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By Darian Shimy, October 18, 2009 10:24 am

I came across this product on Amazon.com under their sexy costumes.

Uh, yeah!

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By Darian Shimy, October 2, 2009 1:38 pm

It looks like people who were invited to Google Wave by other users (the ones that received the original invite from Google) are still waiting to get their invite.  If Google sent out 100,000 invites and each user could invite 8 more people, that’s about 800,000 people who are waiting around getting frustrated.

Has anyone received their invite yet?

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By Darian Shimy, October 1, 2009 12:07 am

Working with a RESTful API in Rails can be a bit challenging at times.  One such problem is the ActionController::InvalidAuthenticityToken error.  This error is thrown when authenticity token is not present or invalid.  (This is how Rails protects itself from CSRF.) This token should only be checked with HTML and AJAX requests.  XML requests do not need this check.  However, if the following code is run:

$ curl -d "<status>...</status>" -X POST http://localhost:3000/statuses.xml

the InvalidAuthenticityToken error is raised.  The problem stems from an incorrect content type.  If you force the content type in the header:

$ curl -H "Content-Type: application/xml" -d "<status>...</status>" -X POST http://localhost:3000/statuses.xml

everything works as expected. This turns out to be a gotcha since GET requests don’t need the header.

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By Darian Shimy, September 9, 2009 11:19 pm

I submitted this blog to Yahoo a while ago.  Why?  It was more of a test of how fast they spider sites rather than an attempt to drive traffic.  After the submission, they stated:

Thank you! Your URL has been added to our list of URLs to crawl. Please expect a delay of several weeks before your URL is crawled.

Several weeks?  Really!

Since the submission, it appears Yahoo is doing their best to meet their goal of several weeks.

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By Darian Shimy, September 4, 2009 11:01 am

Today we received notice from Google that we would be receiving credit for the loss of service earlier in the week.

Between 12:45 PM to 2:15 PM PDT | 19:45 – 21:15 GMT on Tuesday, September 1, 2009, Google Apps Gmail users were unable to access their accounts through the Gmail web interface. … As a result of this incident, we are extending a 3-day SLA credit to your account. This credit will be reflected in an automatic 3-day extension to your Google Apps term date, and no action is needed on the part of your administrators.

Looks like Google like Netflix know how to handle customer service.  If only the second worst cell phone company would do the same.

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By Darian Shimy, September 3, 2009 10:27 pm

I was too quick to declare success in my update to Snow Leopard earlier this week.  As it turns out, much of my recovered space came from Xcode being uninstalled.  Easy fix.  Grabbed the DVD and installed it in a few minutes.  After doing some deeper checking, I found anything with native extensions or compiled with Leopard was not working.  Thanks for the heads up Apple.

With the move to 64 bit, my older 32-bit version of MySQL was moved to /usr/local/mysql-5.0.45-osx10.4-i686.  Grabbed the latest and installed the 64-bit version.  You may want to skip the preferences pane since it runs in 32-bit and causes the System Preferences to reload each time.

Macports needed a fresh install as well.  After that I needed to clean out the old builds with:

$ sudo port -f uninstall installed

This wiped everything out and I needed to reinstall my ports. As expected my gems were in need of help as well.  Although most were resolved with the following:

$ sudo gem update

the MySQL gem needed some help finding it’s cousins:

$ sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

Finally, Mongrel decided to hang during the startup and WEBrick as no better.  Had to grab Thin.  Worked like a champ.  Note to self: need to switch to Passenger for development.

I’m sure I’m missing a few things, but right now, most things seem to be working.  I’ll update this post if I find anything else.

Update: Mongrel can be fixed by uninstalling mongrel and fast thread and reinstalling mongrel:

$ sudo gem uninstall mongrel fastthread
$ sudo gem install mongrel

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By Darian Shimy, September 3, 2009 8:20 pm

There were a number of things that seemed to break with the upgrade to Snow Leopard.  The latest is my ability to deploy Rails application using Capistrano.  For some reason, the SSH connection would hang.  Looks like this was fixed today with the 2.0.15 release of net-ssh.

To get things working again, just update net-ssh:

$ sudo gem update net-ssh
Updating installed gems
Updating net-ssh
Successfully installed net-ssh-2.0.15
Gems updated: net-ssh

Deployments work like a charm.

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By Darian Shimy, February 12, 2009 9:34 am

During the last sprint, we made a critical error in planning our meetings.  Due to time constraints and people’s schedules, we scheduled the Sprint Retrospective for the last sprint after the Sprint Planning meeting for the next sprint.  The retrospective was a bust.  The team was soley focused on the next set of tasks and couldn’t understand why they needed to be in the retrospective meeting with so much work to do.  Bad idea.

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By Darian Shimy, January 4, 2009 10:04 am

Sadly today, I need to take my wife’s iPhone to an Apple store for a replacement.  This is will be the 7th iPhone between the two of us.  Here are the problems we encountered:

• The earphone jack stopped working, phone replaced
• The battery would not hold a charge, phone replaced
• The camera would only take blurry pictures, phone replaced
• The battery would not hold a charge, phone replaced
• The phone continually docks, pending

These are the first generation phones and I’m glad we purchased the warranty before our expiration period.  Although they are very good about giving a replacement, I would much prefer to have the phone last longer.  My old Nokia was indestructable.  You could use it as a hockey puck and it kept working.  It was also a very simple device.  It only made calls.  It was a phone, nothing more. 

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By Darian Shimy, July 23, 2008 9:25 am

I finally decided to sneak a peak at git, the distributed version control system.  After some light searching, I found MacPorts to be the best bet for installing the software.  While trying to install rsync, I kept getting the following error:

% port install rsync
—>  Fetching rsync
—>  Attempting to fetch rsync-3.0.2.tar.gz from http://rsync.samba.org/ftp/rsync/
—>  Attempting to fetch rsync-3.0.2.tar.gz from http://svn.macports.org/repository/macports/distfiles/rsync
—>  Attempting to fetch rsync-3.0.2.tar.gz from http://svn.macports.org/repository/macports/distfiles/general/
—>  Attempting to fetch rsync-3.0.2.tar.gz from http://svn.macports.org/repository/macports/downloads/rsync
Error: Target org.macports.fetch returned: fetch failed
Error: Status 1 encountered during processing.

If you get this error, you will need to update MacPorts.  This is accomplished by the following command:

You can then install rsync which is needed for git.  To finish the git installation, run:

If you have a problem with m755 and make, just run the command again.  It will work.

Update: I just found a Mac installer of git, but I have not tried it.  You can get it here.