Three till Seven

Wow, I haven’t updated in a while. It hasn’t been because I’ve been too busy off doing exciting things, but rather the opposite: ain’t shit happenin’. Let’s see, what have I been into… Well, Wednesday was mine and Todd’s 9-month anniversary, so I made dinner and we watched a movie. The dinner being enchiladas and refried beans, which in retrospect was not the sexiest meal I could’ve made, considering… Well, work with me, people, you all remember the song: “beans beans, they’re good for your heart,” etc. The movie was Strange Brew, which I’d never seen before but definitely enjoyed; very geeky.

I’m currently going through Hegemony, which has been even more neglected than this blog, and removing spam links from the approval queue. After that, I plan on approving valid links and making a new layout for it. It would also be nice to find another directory script, since SimpleDir is very primitive.

I’m at Jessica’s house with her and her family behind me talking about something Jessica saw on Facebook. I got here this morning and watched The Soup on VH1. We sat around and watched a bit more before heading out to pick up a gift from me to Jessica’s parents, who are my adopted parents for the most part. I realized last night that they were the only people for whom I hadn’t gotten a Christmas gift. I picked them up an Applebee’s gift card before Jess and I hit up the Wal-mart to get some fake flowers for her grandmother. We went to Nana’s house to deliver the flowers and were only going to stay for a few minutes, but that somehow turned into a few hours and we only recently got back. You can’t go to that house without getting stuffed full of food. We had come from Fazoli’s, full of pasta, but still ended up trying hash (some kind of pork mixture), cushaw (some kind of gourd), lemon bars, and tomato with cottage cheese. I had never heard of the first two, and they seem like very southern, old-fashioned dishes.

Friday night, I went through HostingRails.com and set up a second domain. I want a test bed to easily play with Ruby and Rails applications without having to worry about setting it up on 3till7 through Dreamhost and potentially messing up something here. My big idea for now is to write a directory management app in Rails to replace the SimpleDir I’m currently using with Hegemony, because SimpleDir is so primitive with its admin interface. Another big idea will be to incorporate better spam protection in the Rails rewrite. The new domain is at mumbleramble.org, but all you’ll see right now is a Rails Application error because I don’t have the Ruby CAPTCHA gem installed yet, which it depends on. I’ve asked the Hosting Rails guys for help with that because they’ve been remarkably helpful.

However, Todd has been wanting to get on different hosting for a while now because Todd[1] can’t keep things up and running. Sooo… I was going to set him up with Typo in a subdomain, but Typo is a piece of crap, apparently. I installed the current stable version, 4.0.3, but I couldn’t perform the upgrade via its web admin interface because it crapped out with an Application error. Uh, what? It was trying to migrate to a new database version, so I tried doing that by hand via rake RAILS_ENV=production migrate. That told me that the new version was experimental and that it could mess up my data. That was just fine, since this was a fresh install and I had no data. I commented out the line they said to comment out, ran the migrate by hand, and it worked fine. Unpolished as hell, but it worked. The next problem, and the big setback, was that I couldn’t post entries. I tried to and it gave me an Application error. I checked the logs and saw an ActiveRecord error where the new post was trying to insert a value into a non-existent field. What?? This is a freakin’ stable release of a blog-publishing tool and I can’t post an entry?

That was the big clue to say g’bye to Typo. I decided to try Mephisto and got it up and running, with a posted entry, in about five minutes. Piss on ya, Typo! You can see Todd’s blog at todd.mumbleramble.org.

Well, I’ve gone so far as to get a simple Mephisto blog set up on mumbleramble.org as well as a sub-domain for Hegemony, though the rewrite’s still not ready to go live. I gotta say, the Hosting Rails guys have been very helpful and responsive getting various libraries and gems installed for me. I’m very much enjoying the place so far, and I know Todd’s happy to have his blog back.

Todd and I exchanged Christmas gifts yesterday, so I finally got to open the 20″ Benq monitor that’s been hanging out in his closet for a month. Man, going from 1024×768 on my 15″ LCD to 1680×1050 is a big change. This is the first widescreen I’ve had, and it’s interesting having so much horizontal real estate. I had to decorate my desktop with pretty fractals from Blatte’s Pages, but that was only after I’d set up Ubuntu to use the new optimal resolution. That was much easier than I had expected, too: in /etc/X11/xorg.conf, I just added “1680×1050″ as you can see in the following lines:

Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "Default Screen"
        Device          "NVIDIA Corporation NVIDIA Default Card"
        Monitor         "FLATRON L151"
        DefaultDepth    24
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth           1
                Modes           "1680x1050" "1024x768" "832x624" "800x600" "720x400" "640x480"
        EndSubSection
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth           4
                Modes           "1680x1050" "1024x768" "832x624" "800x600" "720x400" "640x480"
        EndSubSection
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth           8
                Modes           "1680x1050" "1024x768" "832x624" "800x600" "720x400" "640x480"
        EndSubSection
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth           15
                Modes           "1680x1050" "1024x768" "832x624" "800x600" "720x400" "640x480"
        EndSubSection
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth           16
                Modes           "1680x1050" "1024x768" "832x624" "800x600" "720x400" "640x480"
        EndSubSection
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth           24
                Modes           "1680x1050" "1024x768" "832x624" "800x600" "720x400" "640x480"
        EndSubSection
EndSection

Then I hit Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to reload the X server. Bingo! It was automatically using 1680×1050. :)

I’m in Lexington for a few days before I’ll head to Jessica’s parents’ and spent a night with them and Jess. After that, I’ll be going to my own parents’ for the holidays. I’m planning on taking my computer since Mom’s getting me a Sims game for Christmas. I also want to take the bread machine so that I can bake some delicious French bread for Mom and the guys.

Candice called me out of nowhere the other day and asked if I would like to come with her to Ohio with her boyfriend and some band. I turned her down, and it’s a good thing I did, after having read this blog entry of hers. It seems like that sort of thing happens to her all the time! She’ll ask me to go somewhere or do something with her, and I always get this knot in my stomach and have to turn her down because, no thank you ma’am, I do not want to get arrested, lost in Ohio, or eaten by a bear. The girl is like a beacon for bad luck, I tell you.

I’ve worked out my plans for Christmas, finally. Jess and I are meeting for dinner and a movie tomorrow night (no clue about food, but we’re seeing Happy Feet). Afterward, I’ll be going to her parents’ for the night, then the next day I’ll travel to my own parents’ home. We’re having a family gathering with my dad’s side a few days later. One thing I don’t have cemented is when I’ll return to Lexington. I know Trin’ll be in town in early January, and it turns out Christine will be as well. Neat! The Chicago folks meet my PA friend, at least if they’re down here on the same days.

Todd, the lucky joik, is getting taken out to lunch today at work, and to a fancy, expensive restaurant, too. However, I don’t even have work today, nor any this week, so maybe I’m really the lucky joik. The two of us are going out tonight for our goodbye-I’ll-see-you-in-a-couple-weeks dinner. Last night we had the fun of going to Wal-mart at 11 because the wireless router for him and some of the other folks in the apartment was down. I found it funny that the Linksys he bought was able to replace the Airport and it supports more users than the Airport did before. Silly Apple, trying to outdo Linksys.

I cooked a good deal yesterday, including biscuits, fruit salad (I added raspberries to mine and replaced the oranges with mandarin oranges), some chicken dish, and then easy ol’ Lipton rice with a bag of steamed corn. I plan on baking more today, and should really hit up the grocery in a couple hours.

Now that my co-op at Lexmark is over for the semester, I won’t get to do Ruby or Rails stuff on a daily basis except in my own projects. This is more of a bad thing than good because while I’ll have the freedom to spend more time with projects like Hegemony, there won’t be the necessity to continually read updates in the Ruby community or even program in it daily. Hegemony seems pretty stable, but of course as more people start using it, I’m sure problems will crop up. That will definitely warrant my attention, but there won’t be the daily improvement, refactoring, bug fixing, and feature adding like there is at work.

Of course I plan to keep up with the community, in fact I was just browsing my regular Ruby feeds via Netvibes this morning. My time for that sort of thing, and leisure programming in particular, will be cut down severely when classes start in January, though. I’ll be taking five: intro to algorithms, the second logic circuits class, an intro to biology, discrete math, and the second physics lab class. Logic circuits will probably require programming, but most likely in Assembly or Verilog. Algorithms may involve some C++ or Perl. And of course UK doesn’t offer any classes with Ruby. I don’t even know that it’s mentioned in any of the classes available.

I’m at my parents’ house for Christmas break and I went and left Enchantment by Orson Scott Card in Lexington. So, I looked around my dad’s book collection this morning for another novel to read on while I’m here, and came across Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett, a book which I’ve read before and loved. Here’s an example why:

In the warm, horsey gloom of the stable, Death’s pale horse looked up from its oats and gave a little whinny of greeting. The horse’s name was Binky. He was a real horse. Death had tried fiery steeds and skeletal horses in the past, and found them to be impractical, especially the fiery ones, which tended to set light to their own bedding and stand in the middle of it looking embarrassed.

– pp. 17, Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett

Note: If you enjoy this article, you might also check out the Geeky Stuff section.

I’m sitting at my brother’s computer fairly nodding off. I’ve been eating popcorn and drinking hot cocoa, so it’s no wonder: warm food does a great job of making me sleepy. Happy Christmas everyone! I made out with a set of knives, a knife sharpener, an electric can opener, a set of orchid-scented perfume and bath goodies, Cell by Stephen King, and The Sims 2 University. I started reading Cell earlier tonight and I’ve already made it to page 120-something because it’s been hard to put down. It’s all apocalyptic and zombie-filled, so I’ve been creeped out and on edge (Dad knocked over a stack of Atari cartridges earlier and I about jumped out of my skin). I took a break from reading and watched Miracles, a wacky old Christopher Lloyd film, with Mom and Dad so as to get me out of the creepy zombie mindset.

Why were Atari cartridges lying around, you may ask? Yesterday, Dad drug out the old 7800 and all the 2600 and 7800 games from my brother’s closet and we settled in to go through all of them again. Well, we ignored the obviously sucky ones, such as Raquetball and Baseball (honestly!), but had some fun with Pole Position, Frogger, Dark Chambers, and Xevious, to name a few. To add to the old gaming goodness, Dad’s been working on getting the old TI backed up and runnable through an emulator in Linux, so I got to tinker with that today. I played with the old Beach program and Colors and Elephant and several others I had forgotten about. Those are all TI Logo II applications, and there’s one other I remember that involved feeding an apple to a horse or something like that, and Dad says “At the Zoo” is what I’m thinking of.

All right, that’s enough of that! I’m off to read more in Cell and hit the hay. As a side note, I think I’ve had several entries now that have “zombies” in the title.