In a post entitled “Retreat!” Christian blogger Tim Challies decries the ubiquity of cell phones and texting among Christian youth, rightly noting that they can’t stand going a few minutes without talking or (nowadays) texting. The martial art of Judo teaches us to use an opponent’s own weight and momentum against him, and a small group at the Willow Bend Community Church of Lutz, Florida has figured out one way to do just that by translating the entire Bible into mobile message text. A confession here: it was my wife’s idea, she discovered a way to do it as well, and I actually did it. We have created a site to sell d Old Textament and d New Textament at Textament.com. A Mobipocket version will follow soon.
Reaching Young People with a Text Message Bible
March 13th, 2009Joining Technorati
January 20th, 2009Newbie Miscues Hampered Eldorado Deployment
January 20th, 2009First, I want to thank Trevor Turk, Eldorado’s creator who chimed in with a comment a couple of posts ago. He must have an RSS feed from Technorati that caught my posts and afforded him the opportunity to make a comment that eventually sent me down the right path.
Briefly, I had Eldorado in two folders on my development machine’s Ubuntu drive partition dedicated to Rails development. Only I hadn’t clearly understood that at one point, and at another point (or more) I had taken steps in Trevor’s README file in one place or another, but never consistently in both. To top it off, I had bollixed a “rename” in Trevor’s README file (because I was looking at it in Microsoft Notepad and all the paragraph breaks were ignored so all the text was run together). This caused me to copy config/database.example.yml to config/database.yml2 when the latter should have been config/database.yml.
So I concluded that the Eldorado folder under the “root” folder was hopelessly buggered and I copied the contents of the relatively unscathed Eldorado folder that was under the system’s root (and not under a folder named “root”) to the root folder. Then I performed the steps as outlined in the Eldorado Readme file and Eldorado loaded and ran flawlessly.
There was no need to edit any “routes.rb” file. Nonetheless I will be needing to edit, so my advice to newbies is to make sure you learn the following:
1. Make sure you either load a Ubuntu distro that has the GUI on your Rails development machine or on a separate machine on your network.
2. Make sure you understand permissions and set up an icon that invokes nautilus and gksudo so that you can have admin status in your GUI session.
3. Know how to “mount” a drive from within the GUI session so that you’ll be able to reach your Rails development folders on the separate partition while still in the GUI session.
4. Load a basic editor like Emacs that gives you a simple editor in your GUI session. If you’re ready to
pay for something more advanced, Radrails would probably be the pick.
5. Know how to log in as the “root” user on the non-GUI partition where the Rails environment lives.
6. Know how to change directories (the CD command, just like good ol’ MS-DOS) under Linux.
If you get those basic things under control you will save a lot of time and headaches.
For the moment I have to back-burner the project I’m working on though and pay more attention to some quotidian billing concerns at my business.
Getting Eldorado Going
January 20th, 2009Well, since my last post I started eldorado running using the “script/server” command and got this:
“NameError in WwwController#index
uninitialized constant WwwController
RAILS_ROOT: /root/eldorado”
Apparently it’s the result of the default route I set up in the routes.rb file “map.connect ”,
:controller => ‘www’” which was supposed to “work like a charm”
http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/70135
Not so much. But getting rid of the statement entirely (and commenting out the two operant statements in the routs.rb file set me back to:
“Routing Error”
No route matches “/” with {:method=>:get}”So that wasn’t the solution.Now it was time to punt. This site said eldorado could be installed automatically.http://blog.fiveruns.com/2008/10/20/automatic-production-railsThe trouble was, the “wget” command didn’t work on the Ubuntu install where rails lives.I’ll try to get that working next.
Getting Ruby To Run An Actual Development Website
January 19th, 2009I’ve been able to get a basic ruby on rails installation to boot, however in order to get my chosen package, Eldorado installed it hasn’t been easy. I downloaded Eldorado from the http://almosteffortless.com/eldorado/ website. Then I unzipped it on my PC and wrote it to a CD-ROM. Trouble started after that. I got a quick hard, lesson in LINUX permissions, as Ubuntu wouldn’t let me load Eldorado onto the hard disk. Finally, I found a page that taught me how to make an icon called “root” on my Ubuntu desktop that would log me in temporarily as the root user (a status that the user on the Ubuntu desktop does not have, just as the Vista user doesn’t have “admin” access unless he specificially invokes it). I created a root access Icon using this set of instructions: http://www.instructables.com/id/creating_desktop_shortcut_for_root_permissions_in_
More detailed discussion of how to get temporary root access is here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RootSudo
Once I did that, I was able to launch Firefox in ubuntu, download the Eldorado zip file, and unzip it to the newly created “Eldorado” folder on the partition set aside for Ruby, which got the ball quite a bit further down the field.
So Eldorado’s creator, ‘foo’ included four instructions for how to get the thing going:
1) Copy config/database.example.yml to config/database.yml
(I was able to do this)
2) Create your database (“rake db:create”)
This one went wrong … the database work hadn’t been done, so I had to get mysql3 going. The error message was “no rule to make target” and the fix was described here: http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk/browse_thread/thread/aa726882c3bbb2e6?fwc=1 Specifically, I needed to issue two commands:
sudo apt-get install sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev
sudo gem install sqlite3-ruby
3) Load the database schema (“rake db:schema:load”)
This step worked.
4) Start your web server (“script/server”)
And the web server could be started. That’s where things got murky again, because the standard Ruby welcome screen came up and said to do three more things:
-
Use script/generate to create your models and controllers
To see all available options, run it without parameters.
-
Set up a default route and remove or rename this file
Routes are set up in config/routes.rb.
-
Create your database
Run rake db:migrate to create your database. If you’re not using SQLite (the default), edit config/database.yml with your username and password.
I was pretty sure that 1) had already been taken care of, leaving 2) and 3). Trouble is, the newbie has no idea where “this” file is and no idea how to set up the default route.
“This” file is /public/indx.html.
There is some help on the default route problem here:
http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/70135
I’m working on the problem now but I don’t have the answer yet.
Miracle on the Hudson – Miracle on Wall Street?
January 16th, 2009Yesterday’s USAirways crash landing on the Hudson River between Manhattan and New Jersey has been fodder for wall-to-wall news coverage since it happened just after 3:30 yesterday. But while the word “miracle” has been used over and over, I haven’t heard many people reference God in the equation, although “miracle” carries with it the connotation that God did indeed perform the act. Of course, Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III certainly played no small part in what happened, but then miracles usually do have human heroes as well.
What I am really driving at is that God really does still perform miracles, and we see them every day. This one, in full view of Wall Street is perhaps also a sign … a sign that we can all survive the crash, pick up the pieces and go on with our lives. The global economy is like a large and very complex aircraft whose engines have sucked in a couple of birds. And it may be unsalvegeable in its present form (or not), but the key is that our leaders (political and financial) have the opportunity to scramble to build something better. If they fail to do so, it will cost lives. If we pray for them and they are guided by Godly principles and create a structure that accords with such principles, we will all be better off.
Ruby On Rails is Running on the Ubuntu Box
January 14th, 2009A couple of quick notes. First, the completion of the Ubuntu box and its successful boot yesterday fulfilled what I said I set out to do in one of my earliest posts: http://www.fromjumpstreet.com/?p=3#more-3
Also, by close of business yesterday I had also installed a second Ubuntu operating system in a separate partition on the main hard drive, and it carried with it the Ruby on Rails web development environment. I simply downloaded a turnkey Ruby on Rails implementation from http://www.turnkeylinux.org/appliances/rails and used InfraRecorder again to make an image onto a CD-ROM, then I booted from that image and allowed it to partition the hard drive on the Ubuntu box. Once that was done, Ruby on Rails was running on that box and could be accessed from any PC on my network through any web browser.
Back to What I’d Intended After a Long Layoff
January 13th, 2009When I started this blog, I was building a PC to run Ubuntu. Several things interfered with progress on that front, including lack of a monitor and the physical arrangement of my office, which was not conducive to having a second or third PC set up. Recently both of those problems were solved, and I scrounged the oldest CD-ROM drive in our home, installed it with instructions from http://www.duxcw.com/digest/Howto/cdrom/cdrom2.html and I’m installing Ubuntu on the box as I write this post. The CD-ROM drive was simply a matter of connecting the power cable, the ribbon cable and finding the speaker pins on the motherboard to install the four-pin connector for the speaker wire that runs to the CD-ROM (you can skip this if you don’t want to play CD’s through the speakers on your computer).
Yesterday I followed the instructions at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=505456 for creating a Ubuntu boot disk and after downloading Ubuntu from a Georgia Tech mirror site I found at http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download. I downloaded the desktop edition, which should be sufficient for me to prototype the Ruby on Rails app that I intend to develop as a fork from Beast or Eldorado. In order to create the image disk that could be booted to install Ubuntu I had to download Infrarecorder, a free utility that burns the Ubuntu files as an image onto a CD-ROM.
BTW, the keyboard and mouse I chose for this PC were both under $10 each from Big Lots. I’m using products by GearHead.
When the Ubuntu install began, I was asked what language I wanted to use, and then numerous files loaded and a second screen asked me again. The language choices were seemingly endless, including Esperanto. I chose English of course, being an American whose Arabic, French and Spanish are rusty perhaps beyond repair. That was step one of seven. Step two was to select a time zone, and New York was the default. Since I’m on the Wwst Coast of Florida in the same time zone, that worked just fine. The third option was to choose a keyboard layout. Even for the USA, there were perhaps a dozen, including numerous Dvorak variations. I chose the plain-vanilla option. The next choice was disk partitioning, and I chose to use all of an old 15gb Maxtor I installed. I also have a Fujitsu disk in there, but it doesn’t seem to be working and I’ll need to see what (if anything) I can do about that. The next step required me to enter some information about myself and a username and password. The last step was simply to review and accept all the settings. I received a final warning that the existing data on the hard drive would be destroyed, and installation began.
The ubuntu installation routines formatted the disk and proceeded to install the system files, about 45 minutes after which I was invited to reboot. The PC detected the install disk in the tray and prompted me to remove it. Then the system booted ubuntu. Unfortunately, it booted with numerous errors and immediately dropped to a shell (the equivalent of the C:/> prompt on a PC. A steady parade of errors scrolled up the screen, all of them variations on “DRDY ERR” “ICRC ABORT” “SRST FAILED” and “exception eMask” and various things being frozen and timed out. I pressed the small button on the front of the PC for a soft reboot.
The key problems seem to be “Gave up waiting for the root device” and ”Alert! /dev/diskby/uuid/66b494d8-0861-4955-8e0b-8a25b2c2a1d6 does not exist.” I can enter “help” for a list of built-in commands. The commands are hardly less cryptic than the error messages.
I checked ubuntuforums.com for a fix, and found a post that seemed helpful, but I couldn’t get the editor working, nor could I change anything. Being the type who is prepared to deviate from the obvious track to something he suspects may be a problem, I removed and examined the hard drives, since I had noticed that in the BIOS boot routine for the motherboard only one drive was being auto-detected, and it was the old 4gb Fujitsu (contrary to what I had thought previously, even though the OS had installed onto the Maxtor drive), and it was being detected as a slave. On removing the Maxtor I discovered that its label declared Jumper 50 should be “on” to make it the master. So I closely examined the board on the bottom side of the drive and spotted a small “50″ by one set of pins. When I jumpered those pins and reinstalled the drive, Voila! the machine booted to a desktop that looked like a coffee-stained leather blotter, and I was able to access the Ubuntu GUI.
The next step will be to get this thing working on my LAN, and that will require digging out an old Linksys wired router and setting it up in sequence with the newer ATIVA WiFi router I have … we’ve run out of ports around here.
Ripples of Success
December 7th, 2008Today as we drove past a roadside yard sale that we see regularly on U.S. 41, my wife remarked that a painting she flashed on might be a “highwayman” and I gave a little thought to the highwaymen and how their story might be relate to the current recession and how people who are suffering might make it through.
In 1954, a young black man named Harold Newton met Beanie Backus, a white painter from Ft. Pierce, Florida. Soon Beanie had taught Harold and another painter, Alfred Hair, to paint Florida landscapes. Hair began painting on a production basis, attaching several pieces of Upson board to his fence and making the same brush stroke on each, assembly-line fashion. He taught other young black artists to do this, and soon they were all making decent money in an era when jobs were scarce for blacks, and good jobs even scarcer. Their paintings graced the walls of many, many independent Florida motels and hotels because, well, they were both good and cheap, and they reflected Florida’s natural beauty.
Hair even bought himself a new Cadillac, though later he was tragically killed in a bar fight in 1970. The highwaymen kept painting though, and they sold their paintings from the trunks of their cars for $25 apiece. I own a Sylvester Wells that my father bought that way on the streets of Tampa in 1971. As times changed, many of the artists drifted away from painting and entered the job market that had been opened to them by desegregation and affirmative action, but today in their sixties and seventies they have returned to painting and they are still teaching others to do what they did.
Nobody gave these men permission to succeed, indeed the deck was badly stacked against them in those times. But they learned and applied a simple skill, they hustled, and they not only survived but thrived. And that is how we will get through the huge economic mess that Wall Street and Washington have left us with.
Wall-E’s Hypocrisy
December 5th, 2008Others have written on this topic when the movie first came out, but now that they’re selling it on DVD and Bluray, I think some of these criticisms bear repeating:
Let’s look at the four messages Wall-E sends:
1. We overconsume
2. We generate too much waste
3. We passively absorb entertainment rather than being active and communicative with each other
4. We’re too sedentary
Sitting in a darkened theatre in front of a giant screen, ready to go out and buy the Disney toys related to the movie and later toss them in the garbage, what can we call the messages coming from this movie other than hypocrisy?
