found_drama

• MySQL

  Marc Liyanage’s excellent tutorial w/r/t/ setting up MySQL on an OS X box.

  (tags: MySQL Mac OSX tutorial)

• Unix Commands Unique to Darwin

  (tags: Darwin Mac OSX Terminal reference)

• Achewood

  (tags: comic absurdist surreal)

Our fort is an ancient resort; the oldest hotel on Ibiza transported to much colder climates. This military installation is the last bastion of the Soviets — our slow take-over of Never Never Land having evolved into some tacit but successful bid for power over the island. From over the moon, Captain Hook sent Petrov Pan (his Venom to his Spider-Man) to ally his pirate crew with Nikita Kruschev. And while the first round of troops were eager to help purge those Lost Boy Contras, it wasn’t long before that red-coated Hook was displaced and we had set up.

But that was so long ago.

The Wall may have fallen but news travels slowly to Never Never Land and our fort still stands as a testament to Soviet might. This is not to say that we do not know about the Mother Land’s crumble into some feeble capitalism; oh no, something is undoubtedly amiss. New orders have not come from the High Command for many years now. That said, our Colonel is wise and reminds us that no new orders mean only that the original orders still stand.

So we continue with our chores, our full dress parades, our missile drills… We keep watch on the skies and interrogate the Lost Boy Contras still left alive in our holding cells. We train the pirates’ descendents the Cyrillic alphabet and walk them through the training exercises that will help them keep the island free when the Politburo declares the island safe and our presence no longer necessary.

But it’s mostly an act to the junior crew.

On this day, I am on trash chores while a parade assembly (in combat dress) moves up and down the concrete landing strip. The senior officers are assembled and for a while (as I peel potatoes and chop leeks) I watch the Captains nudge each other in the ribs under the gray sky. I cannot tell if they are joking with each other or trying to stay awake. The enlisted men and junior officers can barely keep their goose steps together and many times they break up all together, playing games of pitch-and-toss or tag.

With a can full of potato peelings and leek greens, I go downstairs to skirt the edge of the parade grounds and heap these into the compost bin. Someone picks my pocket on the way down and though I call out, I cannot see who did it. There is no use in trying to chase him anyway; my hands are full with this garbage. Once I have dumped it out however, it becomes obvious which two Ivans have picked my pocket.

They’ve fleeced me of my sidearm and toss it between them, miming fired bullets and struck limbs with each successful pass. I open my mouth to call out but these two infantrymen are jerks. I cannot stand them. My jaw goes slack and though my hand is out-stretched, no words come out.

One of them actually manages to hit the safety through his miming and the gun goes off, hitting his fellow in the face.

Everyone converges on the scene but he’s already dead.

The Colonel, having witnessed it all, descends on me. Is this your pistol? How did they get it? Why didn’t you say something and try and get it back? My answers are honest but weakly spoken and I can only stiffen and thrust my chin toward the overcast sky and stick to my story.

For various reasons, I decided to give TextMate another try (as I may be hitting Smultron‘s upper limits). One of the reasons was to because I felt like trying my hand at a few Rails tutorials and TextMate is supposed to be the de facto standard editing environment for that kind of development^[1] — and thus begins our chicken-and-egg question.

Anyway: day one of our TextMate evaluation period and I figure: No time to lose, better get crackin’ on a tutorial or two… In particular, I have my eye on this tutorial from over on the Apple developer site; it seemed to apply most directly to my specific aims in learning the language and appeared to take the most direct approach. A quick install of MySQL and Locomotive later and I’m ready to go…

But we don’t get very far, do we?

The instructions in the tutorial conflict with each other and make some assumptions about what you have (or have not done) with respect to setting up your $ENV and $PATH (etc.) On the one hand, they mention Locomotive by name as a “golden-path” method to get up and running and on the other, they’re linking out to the Hivelogic build tutorial. At any rate, there is a disconnect — and I’m fairly convinced it has to do with what is or isn’t in the $PATH; specifically, Rails doesn’t seem to know where to find “rubygems” and I’m pretty confident that it has to do with Locomotive and its “Bundles”. For example:

1. The article says to set up the project on the command line using rails expenses — but it doesn’t like that. Apparently, “rails” cannot be found. But that’s no problem. Locomotive takes care of this set up on your behalf anyway.
2. Next it says to throw script/server into the command line. I’ll admit that I skipped this one. Again: Locomotive is more than happy to do this on your behalf.
3. Where we get into trouble is with the migration generator:

$ script/generate migration accounts
./script/../config/boot.rb:18:in `require': No such file to load -- rubygems (LoadError)
from ./script/../config/boot.rb:18
from script/generate:2:in `require'
from script/generate:2

…? Not seeing a way to do this through Locomotive, I try to work my way backwards through the code. The error message certainly gives me the right breadcrumbs. Perhaps I’m still too novice with Ruby itself to fully determine what it means. I’ve got enough experience with other languages to make a guess: just like it says, it can’t fine “rubygems” but only because that file isn’t where the script expects it to be. A quick Spotlight search for “rubygems” uncovers 21 files and 8 directories (all buried deep within that “Bundles” directory that Locomotive has installed for itself.

So why the mismatch?

At this stage, I’m not certain. Which is a drag because I was expecting a much cleaner install, a much cleaner first impression. How am I supposed to “get” the beauty of this full stack framework when the only thing it wants to do for me is choke and throw errors? Alas, we’ll call it an unsuccessful night and hang up our spurs. For now.

1. Though their marketing literature would sure have you believe that it’s the de facto standard editor for any geek textnology on OS X. [↩]

• Curried Noodle Patties

  (tags: recipe todo)

• TextMate

  “The Missing Editor for Mac OS X”

  (tags: TextMate Mac OSX text editor)

• Esquire:The Napkin Project

  (tags: art literature writing todo)

If you haven’t checked out Firebug for Firefox yet… DO IT NOW.

That is to say: if you do any kind of webdev in Firefox, you should have this bad boy in your arsenal. Though I’m usually more of a Camino man myself, this little extension has put me into a Firefox renaissance these past couple of days. Browse through your code, mouse-over the elements to see what styles they use (and what styles are getting overridden etc.). It is certainly the cat’s pajamas, as they say…

In combination with the developer toolbar, you’ll have everything you need to geek your way through all the sites with which you work.

We’ve come to the lake to swim, some friends (two or three others) and myself.  The lake has a large island in the middle and may as well be little more than a moat for the island; it’s eighty feed across from the shore to the island at its widest point.  We swim clockwise around the lake, against the current.  As we finish our lap and come once again upon our starting point, I notice that a large tree has fallen across the width of one of the narrower portions of the lake.  There are lots of people on that tree, using it as an ad hoc diving board.  All of them are guys that I knew from high school and none of them I particularly care for.

Two of my accompanying friends swim up ahead faster to meet these guys and try out the diving board tree.  The other asks me what I’m waiting for.  I don’t bother telling him that I knew these guys but I get caught up in the moment and send myself forward, butterfly strokes and all, as vigorously fast as I can against the current.

When we get to the tree, I climb up and everyone else has jumped back into the water already, swimming away in a mock race, with the current this time.  On the tree is a young woman I know from high school (Becca? Lauren? something like that); she’s in a white t-shirt and guy’s swimming trunks.  She makes a few comments in my direction but I’m cautious around her; as cautious as I am diving back into the water.  I know how shallow it can be at some points, after all.

After about two years and several iterative incarnations, the time had come to bid farewell to the beard.

LivingRoom.color = “Woven Flax”

One room down… Five-ish to go…

• Top 10 Foods for a Good Night’s Sleep

  via Beauty Eats on Yahoo! Food (via LifeHack.org)

  (tags: sleep food health lifehacks)

• Flickr Leech

  via LifeHacker: a way to (ab)use the Flickr API to view up to 200 photos at once…

  (tags: Flickr hack)

• Introduction to Scripting iCal

  (tags: applescript ical tutorial todo)

• Search Free Fonts

  “over 13,000 free fonts available for download” (Windows-centric site but there are plenty of Mac-compatible TrueType fonts available for download)

  (tags: fonts typography freeware)

• MacFUSE

  The project homepage @ Google Code

  (tags: MacFUSE Mac OSX FUSE filesystem Google)

At an after-party, I meet this DJ/producer that’s built his career out of pornographic movie soundtracks.  He started out as a DJ in California (he explains) spinning mostly house and breaks; he always wanted to get into the production scene though, to have his discs become the ones that were rocking the floor.  As his tale unfolds, he explains that the porno from the 60s and 70s was fringe enough that the production houses did not spend a lot of energy, effort, or money on securing the copyrights to the music.  Those classic grooves (he continues) that everyone instantly associates with vintage skin flicks are not protected works; the films are protected but the scores from them are not.  So he started to sample them, building house tracks on top of the definitive bassline from “Debutante’s Handbook”, the timeless recurring drum loop of “Theme from Double Delights”, the twangy guitar section in the final scene of “The Good, The Bad, and The Naughty”…  Eventually the modern porn industry started to ask him to produce new material for him but it just wasn’t the same.