Beware your editor!

So,
I have a new jorb! Doing Ruby on Rails work even! I quash bugs and recently had a little editor snafu that I didn't catch right away. You probably already know this, but don't make my mistakes.

Usually, when it comes to text editing I use Geany on Linux. It's a nifty little design, and it's pretty simple to add snippets and what not. Sometimes though, when I'm tired and not thinking straight, I'll use good ol gedit. Hey, it comes with Ubuntu, does some pretty good syntax highlighting, and I don't think it's bad, it just does some default actions I don't like. The dang thing automagically backs up whatever file you are using! That's not a bad thing when you are doing something in say the /etc/ or /boot/ directory, but when you are using git to manage source code on a rails application, and you accidentally gedit your config/database.yml file, you can quite easily add commit and push your automagickally generated config/database.yml~ file containing your topsekrit mysql passwd for all your team to see!

I know I did!
what a n00b/dweeb...

one day i has 1337 sk1lz.
GB Hoyt

To Cut a Precious Rock

Howdy!
Recently several security vulnerabilities discovered in ruby reared their ugly head, and a fix was in order. Now if you are an Ubuntu user like myself you quickly discover that while Hardy Heron was shipped with the latest and greatest patch for ruby in its day, it often lags seriously when it comes to security updates. The best solution, I think, in such a case is to go ahead, bite the bullet and compile ruby (or any other software for that matter) from scratch. I call this the best solution because after some brief searching for a package version of 1.8.7, I had an adventure.

What you need to understand is that when I say I had and adventure, what I mean is that something went horribly wrong. It started with fireworks. The wonderful night blissfully waxed, and I sat enjoying the latest issue of Linux Pro magazine, reading some useful article about Totem (mainly useful for putting me to sleep) and gradually feeling the weight of my eyelids increase, when all of a sudden, BANG!!! Blah, some neighborhood kiddie decided 12:37 was a great time to light firecrackers. Startled me awake enough to make me want to hack something. In this case, I ran headlong into the ruby prollum. Previous attempts at compiling ruby from source were only marginally successful. I utterly failed when it came to compiling a useful ruby, especially when it came to be generating something useful for rails, and let's face it. When it comes to making money with your Ruby programming knowledge, rails is going to be your best bet. In my effort to grace my lappy named (aptly I might add) "PortableFun" with some excellent ruby versionings, I discovered that Google is a fickle friend. I'll never trust it the same again. In short, I discovered This "Nerd's Only" site when googling the phrase upgrading ubuntu 8.04 ruby 1.8.7 or some esoteric combination thereof. I followed instructions, and still, my tired brain musta did something very bad, or I didn't have the switch flipped to "More Magic" or something, because I wound up updating about half of my core packages to the 8.10 version of ubuntu!

Yeah for fail! Now I not only didn't have ruby 1.8.7, i didn't even have a working os. I took this as a sign that sleep was more important than ruby at this point. The next day I reinstalled my os, reinstalled all the important packages I thought I needed to make things work, and got back to fixin' the ruby problem. With much trepidation, I ventured back to the backstabber, Google, and tried another link. Throwing caution to the wind, I discovered a wonder place full of joy called Tag Ubuntu, and they seemed to understand my problem. Compiling ruby is a matter of knowing what all you need to enable. The source code comes with many wonderful libraries, and options, but it's so flexible it won't do crap unless you specifically ask it to look for that crap in place x in your filesystem. I followed these instructions:

$ tar zxvf ruby-1.8.7-XXX.tar.gz
$ cd ruby-1.8.7-XXX
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --with-openssl-dir=/usr --with-readline-dir=/usr --with-zlib-dir=/usr --enable-shared --enable-pthread --enable-install-doc
$ make
$ sudo make install

You are responsible for finding the tarball, usually the latest and greatest is available at The Main Ruby Site and untarring it wherever you want to compile the code. That little snippet was pretty much word for word from the ubuntu blog, but I did add the last three ./configure tags cause I find them useful.

Once I had ruby 1.8.7 installed, I got the latest issue of rubygems and installed it and then had a lot of fun installing a lot of gems.

hopefully someone can use this meandering thought page to get themselves up and running on ruby 1.8.7

I loves me the rails!
GB Hoyt

Yet Another Transition

People,
I have been changed...
It was the most natural change I could have ever made, yet I hadn't. I needed catalyst, and I received that catalyst a week ago Monday while still on vacation. I experienced shock and awe, but in an awesomely magnificent bicyclally kinda form. I went REAL Mt Biking. well, real mt biking by Florida Standards at least, the guy at the bike shop said the place we went was "for the masses". usually that is shop speak for easy, and stuff. Kelly and I rented full suspension bikes, Specialized to be exact. She had the XC, I had a Stumpjumper. It rocked. We rode a couple of trails, and went to a waterfall. We both fell in the water, and Kelly skinned her knee. I skinned my knee too, but Kelly's looked a lot more impressive. We were having so much fun that we didn't take many pictures. Next time, I'm mounting a camera on my handlebars or something. The trails rode great, too great almost, like maybe people take a lot of time maintaining them and stuff ;-)

Anyway. My main point is that I've been ruined now. I rode an awesome trail, on an excellent bike, and I can never ride the local trails the same way again. I've been refusing to go to the local bike shop for fear that I'll come home with a bike. I've been thinking Cannondale Rush. Kelly really liked the XC, so I think I'll buy one for her. I've also been thinking about upgrading some parts on my hardtail to make it into a machine worthy of taking to work and back. Disc brakes and an upgrade in shifting would do a lot. ultimately, I would like new brakes, drivetrain, and fork, something with a lockout preferably. So that's my life. I am crazy in love with gettin' on a trail with a better bike. I had too many, "this is awexome" moments the short little time we rode.

Some things to note:
If you go to Brevard, NC, visit Sycamore Cycles to do your bicycle outfitting. They didn't pay me to say that, we just had an awesome experience there. The helpful staff turned us on to some trails that while not the hardest I've ridden, they were a lot of fun. Very smooth. The only bad thing about them is that they don't open shop until 10am, but because the weather is usually pleasant, it's not such a big deal to a Florida boy to start riding at 11 or 12. Go see Wes, and tell him that the guy who was sent by Nixon sends you now.

Buy a map of DuPont state forest. It's kinda like a fundraiser for park maintenance and they keep the trails there in great shape.

watch out for horses, and associated horse poopy.

see you out there.
GB HOYT

Hmmm...

We in da hills folks, Lake Lure, NC to be exact, and my current internet status is Blackberry via EDGE network. Check my Facebook for updates.
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

Randomnessses

Ok, I'm not at work anymoe yet am using my blackberry to publish this. Short lil blog.
Bye!
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

Facebook is de Debil...

people,
i have abandoned all hope of social networking on a social networking site because nothing can compare to the joys of being solo on a social networking site for if it really did involve being social, the profiles would be viewable, and yet the people i know are my friends, the fiends i've known all along, hypervigillante, and no spam from them, just like in real life. they live there online and in far away places, but not near me, so to be social, you can't be social. let's face it, i either don't get it or i've failed to be social.

can you tell i've been reading too much faulkner.

The Blackness that is my Hand

ok, blogging with a 8mo in the house is rough.
she nappin' now though.

d00dz.
i wish you could see my right hand. it's awesomely bruised. i played superman with my bicycle saturday, and sprained my wrist. also wound up with some awexome ridge rash on my left knee and left shoulder.

hehe!
anywho. gettin' ready for some summer break action on vacation involving north carolina, and Mt. Pisgah national forest. Should be ::The End:: when it comes to mtbiking so far in my life. hey i'll be at a real mountain for a change!!
hehe, i can't wait. but i gots to padd up my skillz.

i need a new helmet now...

dag, yo!

GB HOYT

ps -- never try to install kde components from regular gnome based ubuntu 8.04.
apt-get autoremove removes about half your packages, including gnometerminal.
time for some bash hackin'!!

Exciting things afoot...

M'k ya'll listen up,
it's my daughter's third birthday! Yeah!
we marked this milestone by taking her to the dentist, and having four teeth removed and replaced with a bridge. Does that make me a mean dad?
maybe, but we did have a party saturday already, and it rawked! She's at her grandmother's house recuperating along with my traumatized wife. Poor things.

anywho:
Did install the heron on the ole lappy... ... and the lappy is about dead me thinks. Fans are goin' down, it's just a matter of tiempo. stupid fans...
who wants to buy me a mac?

ok, so weird ruby thing I learned last week:
entering:
system("cd ./some_dir/") will not change directories!
cd is not a command found in bin. idk what's up with that, enlighten me oh great Internet Mystics!

Ok, so i'z a wuss...

hehe,
don't have 8.04 release on the lappy here yet,
but hopefully will soon. namely needing time, and i don't have any because i'm in the middle of getting ready for a birthday party for a three year old all week. We are definately overdoin' things.
bleahk.

I feel cheated...

so,
today's the day,
yet there's no Hardy Heron Final. I was so hopin to do that last nite.
jerks...
instead i replaced a battery, and discovered it's not working! great... just spent some dough on something that isn't functioning properly.
i think that it's a computer problem, not a battery problem, for what its worth.

gosh, now what am i supposed to do about ubuntu?!? did some browsing through the website though, especially in the merchandise department. they have some kik-tater teeshirts available for this release, when they release it.
sweeeeeat!
i's got a 97.04% in my C++ class, that's cool. Now I need a job writing programs that are useful. hoosgot work for me?

PIECE OUT!
GB Hoyt

ah yes the very sweetness of life!

so, m'kay,
this is my last C++ class, the final exam. If I pass this I can put that i have C++ experience on my resume. now i just need to get involved in some open source project to keep my skillz sharp, and to learn more. right now i'm reading through a book designed for people who know C to get ninja in C++ and that's alright. just pokin' about in it mainly.

also ordered a new battery for the old school lappy that runs FreeBSD 6.3. when it arrives i'm gonna seriously reconsider using that one all the time, the cooling fan works better.

go figure.

that was when laptops were men!

PIECE OUT!
GB Hoyt

First Fruit!

If you consider squash a fruit, my garden is bearing fruit!

first one came out yesterday, and i planted two more seeding maters, some betterboys to be exact. some of the romas are in bloom, and soon we'll be up to our garterbelts in tomatoes!
i can't wait.

pepper plants are doin' fine too.

i silently thanked a foraging bluejay yesterday i spied chompin' on some insects round the garden. birds are awesome like that.

some notes on C++
it's lame compared to ruby, but at the same time it grows on you. the structure takes a while to appear, but at least it's not as bad as something totally lame like visual basic at least.

lets face it, you'll not be using gedit or anything sans smart tab complete to write a vb program, yet w/ c++ there are shortcuts.

ruby is still my baby though.

it's a wonderful mess.

PIECE OUT!!
GB HOYT

Silly ideas...

#1 grab a turkey, a live turkey, and start asking people if they want to have a lil' wild turkey in their beverage.

#2 Grab an old school fone, cut the end off, place in a glass of coca-cola, and tell people you are drinking jack-n-coke.

#3 Through a party, insist it's 1999. Wear bright colors.

#4 Don't eat for a day, tell people you are remembering the alamo.

#5 See number 1.

ps, check out the BASIC blog.

PIECE OUT!
GBHOYT

#6 spll wrds wtht vwls.

weeeeeee!!

we are stinking awake.
i hate being awake when i should be asleep, it's a primary motivation for getting a new job.
anywon hiring a c++ n00b?
ruby jr h4xx0r?
rails wannabee?
i only need like 55k a year.
PIECE OUT!!
GB

mk...

ok, this is for random thoughtness, and updates involving my general social life, programming adventures, randomnesss, and linking type actions to other, more focused blogs...
ok, brb...