Month: October 2007

Thursday, 18 October 2007

Walk It Off

by Garrick van Buren Comments Off on Walk It Off

Ed Kohler draws a 2 mile circle around his house and identifies all the places within biking distance.

Walkscore.com quantifies and ranks the amenities within 3 miles of your house on a scale of 0 – 100. Suprising results at least for me – the Roseville Apple Store is bikeable at 2.48 miles away.

Project Launch: Sun Downloads

by Garrick van Buren 1 Comment on Project Launch: Sun Downloads

Sun’s new download service launched yesterday – a project I’ve been working on for 18 months or so. Big congrats to Gary Zellerbach and the rest of the project team on this milestone.

If you’d like to compare and contrast, the initial four products (of the 1000s being migrated) are:

MySQL on OS X Reinstall Reminders

by Garrick van Buren 3 Comments on MySQL on OS X Reinstall Reminders

First off, if you can avoid reinstalling MySQL on OS X – by all means do. Whatever the reason is that you want to do a reinstall, it’s not a good one1. Just buck up and work around whatever issue you have. It’s not as bad as what follows.

Let’s say you decide to reinstall anyway.

Since there’s no easy way to uninstall, you go on a crazy rabbit hunt – including showing all the hidden files2 – through your system to eradicate all instances of MySQL and any dbs (bu-bye data). Then, you downloaded and installed a fresh binary from dev.mysql.com. Now, there’s no reason to do 3 or 4 system restarts, but you haven’t listened to me this far.

Weeee.

Now, I’m pretty sure that if you go back into your Rails app and run rake db:migrate you’ll get the following:
dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/local/mysql/lib/mysql/libmysqlclient.15.dylib

Thank Peter Morris for reminding you to run:
sudo install_name_tool -change /usr/local/mysql/lib/mysql/libmysqlclient.15.dylib /usr/local/mysql/lib/libmysqlclient.15.dylib /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7/lib/mysql.bundle

Hey, not so fast, make sure you set up the same root pass you had before:
/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqladmin -u root password new_password_here

1. My reason – I was intermittently getting "Lost connection to MySQL server during query" when running rake test. It seems better now. There had to be
2. defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles ON

Wednesday, 17 October 2007

3.75 Reasons Jonathan Coulton Is More Interesting than Radiohead

by Garrick van Buren 2 Comments on 3.75 Reasons Jonathan Coulton Is More Interesting than Radiohead

In Jonathan Coulton’s Portal post, I find 6 things very interesting. He:

  1. was commissioned (I’m assuming) to write a song for a video game ($$$)
  2. likes the video game (is this an ad or a recommendation to his fans?)
  3. includes the lyrics in the post
  4. includes the chords in the post
  5. thanks the video game dev team
  6. recommends another game with a great theme song that

3.75 of them are for JC’s fans. He didn’t need to include any of them. Others haven’t and wouldn’t. This to me makes Coulton a far more interesting and fan-oriented musician than Radiohead simply removing the middleman.

LATER:
Tonight, my iPod randomly pulled an almost-exactly-one-year-old Coulton/Hodgeman/Sound of Young America interview from my Unlistened Podast playlist. Quite good. Hodgeman even discusses Minnesota State Fair food.

Tuesday, 16 October 2007

The New Dad Book Needing To Be Written

by Garrick van Buren 4 Comments on The New Dad Book Needing To Be Written

We’ve Got Money, What We Need is You
A New Dad’s Family Handbook

The first time around, we picked up the stereotypical new parent books. If any of you are having your first child – you only need one of those books. Go to the bookstore, page through them all, buy the one that makes you smile.

Chances are, it won’t be The Expectant Father or any other of the “serious” New Dad books. As my college roommate warned – all those books do is amplify the sense of financial inadequacy (all?) new dads feel and the need to double the instinct to “provide”.

Unhelpful.

There needs to be another book – one encouraging being present in the new family.

Any candidates?

UPDATE: Dan Brown recommends Be Prepared: A Practical Handbook for New Dads. A second?

RE: Crushing the life out of the iPhone ecosystem

by Garrick van Buren 5 Comments on RE: Crushing the life out of the iPhone ecosystem

A couple years back, after ‘getting’ the idea of having all my favorite audio with me at a moment’s click – I had grown bored of my then new 40gb iPod. A few minutes of searching and I found Doc Searls link about the iPod Platform. Suddenly, I was neck-deep in podcasting. Even in those early days, the open, informal, deep-dive nature of podcasting made my iPod interesting again in a way the closed iTunes Music Store just didn’t.

From another early days MN podcasters – emphasis mine:

“As a stockholder, I’m concerned about the command-n-control, draconian measures being exhibited by Apple around the iPhone and what that is doing to any semblance of an iPhone ecosystem. I’m also bored with a stock iPhone and was really enjoying what the ecosystem was delivering.” – Steve Borsch

I’ll be excited about the iPhone when it’s more of an ecosystem and less of a museum artifact. Looks like that time will be in February 2008 🙂

Monday, 15 October 2007