Botany photo of the day

Oct 02 ’10

Filed in plants

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Botany photo of the day: Halloween edition

Oct 31 ’09

Filed in plants

One of my photos was chosen to be today's Botany Photo of the Day by the UBC Botanical Garden. I think it's because the flower in question is a crazy bat-looking tropical thing. Read the rest …

Running git-svn and svn smoothly with kerberos on Mac OS X

Sep 28 ’09

Filed in operating systems

I've been trying to learn git, and I thought that I would start by using git-svn to wrap up my upstream subversion repositories and lean the beauty of easy branching.

As I learned, however, getting git-svn to work with kerberos tickets on your system is a pain.

With the built-in OS X subversion binaries, you get a very strange error:

PROPFIND request failed on '/my_repo/my_project': PROPFIND of '/my_repo/my_project':
207 Multi-Status (https://svn.domain.com) at /usr/local/libexec/git-core/git-svn line 1699

Wow. That's unhelpful. It turns out that git uses the perl svn modules in order to talk to subversion, and that they are lacking a kerberos binding on Mac OS X. Or something like that. My unix-fu wasn't up to the task of figuring this problem out; I got help from my local unix guru. The solution was remarkably simple, however. Read the rest …

Digital plants by Macoto Murayama

Aug 14 ’09

Filed in distractions, plants

It's not too often that you find a good mashup of plants and computers, but artist Macoto Murayama manages the trick:

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Yoshida Brothers rock!

May 19 ’09

Filed in distractions, music

I rarely post about music, but I just got back from an awesome concert, and I thought I'd share.

The Yoshida Brothers are brothers from Hokkaido (northern Japan) who are just over 30 years old and have been playing the shamisen since they were five. They are truly masters of the instrument. Read the rest …

RailsConf '09: What professionalism is about

May 12 ’09

Filed in ruby on rails

Robert Martin's keynote at RailsConf this year, though ostensibly about SmallTalk, was really about professionalism. Many people are talking about it, but I think there's part of the message that everybody missed. Read the rest …

HOWTO: Create a new link by munging the current URL in Rails

Mar 20 ’09

Filed in ruby on rails

I've been working on a restful app that allows very complicated searches. I've been composing scopes to build the searches, but that's another post. All searches use the index action of the resource's controller. I wanted to offer RSS feeds for every possible search, to allow users to really get only the information they are interested. But I couldn't figure out how to generate the custom RSS feed link easily. I could have gone through my list of scopes, and then re-created the URL with :format => :rss, but that's not very DRY. It turns out that there's a much easier way. Read the rest …

Change the prompt in the Rails console

Mar 04 ’09

Filed in ruby on rails

At work, I frequently find myself in the situation of having two or three or more console windows open, working on multiple apps in different environments. After almost getting myself into trouble on several occasions, I decided that I'd rather have the Rails console tell me what environment I'm running in. Read the rest …

The Devonia Cocktail

Nov 17 ’08

Filed in food

Here in Oregon, it's fall. The leaves have changed colors, the weather is changing. When I go to the farmer's market, I no longer see plums; root vegetables, apples and pears are the norm now. And the apple cider is here.

I've been thinking about seasonality a lot recently; I figure that, although I can make a drink that tastes like a long summer day on a tropical beach, perhaps in Oregon in the fall I should make a drink that tastes like Oregon in the fall. A few searches on Cocktail DB later, I've found the Devonia Cocktail.

Wow! What a drink! It's not particularly strong — it has less than a full shot of alcohol — but it is extremely smooth and well balanced. Read the rest …

HOWTO: Use a Rails model with an Oracle public synonym

Nov 11 ’08

Filed in ruby on rails

The title of this post is somewhat misleading. It turns out that you can't use Oracle public synonyms with Rails, because of how ActiveRecord obtains information about the fields in its models.

The problem

Let's say you have the following model:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
end

If you have a public synonym in your database called users AR will fail, with an error message about how it can't get column information for the users table.

Why is that?

Well, AR queries the all_tab_columns view to get the column list, with something like this: Read the rest …