RAG on Rails

Photo

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:15:57 -0800

15 Things Worth Knowing About Coffee

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:01:33 -0800

15 Things Worth Knowing About Coffee

Public Pools in Los Angeles

Sun, 17 May 2009 21:24:37 -0700

Public Pools in Los Angeles

"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I..."

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 11:06:19 -0800

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

- Reinhold Niebuhr

Esperanto?

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:04:20 -0700

I don’t know why I thought this was a good idea, but I’ve started playing around with learning Esperanto. There are a surprising number of programmers that are involved in the community surrounding the language. Kind of cool

rickyv: After hearing Matt Damon’s brilliant comparison of a...

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:14:11 -0700

rickyv:

After hearing Matt Damon’s brilliant comparison of a Sarah Palin presidency to a bad Disney movie, I called up Sam and said “Let’s make a trailer for what that movie would look like.” Within hours, Dan and Amir were writing it, Ben and the CHTV crew were casting and producing it, and two weeks later, here it is.

Digg?

"PaklSound1 is one of the funnest iPhone apps I’ve found"

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 12:10:43 -0700

“PaklSound1 is one of the funnest iPhone apps I’ve found”

be_valid_xhtml

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 12:34:03 -0700

be_valid_xhtml:

I’ve extended this (with limited testing) to allow for validation of a string. If you have a model that is generation templates (as I am) then getting a AC::Response is not really desirable.

http://gist.github.com/9300

REXML wrapping and rcov

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 17:46:03 -0700

I recently ran in to some problems trying to get Rcov to run on a new code base I’m working with. Admittedtly a few of the files are far longer that I’d like, but a standard xml library should deal with such things gracefully. Unfortunately, REXML will throw all sorts of nastiness on pretty.rb:131. The problem is that the wrap function: a) doesn’t handle a few corner cases when spaces show up in weird spots, and b) since its a tail-recursive function if the string is long enough the interpreter will throw a Stack-level too deep error.

Fortunately the corner cases can be dealt with and as we all know tail-recursion can be eliminated and converted to a loop quite easily. The patch looks like this (I’ll try and package it up properly at some point as a patch to core):

      def wrap(string, width)
        out = nil
        # Recursively wrap string at width.
        while true
          return [out, string].compact.join("\n") if string.length <= width
          place = string.rindex(' ', width) # Position in string with last ' ' before cutoff
          start = 0
          if place.nil? || place == 0
            start = width
            place = width
          else
            start = place + 1
          end 
          out = [out, string[0,place]].compact.join("\n")
          string = string[start..-1]
        end
      end

Rock on!

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 11:20:12 -0700

Rock on!:

I’m getting excited about this. Finally, an opportunity for sane leadership. America, don’t disappoint me again.

Ruby BDB and You.

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 14:20:37 -0700

I just got through tearing my hair out to get this to work finally. I hope that this is useful to anyone out there that doesn’t want to install ruby from MacPorts and already has the latest BerkeleyDB installed.

The problem is that to install the ruby BDB bindings you need to build it from source. I used 0.6.5 from ftp://moulon.inra.fr/pub/ruby/. If you have bekeley db installed somewhere then all you need to know is where the lib directory is and the include directory is. For me they were:

—with-db-lib=/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.7/lib

—with-db-include=/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.7/include

Since this the lib and include directories are both in that location I sort cut this by using:

—with-db-dir=/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.7

This should have worked, but there is one thing that I missed:

env ARCHFLAGS=”-arch i386”

I picked this up somewhere and it stopped the stupid errors about not finding db_version for ppc. The final command to get you off the ground is:

env ARCHFLAGS=”-arch i386” ruby extconf.rb —with-db-dir=/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.7

Drive Faster!!!

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 15:23:16 -0700

Drive Faster!!!

You should watch to full length video.

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 16:57:40 -0700

You should watch to full length video.

TWC is lazy: Part 2, Episode 6

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 22:34:46 -0700

So did I mention that Time Warner Cable has completely undermined my trust and confidence in them.

I was almost feeling sorry for them. I was starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel and expecting that there truly would be a day where I would have Internet at my home and it would be provided by Time Warner Cable.

I have lost all hope.

My initial sympathy for TWC started when an engineer came out to the apartment (this was the second visit that we’d had at this point) and tried to test the connection that he had set up. We quickly realized that my apartment had no direct cable line in that was actually connected to the box in the garage. The engineer supposed that a cable had been clipped during the improvements and that they would need to send out a construction crew. I was promised a call back to arrange that appointment…soon. No call, but I was following up with the management company. The management, incidentally, are doing their best, but I’m pretty pissed that this was even an issue. I hope they are too.

I called in to the TWC support line to see what the deal was and make sure that an appointment got made. In fact there was an appointment made. I was not informed, but the rep. told me that I would need to be on the premises and the construction crew might need access to the adjacent units. Well shit, thanks for the heads up. Maybe next time you can let me know when I’m expected and home.

Those that know me know that I have a hefty commute, and with no Internet I’ve got a pretty small pipe to work through with my AirCard (total life-saver by the way, you should get one). I arranged for the management to be available to let the guy in and was able to give very short notice that they might need access to the 2 units below me. The construction crew came and did some work and left. I was emailed by the building manager that they couldn’t get the go ahead in time for the other units and that the crew would be back out on Friday. Damn, ok well at least the ball was rolling, it was being handled, I’ll have my Internet soon.

Today it is Friday July 11. The construction crew supposedly came and left. I still have no Internet. I was fortunate to have someone on the support line for TWC to tell me that there was an appointment today. Thanks. She passed a note across to their construction department and expected that I would hear back on Monday. Oh, hey mister TWC man, don’t worry I wasn’t expecting to have this done today, or last week. I wasn’t expecting an update when it turned out that more work would be required, or that I would need to reschedule.

Time Warner, get your act together. This is not professional, it’s amature. I hope it does not reflect the quality of your work and ongoing service.

TWC is lazy

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 09:40:01 -0700

I just tried calling tech support to get my cable modem working. I call using skype and I get a message telling me that because my inbound number is out of state they don’t know how to route my call. Then they ask me to hang up and try again from a local phone. WTF! I’ll be happy to enter in a local number so you can route me. I’m in your SoCal LA North Division, will that route me well enought.

This after being told I would get a call back in 10 minutes from the service guy about if he needs any more information to get the modem up and running. That was yesterday and apparently he did because my internet is still down. Lame!

I’m tired of poor service from companies that specialize in services. Service is our life and focus, take some pride in the work and be amazing. Is that so much to ask?

Focus

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 15:59:10 -0700

Focus

Rake Bash Completion, FTW

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 09:06:16 -0700

Rake Bash Completion, FTW:

For the OS X console, but should work for most versions of Bash. Drop in your ~/.profile

Oops.

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 11:51:22 -0700

Oops.

Nationwide killed my autopay

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 10:07:55 -0700

I found out today that Nationwide cancelled my Auto policy because back in February they killed my autopay. When I asked them about it the lady said that it did look like those were EFTs but that they didn’t have an agreement signed by me. Based on all of the confusion and the 10 minutes on hold while investigating I think they messed up. Note to self: Don’t trust Nationwide to bill you on time, they may cancel your policy before they get around to it.

Twitter Said To Be Abandoning Ruby on Rails...???!!!

Sat, 03 May 2008 11:35:23 -0700

Twitter Said To Be Abandoning Ruby on Rails...???!!!:

It’s pretty clear that people are clueless about where Rails is now as far as performance. And as far as I can tell there has been nothing but unanimous agreement from the Twitter people that they are not changing their technology. This smells of FUD. What does Arrington have against Rails anyways.