Urban Puddle

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.

When I first started on Buyindie v4, I decided that each store would have many addresses. So I dutifully created a model for both Store and Address with a has_many relationship. Over time I discovered that most stores had just one address and that I'd just created a new store entry for each additional location (each location has unique qualities so reviews and votes shouldn't get confused). After that I pretty much had two tables and two models where I needed only one. Here's the migration I used to fix it.

I use KDE3.5 and have been reading a few articles on how KDE4 is even more miserly on resources than KDE3 despite having more eye candy. Sound too good to be true? Probably because it is. I've run both on my laptop and can tell you that I have some concerns about KDE4. They're big enough that I'm actually considering a switch back to Gnome. Actually, I would have probably already have switched back except for 2 programs...

By now you know that Rails 2.0 is out. But you may not know that Ruby Gems 0.9.5 is also out. Do yourself a favor and update gems before updating everything else. To do that from 0.9.4 type:

sudo gem update --system

In version 0.9.5 you no longer have to specify --include-dependencies so just use gem install rails followed by gem update to upgrade from there!

Using google ads has always seemed an easy way to go. Since I slapped a few ads on my site last year The Google has been steadily rewarding me from clicks that readers make. At its height, this blog would generate about $1 per day from around 1000 unique visitors. Today, I'm getting around 10 cents from 800 unique visitors. Weird, huh? The click through rate and types of ads are pretty much the same and there's not much competition in the online advertising arena (notice how those guys always get acquired so fast?) so from where I'm sitting (on my couch) it looks a little arbitrary. One day your blogging might be on pace to buy you dinner at a fancy restaurant and the next.. not so much. All this to say that I'm glad my livelihood doesn't depend on online advertising. Oh and also, beware The Google.

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I don't like to use this blog to toot my own horn, but I'm pretty proud that the technology* project I led** back in 1999 while at Apple (Airport) was just rated at #13 in the Top 100 Tech Innovations of all time. If I had a tenth of a penny for every 802.11b station out there.. well, I'd be paying somebody to type this for me. :op

Of course, ahead of 802.11b is ahead of a bunch of really cool techs and a few questionable ones so I'm not sure how much stock I hold in the actual Top 100. Still, it was fun to see!

Yay, I've got Leopard! Boo, it won't let me choose a destination disk for the install on my shiny MacBook Pro. Being a former Apple employee I hesitate to sing their praises or fault them too loudly but I gotta say that this was pretty lame QA even for a company distracted by shipping iPhones and whatnot. There are a few solutions listed on the net from waiting to clicking invisible panes, to firing up Disk Utility or running commands via Terminal. If you're having trouble, here's a thread to check out. Sad sad sad that it has to come to this on a GM piece of software. I guess I was lucky that my solution just involved waiting while others I know ended up wiping out their hard disks completely. Did your installation go smoother?

Or rather the title might say open links found in your icedove emails in iceweasel. See the strange thing is that even though I have both applications installed, when there's a link in my email clicking it does nothing. My default browser is Iceweasel (aka Firefox) but the problem isn't that it's opening the link in the wrong browser, the problem is that it's not opening the link at all. If you have the same issue, this is how you fix it:

Sidux for a while now. It's been great but when I first tried to get games running using Wine, it would complain about various things like "No LibGL installed on this machine". There's a nice Howto for installing DirectX for Wine, but before that does you any good, you'll need to make sure you can compile Wine with OpenGL support.

Update: If you prefer Apache, use this tutorial instead.
Update 2: If you are on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron), check out this HowTo.

This is a follow-up article to the HowTo I wrote for installing Rails on Feisty Fawn. Most of the same tricks and methodologies from that HowTo in Feisty still apply to Gutsy so be sure to check out that article as well if you have problems. There are some different apt-get commands and the organization of the document is a bit different so if you're unsure you may as well start here. My thanks go to all the great developers and bloggers who have helped me along the way. Let's get started!