HPLogsdon

You probably havent noticed, but I moved this blog from hplogsdon.com to blog.hplogsdon.com.

Some time ago, I attempted to install FreeBSD on my Apple MacBook Pro CoreDuo, but ended up getting frustrated with the booting process and wiped it clean. 7.0-RELEASE attempted to enable GUID Partition Table support, but it didn't seem to be available or working until 7.1-RELEASE. Well, now that 8.1-RELEASE is out the door (for a while now) it seems that support is much better. I hadn't had a chance to test it yet, but I became frustrated with my iMac over the past few months and last week it finally hit critical mass. Now seems to be the time to try this out and see if I can get a very usable FreeBSD desktop.

I've always been on the lookout for good tutorials and educational materials on programming. I'm too cheap to personally go back to school to learn, and I know of enough people that haven't ever graduated any CS course that do well. I think I can succeed the same way. Every once in a while I come across something pretty fantastic. Things like MIT's Open Courseware are great, but a lot of times, blog posts and short how-to's are better due to them being very specialized. I get bored with abstract ideas without any use for them.

In the last post, I outlined a simple way to adding to the Ruby.framework bundle the newer version of the Ruby Language, 1.9. Shortly after I published that, I started hacking around with some other code, and a friend was trying to show me something neat with Ruby-HEAD... Well, that made it difficult to add a HEAD into the bundle, since the bundle is supposed to be pretty static and not prone to constant modifications. My way works for simple things (get 1.9, end). He suggested I try RVM.

I broke down and installed Ruby 1.9.1 on my MacBook Pro today. It was rather simple, but there was one thing that I've learned to do, that I didn't see anyone bother with. If you drop down into Terminal.app and look at the ruby executable /usr/bin/ruby ...

I use the website Binsearch a fair amount, specifically the Browse feature. A site like Binsearch makes it so I dont have to spend a lot of bandwidth and cpu power downloading and threading/sorting headers. Unfortunately, they seem to have a custom option that automatically groups similar threads together, usually by the same poster. I see its usefulness in combatting SPAM and what-not for text and discussion groups, but not for binaries.

Some time ago when I first started hacking WordPress (about v2.2 iirc) I can remember having to go into my MySQL terminal and replace the admin password due to me not changing the random string they gave you just after you installed it. It wasn't fun to do, but it worked.

I'm an idiot...

A few days ago I heard that facebook's chat feature, which I had never actually used, had been "released" as an XMPP service. That meant people could technically use a standard IM client to connect to it, without having to be connected to facebook.com inside their web browser. I love the Unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing one thing well, so when I have to have 3 processes running that do essentially the same thing, but cant interact and do it all, I get annoyed.

So, the past few month I've built a few applications using Rails. They aren't big applications by any means, but they are the old standbys I code up when I'm trying something new. I now have a custom Blog, Gallery, Shopping Cart/eCommerce and semi-Collaborative Task List.