My Dad Bought a Sweet Camera
He got a Nikon D40, and it is seriously awesome. Here are some photos I took with it.
“Better” resource controllers in Rails
Warning: Nerd talk here.
Scaffold REST/resource controllers in Rails aren’t too DRY. (Wow, buzzwords ahoy) You can tell because there are about a billion different plugins that try to fix them up. Here are some I’ve found:
Whew! (Maybe someday I’ll actually use all of them, but for now, I’m using James‘ resource controllers, mostly because the smart urls/urligence is quite nice)
Unsafe Data
So, my data on my desktop is currently a mix of extremes. I keep my Linux home directory striped across two 250GB HDDs (RAID 0!). (As an aside, I actually formatted the whole 500GB as NTFS, and use ntfs-3g in Linux to mount the drive… so this is really seriously flaky stuff.) And then I periodically back the whole thing up to dreamhost via rsync…
Recently I’ve found I can not load my RAID0. When mounting, it complains after finding the drives. It creates the disks fine (detecting my nvidia fake-raid), but is unable to do anything with my partitions, complaining “DOS: partition past end of RAID device”. I boot into Windows and its fine, but I have discovered a workaround… when I power on my desktop I first boot Windows, immediately restart and then boot Linux, and all is well.
I think this is very much Not Good, but it seems to work and I haven’t been able to fix it through other means…
Cool Bash Trick
I was watching my host/mentor try to fix my broken perforce client when I saw him do something really cool. You can search previous commands in bash! Hit ctrl-r and type a substring, ctrl-r again to see next result, etc. (ctrl-anything seems to kill the search, and tab selects.)
Working at Google I periodically have “Whoa how did you do that” moments, and its kind of cool being surrounded by people who are really really good at what they do.
News From the Trenches
I’m scared to shut down my laptop. I upgraded to Feisty Fawn (crossed fingers, made backup of home directory).
Yah, it didn’t work. Just before it completed I got many many error messages, all saying horrible things about my computer. “Your computer may be in an unusable state”.
I’m considering never shutting down my computer and seeing if it lives.