randyorr.net

I finally got around to trying out Ruby on Rails. Being able to use the scaffolding to get very basic functionality right out of the gates and then slowly develop the site seems like a very cool thing. I’ve never even touched Ruby before, I’ve always been more of a python kinda guy, but I guess this could get me to at least consider the language. We’ll see what happens.

I went skiing this past weekend. Ruidoso, NM had some great snow and fantastic weather. This is the first time I went skiing with my iPod shuffle. It actually worked really well. My jacket has a special pocket for mp3 players with a gromet to run the headphone wires through, I loved it. Skiing to a soundtrack was very enjoyable.

A few more pics are up on my flickr page

One of our Slackware linux servers at work just passed the one year uptime mark this morning. Very cool!

I’m really enjoying the new beta version of RSS Bandit. You can find the 1.3.0.18 Wolverine beta right here. The newspaper view of unread posts is fantastic. I think it has now passed NewsFire as my favorite rss reader.

It was indeed a bug in WordPress. Read more about it here. It’s good to see that this was fixed quickly. Good job.

This is where all of the content is supposed to go. Please ignore this, I’m just testing junk. Move along, nothing to see here

My rss feeds were not validating for some reason. I could see the file from a browser, but using any rss reader or feedvalidator.org gave a 404 error file not found. However, when I looked at the actual apache log files it was showing a normal 200. After digging around I eventually found this on the wordpress support forums. I changed the permalink structure to /%year%/%monthnum%/%postnum%/ , this also changed the rss feed mod_rewrite rules to be under blog/feed/ and now everything works properly. Hopefully.

Last Sunday was not a good day. I’m not quite sure how, but I managed to drop my powerbook as I was getting up off the couch. Miraculously, I managed to catch it mid-air by the right side of the display. I should have just let it fall to the nice soft carpet of my living room floor. You can see the results of this here.

Immediately the display went almost completely dark. If you got really close and squinted really hard you could see the faint outline of the desktop. The laptop was still running just fine, I just couldn’t see anything. Armed with my trusty Torx T6 and T8 drivers I determined to take the whole thing apart. Even if I couldn’t fix the display it would be fun to take the laptop apart.

I quickly found the problem. One simple wire had been cut. You can see it here.

Can you say redneck engineering? I can. A little piece of electrical tape and we’re back in business.

You can’t even imagine the relief I felt when the display actually powered up.

Please let this movie rock. A new trailer is available, it looks pretty good I guess.

After many attempts, I think this is going to be the final resting place of my personal blog. I’m sure the look will change quite a bit rather soon.