blog.erik.rainey.name

I just upgraded this blog to Typo-5.1.3. Here's a short description of the two night escapade that was. I install typo (copying the database.yml and other configs) and point the symbolic link I have for the domain to it, everything stops working. Fine, I know they probably updated some tables so I wasn't expecting that to work. So I run:

$ rake db:migrate

Thinking that will fix it. Nope. That doesn't even run. Why? Well there were lots of errors and what-not but after some research and having to read the code, I found out that Typo-5.1.3 thought I had to have a frozen version of Rails in my vendor/rails. However, I just installed it, so of course I don't. So I get rid of vendor/rails:

$ rm -rf vendor/rails

Now I run:

$ rake db:migrate

And failure. After some more reading I learn that Dreamhost decided to update itself to Rails 2.1.0 which is, of course, incompatible with this version of Typo. Great. Now I do have to have a frozen version of Rails. Now I have my own gems on Dreamhost, so I think, no problem, I'll just move it over to that. 

$ rails -v

Rails 2.1.0

Great, it's not even in my gems. So I wget all the Rails 2.0.2 parts (remember the Ruby-Killer on Dreamhost will stop any remote fetches gems!). I install Rails 2.0.2 into my local gems. 

$ rake rails:freeze:gems

Still fails. Great. Turns out Dreamhost installed Passenger for Rais, which is great since it'll speed up loading. However it's also not working with Rails 2.1.0, which is fine I think since I froze it, but it turns out that Passenger ignores your Gems. Awesome. So I try locking the RAILS_GEM_VERISON and the ENV['GEM_PATH'] in environment.rb and then it works. Now, I try to access the new /admin page. That works. Now we migrate. 

$ rake rb:migrate

Failed in Version 71. F**k!  I go to the MySQL Admin page with a righteous fury and open the migrate script up to see what the 071 script does. Looks like it just makes the tag names safe by converting '.' to '-'. Awesome. Now why would that fail? Who knows. I look through tags and I don't even have any with '.' in them. Great. I do have some with ',' in them, so I fix those and move the schema_info table to 71. I run the migrate again and it seems happy since 71 is the latest. Now I load the front page of the blog.

Fail. I'm fairly peeved now. 

I decide to heed previous experience here and go through the Admin pages one by one and which ones fail. Sidebar. That old f**ker. I go into the MySQL Admin and save the old sidebars in a text file and rip them all out. Reload Admin page. Works. Reload blog. Works. Great! Finally. Easy install huh? You just have to hack you database, edit a bunch of config files, and burrow through some code to get it working. At least I can use the /admin page to edit posts again. 

Well I finally summed up the courage to ask Amber to marry me last night. She said yes!

...on flickr.

Amber and I just go back from our cruise on Royal Caribbean's Voyager of the Sea. I was deeply impressed with the ship itself (so much so that we bought the "Building the MegaShips" DVD they had in the store on the ship about the ship). For the most part I defer to Amber's detailed post here about our trip except to add detail about my dive. Specifically my right ear would not clear, which is not really important other than to emphasis how close I was to being able to dive the first dive (which was going to be an 80ft max Wall dive on a edge of the island). Supposedly the bottom of the wall is at 3000ft, but really past 140ft, it's just a dark blue void, so it's not like you can see the bottom. Incidently, I was able to see from my vantange point at 7ft, 2 sea turtles (which were not close enough to photograph) and bunch of fish.

 Recently Amber and I went to Which Wich, which was rather good (awkward phrasing intended).  At this chain, they let you decorate a sandwich bag which you can then hang up and show. I created this little ditty: 

Over at The Street, a video indicates that standard Mac users are snobs. Lets see how I match up!

• Perfectionist? - Check
• Feel self-important? - Check
• Use a Notebook Computer? - Check
• Use Teeth whitening products? - Nope
• Drive station wagons? - Nope
• Pay for downloaded music? - Check
• Go to Starbucks? - Triple Hit Sugar Free Syrup Grande Check
• Care about "green" products and the environment? - Nope
• Own a hybrid car? - Nope
• Buy 5 pairs of sneakers in a year? - Nope
• Buy organic food regularly? - Nope
• Politically Liberal? - Nope
• Satisfied with purchasing a Mac? - Check

I guess I'm not the standard snob?

I recently got a AM-311S Digital Microscope (for Valentine's day), which is awesome. I then used said microscope to look at myself in great detail. Suffice it to say, my nose is a forest. Do not enter with a basket of cakes for your grandmother. There be wolves there.

I also took some great videos of my ring, my MacBook Pro and Amber's Diamond Nexus Earring. I'm not terribly good at holding things still under 50x to 200x magnification, but I'm working on it.

P.S.: My pores are a mess.

Over this last weekend, (Oct 20-21st) Amber and I went down the MAKER Faire in Austin, TX. It was awesome. We saw some really neat projects there along with some really lame ones. If you don't know what MAKE is I suggest you head over to the site. We carved pumpkins and put LEDs in the them, entered the Adobe XD contest (made a t-shirt design), learned about Google Sketch while making an object (and got a t-shirt and socks), made some beaded trinkets and generally had a good time. On Sunday we went down to Alamo in San Antonio, and spent some time walking around the Riverwalk. For lunch we went to Mi Tierra and got a great lunch along with some really good bakery items.

When I got my iPhone, I decided to go back to using my Dreamhost account through IMAP so that I could have a single account with a persistent state. While this is nice, I didn't want to have to wade through a ton of spam on my iPhone. Since I wasn't neccesarily have Mail.app or Thunderbird open all the time at home running mail filters, and you can't do that on the iPhone, I was in a bind. How do I filter my mail easily and still use IMAP across multiple devices?

I came across Gurgitate-Mail, a great little filter which is launched by procmail or whatever you use to receive email. You can write some pretty concise email rules or make it even more complex. The point is that you can write rules in a proper programming language instead of cobbling together something in your favorite Mail program. In the coming days I will be posting more about what I've done.

I got my certification for PADI Rescue Diving over the weekend. The lake conditions were terrible (visibility was less than 5 ft at the surface). The camp site that the dive instructors choose was literally covered in spiders so Amber had to stay in the car the whole time that we visited their site, which was only limited to an hour or two in the morning. The dive site had a few fisherman who, on Sunday, decided to call the park rangers on us. On the morning before we had accidentally swam under their line and got it tangled. Evidently they were still pissed the next day.