Urban Puddle

Sometimes Debian packages don't play nice. They install fine but try to upgrade them or remove them and they'll have a fit. It's happened to me on Lighttpd before and it just happened again with Wifi-radar. This time the error on removing the package said:

The following packages will be REMOVED:
  wifi-radar
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 5 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives.
After unpacking 238kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
(Reading database ... 156000 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing wifi-radar ...
Stopping wifi-radar daemon...invoke-rc.d: initscript wifi-radar, action "stop" failed.
dpkg: error processing wifi-radar (--remove):
 subprocess pre-removal script returned error exit status 255
Starting wifi-radar daemon...Errors were encountered while processing:
 wifi-radar
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) 

I just started updating Buyindie to Rails2. I thought it would be a pain but it turned out to not be that bad. Mostly since I was starting from an app that worked with 1.2.6 and also because I heeded most of the deprecation warnings I ran into. There were a few that I neglected though and it required some quick and dirty fixes. I'm not advocating these as the best solutions -- there's always a better way, but if you run into trouble you can go through this list and perhaps it'll give you some ideas of things to check.

This is a follow-up to my article on Installing Ruby on Rails for Nginx. It can also be a good jumping point for another of other Ruby frameworks such as Merb.

Although I'm a big fan of the golden path, sometimes you just don't have the option of picking and choosing your components. Recently I had to deploy a rails app alongside PHP using Apache 2. I took some notes during the process -- hopefully they come in handy for a few of you.

Typo (the software that powers this blog) got a bump to version 5.0.2 yesterday and the team went through all the themes and got them working again. It's really amazing how much of an improvement v5 is over 4.1.1 -- hopefully it'll convince me to blog more often (about relevant stuff..). One thing frequent visitors may notice is a new theme.. I'm still doing some polishing but I think I may keep this one unless there are any objections. The upgrade to v5 has a few snafus so click through if you're interested..

I was updating one of my Dapper Drake installations today when I noticed my ruby gems were ancient (0.9.0 or something). I followed my own instructions and ended up with an error that said:

/usr/bin/gem:23: uninitialized constant Gem::GemRunner (NameError)

No problem, I thought.. I'll just reinstall gems from scratch via rubyforge. But when I ran into the same error afterwards I knew I had a problem. Fortunately the fix isn't that hard.

I recently switched over to XFCE4.4 from KDE3 (am waiting to see how KDE4 shapes up..). I decided to use F-spot to manage my photos since it's added a lot of features I find useful. One of those features is a built-in upload to Flickr. Problem is that when I tried to use it the authorization would fail with an error that said "There was an error invoking the external handler...There was an error launching the default action command associated with this location." Here's how I solved it:

If you're going to compile Wine for Debian Unstable or Sidux (required at the moment for certain 3D gaming) you'll want to install a ton of packages first. Why? Well, wine supports a bunch of different things and if you don't have the correct packages installed before compiling you may find that somethings are not supported. Rather than go through that, let's get as many things installed before we compile. Let's get started with a few good apt-get installs. If you get an error, first make sure you have all the correct repositories enabled.

There seems to be a bunch of people experiencing problems updating from v.95 of Ruby Gems to the latest greatest version. Here's how I did it in two easy steps:

OMFG!

Wow, that was fast. Rails is at v2.0.2 already.. The most recent update includes a change to the default database from MySQL to SQLite3. There also looks to be some other pretty nice goodies like freezing gems and redoing/resetting migrations. It's worth checking out the official rails blog for details if you haven't. Right about now I feel like I need to do a bunch of work just to understand and take advantage of all the new grooviness! It also looks like RSpec 1.1 it out and Rails2 friendly.