Democracy player .debs giving you the fits? (ie: ImportError: libgtkembedmoz.so)
Install ‘mozilla-dev’ and ‘mozilla-psm’ as seen in:
#3234 (Problem running on Ubuntu Dapper) - Democracy - Trac

One of the best ways to describe the whole http “REST” concept:
How I explained REST to my wife…

RadRails - A Ruby on Rails IDE

New version 0.7 is out. Gotta love the RHTML editor and Mongrel sever support.

My google calendar was lacking one major feature: SMS messages. My work cell is Verizon and is was not listed under the availble options.

Workaround: Use TMobile as the option.

BAM!! SMS notification heaven.

For you Ubuntu fans out there:

Dapper +1 is now know as “Edgy Eft”

I’m a big fan of the concept for this release: Bleeding Edge.

I can’t wait to order a load of Dapper CDs and give em out to the world.

I’ve learned several life lessons recently. I’ll share:

1. The tech scene down here in the valley rocks. I attended the Phoenix Linux Users Group last week and heard a sweet presentation by Vince from Google about Linux on the Enterprise Desktop. Nice work - especially about the specifics with Linux (Unix) user scalability issues. Two other cool things happened. I sat by someone taking notes with an Apple Newton (go figure) and more importantly I won the big prize in the raffle swag give-away - a Google Lava-lamp! That sweet baby is going on my desk right next to my well-worn Ruby pickaxe book. BAM!

2. We got to see the Mesa Arizona LDS Temple Easter Paegent. It was a great show and the weather was awesome (as usual). Bailey even managed to stay awake through the whole thing, though she fell asleep soon after hitting the carseat.

3. Rails generally blows on Oracle. Besides the v1.1 issue I found in Active Record, it seems that the whole concept of Rapid Application Development is lost on most Oracle DBA. (Why do you want 3 sepearate users? Why would you automatically blow away your test environment? Blah, blah, blah.) Do what I did - Even if you don’t have root - install mysql and be done with it. (It really isn’t that hard - I even did it on Solaris 8 without gcc)

FYI: If you’re running Oracle ‘oci’ adapter for Rails and you just upgraded to Rails 1.1 (ActiveRecord 1.14.0) listen up!

Are you getting messages like:

wrong number of arguments (1 for 0)

RAILS_ROOT: script/../config/..

There’s a patch in to fix it

see: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/59811#54488

I’m back - the blog is back up and now I’m coming to you live from Arizona.

My new job is with the Apollo Group (#38 in Computerworld’s Top 100 IT workplaces in the USA) doing release automation, systems admin and other sundry things.

One of the most exciting things I’ll be doing in diving head first into Ruby and Rails. I’m working on porting all our deployment scripts to Ruby (Capistrano?) and build a nice web interface using Rails. Peachy!

… the WRT54G. I’m starting work on a Rails site for the WRT54G admin web-interface. It’ll be fun, AJAX-y and Web 2.0 it all it’s goodness. Why not?

It turns out the hardest part is getting rails and all it’s dependancies on the box!

I started with: http://handhelds.org/feeds/ruby/

After loading the ruby-large package, I’ll try to get GEM going.

[Hmm.. do people use CPAN when working with perl compiled for ARM? Should I screw GEMs and package up the rails code itself? Find out on the next episode!]

Instead of MySQL, I’ll throw in SQLite for the backend, thought it looks like I’ll have to compile the ruby-sqlite bindings for ARM myself if they are written in C (and I don’t have GEMs available.)

I’m a fan of great tech ideas and startups. This week’s great idea comes from FON.

It’s idea is this: You share free WiFi with others at home/office and they share it with you when you’re on the road.

That idea is cool - in and of itself - but there more “cool” to be found. All the technology is built into a Linksys WRT54G-type router.

Ah yes, the great WRT54G. One of the best examples of the rising importance of the “Make” culture. As soon as FON reaches the tipping point hardware hacking will really lead some to the $.