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Error - rake ultrasphinx:configureNovember 7

A new Web Designer I work with was running into an error when attempting to configure ultrasphinx for his local Rails development environment.

rake ultrasphinx:configure rake aborted! Anonymous modules have no name to be referenced by /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.0.2/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:402:in `to_constant_name' /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.0.2/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:214:in `qualified_name_for' /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.0.2/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:477:in `const_missing' /home/deploy/apps/stylespotted/releases/20080131024018/vendor/plugins/ultrasphinx/lib/ultrasphinx/configure.rb:33:in `load_constants'

I was baffled for this for a few days. We finally figured it out this afternoon.

He is a UI developer, and new to Rails, so hadn’t created his DB. The fix was simple:

rake db:create rake db:migrate rake ultrasphinx:configure

And he had a working development.conf for Ultrasphinx

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Election 2008November 5

- flickr user sanjaysuchak

Anyone who knows me knows that I am very happy with the outcome, but regardless of your politics you have to admit that we witnessed something special.

A quick story

My mom worked as an election judge in Montgomery County. She was at the polls from 6 AM to after 10 PM and said she’d never seen anything like it. 2 hour lines, people genuinely excited, 65% turnout. She shared a story that I think illustrates why yesterday was special.

When the polls opened at 7AM there was already a line. While waiting, a 74 year old black man fainted. An ambulance was called, and while they were wheeling him out on a stretcher he asked if he could vote before he left (Edit 11/13/2008: Apparently I misheard my mother’s telling of the story. She asked the EMT about letting the man vote. Still a good story in my opinion). The EMT said it wasn’t worth risking his life over. My mom promised him that if he made it back he’d go straight to the front of the line.

A few hours later he came back in a wheelchair and cast his vote.

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The Me MemeOctober 14

Taking a break from work to participate in a silly blog meme.

  1. Take a picture of yourself right now.
  2. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair…just take a picture. (should be super-easy with Photobooth)
  3. Post that picture with NO editing.
  4. Post these instructions with your picture.

via raganwald

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Freezing to Rails 2.0.4September 21

One of our applications is still running Rails 2.0. I’m planning to upgrade to 2.1 soon, but in the meantime I wanted to upgrade to 2.0.4 to get the patch for the REXML DoS vulnerability. We freeze our version of Rails (and so should you) but I couldn’t freeze in the normal way:

rake rails:freeze:edge

This resulted in a message that the release was not found so it checked out the head instead.

I managed to freeze by running the following two commands:

sudo gem install rails --version 2.0.4 rake environment VERSION=2.0.4 rails:freeze:gems 399430821
Explanatory Text is a UI Design SmellJuly 26

I’ve had to switch the phone on my Verizon account a few times in the last couple of weeks. Verizon has an online tool that makes it pretty easy. You login to your account, click on “My Phone”, click “Activate a Phone” and then enter your ESN or MEID. The ESN or MEID is the unique identifier of the handset and is typically found in very small text underneath the battery.

All in all it is a very good experience and makes a fairly arcane task pretty easy. However, there is one bit of explanatory text (highlighted in red) that offers an opportunity for an improved user experience.

Since ESN or MEID is either in decimal or hexidecimal there never will be the letter O it will always be the number 0. However, my mother shouldn’t have to think about hexadecimal base numbers if she is changing her phone. A better solution would be to just treat the letter O as the number 0. Then the user doesn’t have to worry about it, and you can get rid of the explanatory text.

This reminds me of code smells. A code smell is a symptom that there may be deeper issues with the code. For instance, long methods are a code smell. They don’t mean that there is necessarily a problem with the code, but they do suggest that there is a goo