Mike's Page

Last night was the Greenwood Chess Simul exhibition and my first time participating in one. The SC Chess Association had arranged for chess Grand Master Gregory Kaidanov to play exhibitions in four cities.

We didn't have a huge turnout in Greenwood, maybe 15 players and a small crowd of spectators. This allowed the GM to play quickly and it seemed like every time I looked up, he was coming around for another move. I think everyone would have played better with a little more time to think. I was amazed when two of the Greenwood club's strongest players were out quickly. I somehow managed to hang on for a few more minutes but was just as soundly defeated. A few more guys hung on for a little longer, but the simul was over quickly. Here is my game for your enjoyment.


In retrospect I wish I had moved 8...Bb7 instead, but I'm sure there are plenty of other mistakes in my moves.

As if the regular simul event wasn't fast enough, it was followed by a couple rounds of speed chess, 5 minutes per side, with the GM playing four simultaneously. I still had nearly 90 seconds on my clock when I was checkmated.

The coolest part of the exhibition was the "blindfold" game. The GM sat facing away from the board and each player called out moves. Despite drawing one of the better Greenwood players, the GM made quick work of him. It's amazing to be able to keep track of the entire game in your head.

I really enjoyed the event and want to thank Mr. Kaidanov for taking the time to come to Greenwood.

This one stumped me for a while today. I had an application to deploy which worked fine in development. Deploying to production led to this error:

/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.0.5/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:249:in `load_missing_constant': Expected /myapp/releases/20090617160914/app/models/widget.rb to define Widget (LoadError)

Googling that error turned up lots of pages for Rails 1.2.x and issues with underscores in names. None of it applied. Widget was definitely being defined in widget.rb. Following the stack trace it appeared that the error was thrown in the Ultrasphinx plugin. After trying a lot of other things, I decided to comment out the Ultrasphinx code in the model and retry. The error changed to this, which was helpful:

Errno::EACCES: Permission denied - /myapp/releases/20090617160914/public/widget/myfile

This model was also using the file_column plugin, and the underlying error was just a permissions problem in the file attachment target directory. I fixed the permissions and put the Ultrasphinx code back in the model, and all was happy. If only that permissions error had shown up first!

Check out my sister's new website, No Retakes. She's traveling the country with her two boys.

If you're a Twitterer, please post a tweet for Katie Reider this weekend!

3!

Last Saturday I participated in my first triathlon at Santee State Park. It was an "off-road" triathlon which consisted of 3 miles of trail running, 3 miles of lake kayaking, and 7 miles of mountain biking. They had lots of participants for the short and long races, and the weather was excellent. It was good mix of people, so I didn't feel intimidated just by being there. I was there more just to compete with myself anyway.

The race made for a good excuse to exercise during the winter. I did a little more activity right after Christmas, but I didn't really get into it until the last month. Then I spent extra time at the gym and also did some "mini" triathlons here in the neighborhood.

For the race, the running was tough; I should have trained more for that and run more on trails instead of roads and treadmills. I felt great kayaking, and passed several people, but my wide poly kayak was a barge compared to the sea kayaks and racing kayaks that some other folks had. The biking was harder than expected; I was pretty tired by then and you can't coast as much on a trail as you can on the road. But all in all, I was happy just to finish! And to not be last was a bit of a bonus. I came in 19th of 26.

Now you give it a "tri."

After much frustration, I found a way to get the Ruby mysql Gem installed and talking to my MySQL server on MAMP. Credit goes largely to "Hootbah" who followed a similar path to get MAMP talking to Perl's MySQL library. Here's the steps I followed for MAMP 1.7.2:
Success!

I recently needed to run through one data file, pull a number, and look that number up in several other data files. So in Ruby, I first opened the initial file, pulled the number, and then opened the other files, iterating through every line until I found a match, then call break to move on. This worked, but it was sort of slow.

It occurred to me that I could use grep to see if the number was in the other files. So I had to figure out how to call it from Ruby. Here's what I came up with:

The speed improvement depends on how many searches you're doing and the size of the files you're searching, but in a quick test the grep calls were 5x faster.

I hereby declare my candidacy for President of the United States. So please write my name in when you vote today. Why did I wait until today? My platform is procrastination. You can expect me to drag my feet on such projects as:

• Expanding offshore drilling
• Invading foreign countries with no reason, or made-up reasons
• Renewing spying on American citizens

In the immortal words of Mark Twain, "Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow."

And whatever you do, please don't vote for this guy!

Shoulda is a handy plugin for Rails (now a Gem), which makes writing tests easier. It's worth checking out. Shoulda has been very helpful with a big Rails project I've been working on all summer, and I submitted a couple small contributions and bug fixes. I was surprised to see my name mentioned in the newest release, but I appreciate it, and it was fun helping out!

Here's a gotcha that I came across today: don't define a constant as something in one Rails rake task file, and then define the same constant as something different in another file, because the last constant will supercede them all:


I guess this happens because Rake is loading all of the task files before running the requested task. There's probably a way to namespace the constant, but I need to do more research on that. In the meantime I'll use different constant names!

We've had plenty of wildlife encounters in the past month. In late July, my dog Casey happened upon a skunk while I was out of town. My wife was stuck with the cleanup. Casey still has a funk to her if she's been out in the heat.

A couple weeks ago I went north to Tennesee for the 2008 BugGuide Swarm. Two and a half days of bug photography in the Smoky Mountains. I didn't get much sleep as we stayed up late taking pictures of moths at the lights and then up early to head out for day trips into the national park. The bug photos and IDs are still coming in, but we've turned up lots of interesting bugs so far. It was a blast.

Then while cutting my grass this week, I spotted a striking pattern slowly gliding across the rocks that border our shrubbery. My foot on the riding mower was maybe a foot away from those rocks when I saw it. I quickly recognized that pattern as that of a copperhead. I was freaked out about it being so close to the house where my boys play. Fortunately while I was debating what to do about it, I saw the snake slither its way from the house and into the woods out back. It was only about 18" long, but still spooky with that bold coloration. Note to self: keep the grass trimmed and the yard more tidy in the summer!