Jun 28
I was trying to get my rails app to properly search amazon, using the
amazon-ecs library, but could never get the local server to start up. Turns out the problem was in my environment.rb file. I had entered:
config.gem "amazon-ecs"
The error I was getting was a big stack trace that ended with:
I was approaching the point of screaming back, "I ALREADY RAN THE INSTALL YOU STUPID MACHINE!" However, it turns out you also need to specify the library too:
config.gem "amazon-ecs", :lib => "amazon/ecs"
Jun 28
Found this via
Strobist's twitter feed, it was meant for photographers, but I think it applies to just about every profession that requires some semblance of creativity.
Perhaps my favorite bit from it:
"It is about the ability to sustain, to weather the storms, to shoot poorly and still survive a job, to fight out of inevitable creative slumps, to live with all manner of risk that lots of folks would find uncomfortable, to make uncertainty your friend, and to thrive despite sudden curves and happenstance. I guess what I'm describing is tenacity. To love doing this so much that you'll go through 1000 "no's" just to hear the one 'yes.'" - Joe McNally
Jun 28
Found this site via Smashing Magazine:
"a simple tool that helps web designers find variations of any color."
And speaking of Smashing Magazine, I tend to like what they do, but I often find it's almost like drinking from the firehose. They offer so much aggregated content, I often just skip their articles altogether since it would be too much effort for me to sift through them all.
Jun 25
What the Google Maps API recommends if your browser doesn't support GeoLocation:
alert("Your browser doesn't support geolocation. We've placed you in Siberia.");
initialLocation = siberia;
Jun 25
Read a pretty great post over by
Chris Ashworth, "My Competitive Advantage: I Hire Artists"
The gist is that an "artist" as he describes it, is the kind of person who is truly passionate about something. The example provided is that the artist in question turned down a significantly higher salary at a stable job in order to work for the author. Choice quotes:
"[He] is the kind of guy that uses QLab like a musical instrument. I couldn't keep up with him if I tried. He makes things in QLab I didn't even know were possible. AND I WROTE IT."
"But for many (all?) of the best people in the world, money stops mattering once you have enough to not worry about it."
At least for me, the word "artist" has conotated someone who was tempermental, lazy, and pretentious. And I think that for a large number of so-called "artists" this is true. But I think the true ones are as Chris describes:
"Artists, as a species, are amazing people... Show me a good artist and I will show you a highly educated, highly creative, highly passionate, highly driven human being."
Jun 24
I really like the header (and overall design in general) on
Thomas Maier's website.
Jun 23
I was following along with the example project for getting AuthLogic setup on a Rails app, and almost immediately got this error when running UserSession.find:
Couldn't find User Session without an ID
After poking around a little bit, I realized that I accidentally set the UserSession model to inherit from the default ActiveRecord::Base rather than Authlogic::Session::Base.
Changing it to use the proper base class fixed the problem.
Jun 23
A co-worker of mine managed to get his iPhone 4 delivered today, and I got a chance to briefly play with it.
The screen is noticeably better, though I don't necessarily know if it is super-duper-omg-awesome better. For hd video and photos, it might be though. Of course, we couldn't try out Facetime because we 1) weren't on wifi, and 2) didn't know anyone else with an iPhone 4 anyway. I hope/suspect Apple will roll out a Facetime enabled iPod touch soon, and also integrate it with iChat; that'd really get it out in the wild.
AT&T's network seemed fairly crappy (per usual), and only reinforced my decision to not get one until it is on a better network.
What impressed me most though was the speed of the thing, in terms of opening apps and doing stuff (especially Google Maps). Granted, it was fresh out of the box with not a whole lot running on it, but the outright speed of it would be the biggest killer feature for me.
(Did you notice that there are four 'iPhone's in the title there, correlating to the iPhone 4? Bow before my cleverocity)
