for my Google skills, either.

Finally I found an answer. I added ulimit -s 8192 to my .zshenv (yes, I’m a Z shell user), which increases the stack size. After that, everything worked like a charm. Editing the same line to /etc/rc.common should also work, but I played it safe by affecting only my account and am happy so far.

I’m especially happy because now I can dive into Rails with gusto. Until I got it working at home, my Rails exploration was limited to staying an hour late at work once a week.

The iBook’s back. We dropped it off for repair on Tuesday, and it was back on Thursday in fine condition. This might not seem impressive until I tell you that they shipped it from St. Paul to Tennessee. They overnighted the thing to Tennesee and back, at no charge to us. Mighty fine.

At least I thought it was mighty fine until I got to thinking about how strange it is that the laptop had to be shipped out of state — at no small expense — just to crack it open, replace a card, and put it back together. Seems a waste. Apple has three retail stores in the Twin Cities, after all, and we have FirstTech… surely there are Apple certified techs in town.

But hey, the iBook’s back, the screen works, and we barely noticed its absence. And as a bonus, the wireless works better. It had been flaky. Yay!

Wow, in the last 12 hours a whole lot of spam has made it into my GMail inbox. That’s unusual. I think I’ve seen more in the last day than I have all month.

Kiara brought our iBook into the Apple Store yesterday. Owen filled me in on the details this morning:

“Papa, there’s no computer here for you to use.”

“Oh no? Why not?”

“Mama brought it to the Apple store. It has a board inside that’s broken, so when you use it, the screen doesn’t work!”

“Oh no!”

“They took it and they’re going to put in a new board so it will work.”

“Well that’s good. How long will it take?”

“They said they would keep it there for seven days.”

That about sums it up. Don’t believe for a minute that young children don’t understand what’s going on around them (Owen turned three a month ago).

The video card is shot. After the computer warms up, the screen goes bonkers and displays a not-entirely-pleasing set of vertical lines. It seems the card is placed above a significant heat source and over time, all the expanding and contracting of the connections wears them out. Although the iBook itself is out of warranty, this is apparently a known issue and is covered by some special hardware warranty, so we’re told the repairs will be done at no charge. I doubt it will take a whole seven days: the repair status page shows that it arrived in the repair center the same day it was dropped off in the store.

Just a few days ago I was bemoaning the absence of a Perl Advent Calendar this year. I didn’t moan too loud, though, because I know it’s a lot of work and frankly I don’t have the time to do it myself, either.

A short while later, Drew McLellan launched 24 ways to impress your friends with web development tips and tricks. Nice.

I started to wonder if there were a Ruby Advent calendar. As it turned out, no. But then Joey deVilla started posting one (archived in the Ruby section over there on the Farm).

Today I read that there is an alternative Perl Advent calendar, put together by a kind soul with hopefully adequate time.

I never celebrated or observed Advent growing up, but I sure do now!

Update: Now there’s a Catalyst Advent Calendar, too. I do miss mod_perl.

Update: And a Symfony Advent calendar. Which reminds me that I need to look at Symfony.

Adrian Holotavy just announced the Washington Post’s U.S. Congress Votes database, which lets you browse every vote back to 1991. Marvellous. There are RSS feeds, of course, so now it will be trivial to keep track of my representatives/senators. Subscribed.

I can’t wait for the mashups.

Update: Garrick Van Buren wasted no time putting together MNRep: How Minnesota’s Congressional Representatives Vote.

Learn from my mistakes. When typing CSS in public presentations, use color hex values rather than color names. Otherwise when you try to type

background-color: white;

you’ll actually type

background-color: shite;

Guaranteed.

Of course, if you’re presenting to an audience that would appreciate it, it shouldn’t be that hard to put together a Greasemonkey script to support that background color.

Catching up with what’s caught my eye in recent weeks.

Jason Fried gave a talk earlier this year about lessons learned building Basecamp, their development process at 37 Signals, and Getting Real. I’d long meant to listen to the presentation but didn’t get around to it until a couple weeks ago. Then I listened to it again and again, a half-dozen times in two days. Wow. Inspiring. Energizing. He captures a process that makes software development exciting. It’s a big part of what interests me in Ruby on Rails.

Editsite.net, a hosted content management system. Astounding. The bar for browser-based CMS has been seriously raised. After spending a few minutes with Editsite, my first thought was that not to have CMS at this point is pathetic — at least if you want one. Especially if you’ve spent, say, five years thinking about it. Not that I know anyone who’s done that. :)

Remember The Milk. I’m a list maker. I’ve tried lots of ways to organize what I do. I need something a bit more involved than Ta-da List, less project-focused than Basecamp, more easily accessible than a pad of paper on my desk (not helpful when I’m at home), a bit less neurotic than Getting Things Done. ;-) Right now I’m using Remember The Milk. Two words: keyboard shortcuts. Read much of Kathy Sierra et al? Using RTM makes me feel like I kick ass. I haven’t played much with its RSS feeds, email or IM integration, but man am I gonna.

A Moleskine notebook is a thing of beauty. Sublime.

What is Web 2.0? Some are perturbed by the label “Web 2.0”. I am indifferent, but you should at the very least read this essay by Tim O’Reilly, one of the most important software essays of the year.

Speaking of essays, Bill Moyers’ “9/11 And The Sport of God” is marvellous, as is Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s “Forgetting Reinhold Neibuhr”. The New York Times have done something to break or impede the direct link to Schlesinger’s essay, but you should be able to find it on the book review page for September 18, 2005.

An interview with Anders Hejlsberg about C#, part 1 and part 2. There’s some very interesting activity on the C# front, notably LINQ, which embeds a query language right into the .NET framework. See the whitepaper for more detail. Combine this with Monad (MSH), Microsoft’s innovative command shell that lets you pipeline objects from .NET-aware apps, and you’ve got something very, very cool indeed. Seeing lambda expressions come to C# … nifty.

BuildSecurityIn, a new portal from the US Department of Homeland Security designed to provide developers and architects information and guidance about building secure software. Its Software Engineering Institute roots are clear in the academic nature of the articles. Usually heady and abstract, sometimes disappointing, sometimes useful. There are holes, but there’s good stuff there. You might want to start with the process agnostic article view” diagram.

The folks over at Particletree have now released two issues of their beautifully produced web development magazine Treehouse. Always worthwhile.

We have three trees in our front yard; I’ve been waiting for the basswood to drop their leaves before I bother to rake. It’s a small yard and I’m lazy. Well, I woke up this morning at 3:30 and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I’ve been sitting in the living room listening to the rather strong wind raging outside. I just took a peek and not only are the basswoods’ leaves mostly gone, the front yard has been swept clean by the wind. Now they’re Somebody Else’s Problem. Sweet! :)

I just hope that my being pleased about this doesn’t mean that I’ll step outside to find that a tree has fallen on our garage.

A few weeks ago during dinner, Kiara poured ketchup on her plate and set the bottle back on the table. “No,” Owen objected, “that’s the wrong way!” He pointedly turned the bottle around so it was facing him and peered intently at it. “K—K—Ketchup! K is for ketchup!” Almost three years old and the boy occupies odd moments reading ketchup bottles.

Heh. Like father, like son.