Robby on Rails

I left for Colorado last Monday morning and got home last night. On the way back, we drove through Wyoming up to Yellowstone National Park (map), where we spent all day Saturday driving around and taking photos. Was the first time there… and saw my first live Bison (Buffalo), Moose, and many other neat things.

Long story short, I haven’t touched too much code lately and today I play catch up and purchase the beta book that released while I was away. :-)

It’s good to be home.

Totally off-topic, but not…

My Grandfather, who was the first in my family to work in the technical world (recenly retiring from HP…and worked at Atari during their prime)... passed away last night. I am driving to Denver, Colorado tomorrow and will not be posting too much this week as I will be visiting my family.

I went and purchased an iPod for my road trip and will take the time to work on more of my book.

The PDX Ruby Brigade group now has an irc channel.

UPDATE: #pdx.rb on irc.freenode.net.

come by and say hi!

MadRobby (who is not really a Robby… he is actually Thomas Fuchs) has posted a demo page of the new effects that are going to be in the next version of Prototype.

I’m partial to the stuff in Effect2.Fade() myself. :-)

So, I felt pretty stupid… ya know, deleting my blog and all… and then to find out that my backup script forPostgreSQL was calling the wrong version of pg_dump (7.3) which doesn’t work with the PostgreSQL version that this blog is running on (8.0). A simple mistake in the path to /usr/bin/pg_dump, whould have been /usr/local/pgsql-8.0/bin/pg_dump. The things that you look over…

I want to thank my lovely RSS reading program, Liferea, for keeping a nice cache file of my blog entries and all the comments on my blog to date. The only thing that I did lose was the email addresses and urls of everybody who posted a comment and filled out those fields. How am I supposed to sell all your details now? :-p

I spent the weekend, reading more of the book that I recently purchased. I am really enjoying it. I want to thank all of you who left me a list of books to check out. I will be placing some orders soon… or most likely, heading downtown to Powells Technical Books in the coming week.

I should also note that this is the first entry on my blog that has been posted through the admin interface. I like the double-pan window for previewing your entry while you’re typing it. Very nice. ;-)

I accidental caused typo to delete everything. I switched to production and it wasn’t working, ran rake and (had used the same db name) and goodbye 63 entries.

A backup! Woo… untar my pg_dump file… nothing there. Apparently, I was running the wrong version of pg_dump against the postgresql version for my typo blog. Never noticed that til now.

oh well…

but wait! What about my RSS feed? Well, my RSS reader has a cache of all comments and entries! So, I am working on a script to import everything back into typo. It’s almost working for all the entries. Trying to do SQL inserts, is being quirky… I might try to add them one-by-one through the script via the typo web service.

It’s the next day and I have imported all of my entries from my RSS reader cache file… and all my comments! What I did lose were all the email/links associated to comment posters… and they’re displaying in reverse order in the comments section… but it’s all there (from what I can tell).

Now, to fix that postgresql backup script to use the right version of pg_dump. :-)

In the end, I learned a lot about regular expressions in ruby and it’s been a fun experience…despite almost losing all my entries to date here.