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Define “plugged in”

14 October 2011 0 Comments

Did you see the movie Social Network (a.k.a. the Facebook movie)? It was about the founding of the most popular social networking site, and in it was a term used many times: “plugged in”. Well, I’m under no illusion that I am or can be among the elite when it comes to software programming, but [...]

Geek Stuff, Ramblings

Goodbye, Steve

5 October 2011 0 Comments

I still can’t believe it. He’s gone — a legendary business man who created a market for people who were more interested in a product that worked, rather than how it worked. He stepped down from Apple as the CEO only a few weeks ago, and I knew it was because of his un-winnable battle [...]

News

Apple, Death, Steve Jobs

RMagick on Mac OS X: segfault?

2 October 2011 Comments Off

Here’s a quickie for ya. I recently found that using the rmagick gem causes a nasty segmentation fault on my Rails 3.1 development machine, which happens to be a Mac running OS X 10.7 (Lion). I use ImageMagick from MacPorts with Ruby 1.9.2, and here’s what I had to do to get rmagick working: gem [...]

Snippets

Mac OS X, Ruby Gems, Ruby on Rails

mysql2 Ruby Gem on Mac OS X

26 September 2011 Comments Off

Getting the mysql2 Ruby gem working on Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) and Lion (10.7) is a pain in the ass. Once you get the MySQL server installed and working, and the mysql2 v0.3.7 gem, you may get the following error when trying to rake db:migrate: 123456rake aborted! dlopen(/Users/mclark/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p180/gems/mysql2-0.3.7/lib/mysql2/mysql2.bundle, 9): Library not loaded: libmysqlclient.18.dylib [...]

Snippets

Mac OS X, MySQL, Ruby Gems, Ruby on Rails

How to turn a geek into a dental health fanatic

25 September 2011 0 Comments

There’s only one step to accomplishing this feat for this geek: buy him an electric toothbrush. I wonder how many of you think like me when it comes to electric toothbrushes. I’ve never really through about them outside of an opinion that they were just a luxury for people who had extra money to burn. [...]

Reviews

Health, Teeth

Ruby on Rails + Active Directory = Brick Wall

23 September 2011 6 Comments

I’ve been developing a new employee portal application for my employer, Ener-Tel. The project started out as a new sales estimate tool, and then evolved into a concept of an all-in-one web portal which will host various tools for all employees, not just salesmen. At Ener-Tel, we use Active Directory, so it’s important for this [...]

Geek Stuff

Active Directory, Ener-Tel, Ruby on Rails, Windows

PHP cURL and Error 417 (Expectation Failed)

20 September 2011 Comments Off

I recently noticed that my KD5HIA Weather app for iPhone stopped receiving push notifications for weather advisories. One of the PHP scripts I use to send the notifications uses cURL to POST the message via HTTP to another script on one of my other servers, and it was failing with: 417 – Expectation Failed. WTF?

Snippets

cURL, HTTP Error, PHP

Jessica and CosmoCon

17 September 2011 0 Comments

Jessica is in New York City this weekend with about 60 other Cosmo Radio fans. It’s a pretty big deal. This is just my version of how Jessica got to where she is and how CosmoCon got started.

Stories

Jessica, Travel

First round of periodontal therapy

15 September 2011 0 Comments

Today I had the periodontal therapy (mentioned in a previous post) performed on one side of my mouth (the other side will be in a couple more weeks). Overall, no big deal! I had a choice on how I wanted to not experience it, one involving some kind of foam that reduced the procedure to [...]

Stories

Health, Teeth

Oh, Facebook games

12 September 2011 0 Comments

I haven’t played hard-core computer games in years. Long gone are the days of Medal of Honor, Unreal Tournament, and Half-Life. In fact, I think I was still running Windows XP then! Well, I may not be considered a “gamer” nowadays, but I am slightly addicted to another kind: Social Games.

Ramblings