Mike's Page

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!

Katie Reider, 1978 - 2008

Katie is part of my family, and it hurts so much that her fight had to end this way.

Keep her singing in your heart.

Peace.

Links: Details, More of the Story, Beautiful Photos of Katie

I was initially disappointed when it was announced that Ruby on Rails was moving its version control system from Subversion to Git. There's enough to keep up with in Rails that I didn't relish having to keep up with this as well. It wasn't so much that Rails was moving, but related code began to move too, so we're currently in this limbo where many plugins have both git and soon-to-be-deprecated SVN repositories, and it's just another detail to keep track of. Hopefully there will be tools to sort all this out soon.

I like my SVN GUI tools, but it turns out that git works pretty well on Windows under Cygwin, if you can live with the command line. It's certainly sufficient for cloning plugin repositories.

I could take or leave git by itself, but I love GitHub. They make it so easy to fork an existing project, make your own changes to it, and share it back with the world. Your changes can easily be pulled back into the original projects, too. I've been able to make a couple of small contributions to shoulda and acts_as_xapian.

So git is fun after all, and I'm looking forward to using it more; especially when the GUI tools show up.

I've been getting a little more kayaking in lately, mostly to new places. In February I paddled the South Fork Edisto River. In March I went on my first whitewater trip to the Lower Green in North Carolina. My 14.5' boat managed the Class II rapids and I stayed dry, but plenty of that was luck. Last week I did a jaunt along the Lake Greenwood shoreline and found Black Crowned Night Herons living in an inlet near my neighborhood. This past Saturday I paddled the Enoree River. It started with an hour of steady rain, but ended with quite pleasant weather. It's good to get out on the water!

I've had a Canon Pixma MX700 multifunction printer since the beginning of the year. I've been pretty happy with it. It's worked well for scanning, copying, faxing and printing. Until today. Today I needed to scan something, and was greeted with the following message when I turned it on:

U150 The following ink tank cannot be recognized.

The yellow cartridge was indicated. I though that it was an odd problem, but I didn't care for the moment, because I didn't want to print, just scan. But no button on the printer would bypass this error and let me scan.

I ended up calling Canon, and happily received a domestic phone rep. He had me try a couple things, but eventually decided that the yellow ink would need to be replaced. They would send me one free. I asked if there was any way to bypass the error so I could just scan, and he said there was not. If I wanted to use it today I would have to go out and buy a yellow ink cartridge. So after driving all the way across town and spending $16, I have my printer back...for now.

It seems like questionable design to cripple all the functions of the printer just because one color cartridge is faulty. A better failure mode would be to only prevent color printing. Black and white printing, and the other printer functions should still be usable. Hey Canon, how about updated firmware for this? Please?