Urban Puddle

I hate the fact that the political campaign for President is already underway. I'm tired of all the rhetoric already and the media does no one any favors by starting the circus early. Worse is that they've got a habit of creating drama and following stories rather than allowing candidates to address issues. If it were up to the media the Yankees and Red Sox would play for the pennant every year and then the Red Sox and Cubs would play each other in the World Series and both lose. Let the circle of drama continue! Today, I found a website that allows you to answer some simple questions and then matches a candidates views to your own. It seems to represent all the candidates equally so perhaps you should check it out and see what comes up. In case you were wondering -- I have nothing to do with this website at all.

I thought I knew how to add a CUPS printer via the web browser. Just go to localhost:631 and follow the easy menus. But then I ran into an authentication error where it asked me to enter the username and password for "CUPS". No matter what I put there (my password, root password, etc.) it wouldn't allow me through. Turns out there are two things you need to do to get through.

I've spent most of my Internet enabled life on Macs. I did have a stint with FreeBSD and Archlinux on a Thinkpad X41 but for the most part I'm used to the Mac keyboard with the super-handy command key. Moving to a Dell was a bit of a shock (for many reasons) made more difficult by the heavy use of the control key and lack of command key. There is an Alt key where command is on the mac keyboard and many apps like Katapult and Yakuake use it by default. That's great, but I don't want to unlearn all those keystrokes I'm used to on a mac. So let's swap the control and alt keys!

I recently loaded my laptop with a minor variant of Debian's Unstable (sid) called Sidux. I'll probably touch base on it more in another post but for now I'll say that it's pretty cool. Thanks to the efforts of the kernel developers Suspend/Resume works out of the box. That is, unless you have Compiz enabled.

Wow, it all started off so badly but in the end things turned out ok. This humble server was running on Ubuntu Edgy Eft and I decided to upgrade it to Gutsy via Feisty. I followed my own instructions and did an upgrade but it didn't quite work out. The upgrader crashed out on me with an error of some sort. Naturally, I thought to just type sudo do-release-upgrade but it didn't do what I expected.

Say you've got a partial that you're using to render some collection of things like products. You want to call that partial when displaying all your products but also when you're only displaying your 5 most recent products. The problem is if you just call will_paginate(@products) in your view you'll get an undefined method page_count error.

I've been playing around with Slicehost lately. I was looking at the deprec gem and using capistrano to setup a rails stack on Gutsy Gibbon. Unfortunately, the procedure doesn't seem to work in Gutsy so I rebuilt my slice and stepped back to Dapper. In the process of upgrading to Feisty, I noticed that the sudo command gave an error:

sudo: unable to lookup mycomputername via gethostbyname()

Not sure when that started happening but it's consistent across all my rebuilds. So here's how you fix it:

A while back I mentioned how to get the Rails API Without a Network. Well, Brian's been busy and he's not only updated his docs to include 1.2.4 and Rails Edge, but he's also put the Ruby API up as well using the same Ajaxy goodness as before. Head over to Ruby Brain to download it!

Thanks to Brian "Breakpoint" Chamberlain for letting this loose!

It's been a while since I posted a free MP3 download. Most of that type of activity is now being posted over at Buyindie instead. But this track was too good to share IMHO. It's called Leave and is by Never The Nines. Check it!

Ubuntu has come a long way since Warty Warthog. Ever since their first LTS release (Dapper Drake) it's been possible to upgrade fairly painlessly from one distribution to the next. If you're running a slice over at Slicehost you'll likely be able to get Gutsy by default, but until then follow these instructions for upgrading from Dapper to Feisty and then read on for the dead-simple instructions to go one step further to Gutsy Gibbon. These instructions are best used for servers.. there are other methods for Desktop upgrades.