Yesterday’s Thoughts

Showing all posts in 'Software & Internet'

September 1, 2006

Moving to WordPress

What? A brand shiny new WordPress blog with exactly the same content as the old blog. Same name, same posts, same comments.
Why? The old MovableType was too much trouble to change. The templates were awkward to manage and I was tired of the busyness of the pages. Plus I wanted to be able to create [...]

May 23, 2006

Bug & Patch for acts_as_ferret

I’m putting the finishing touches on Endurance Central. Basically the UI is done and all of the user functionality is complete, if not yet fully exposed. I have started to collect race data (the current data on the site is unreliable test data - I need to clear that out).
One of the last features that [...]

April 29, 2006

Labels in iTerm Tabs

On the Mac, I use iTerm, an open source project, as my Terminal client. I don’t have any strong objection to Terminal, I haven’t really used it enough to tell. iTerm has tabs, I installed it the day I got my Powerbook, and customized to my needs. It has keyboard shortcuts to open terminals on [...]

February 21, 2006

Bug in acts_as_authenticated

I found a bug in the acts_as_authenticated plugin. The activate method in User fails to update the user record when using both activate and 2-way reversible encryption. The symptom that I was is that @user.save was false in the controller.
It fails at this line:
update_attributes(:activated_at => Time.now.utc, :activation_code => nil)
This fails because there are a series [...]

December 8, 2005

Les Blogs Smackdown

Lots of rants and raves over the Smackdown at LesBlogs.
Mena Trott, cofounder of conference sponsor Six Apart, was opening the second day and calling for “civility in blogging.” While this was going on, in fact through the entire conference, there was an irc back channel which you can read here. Mena took exception to [...]

December 4, 2005

Thunderbird: IMAP Mailbox isn’t selectable

There is an occasional problem with Thunderbird and imap mailboxes that can destroy your user experience, especially if you tend to navigate using the keyboard, but even with the mouse it can interrupt your work.
The problem occurs only with unselectable mailboxes. These mailboxes don’t contain any mail, instead they contain other mailboxes that may [...]

November 13, 2005

Minimum Font Size in Firefox

Dave Winer has an idea for Firefox:
Failing that how about a setting that tells the browser to ignore what the site says about font size and always display text in the font and size I tell it to. Basically the web is and has been broken forever. Maybe one of these decades we’ll get around [...]

October 9, 2005

Which Robert?

Robert Scoble wants search engines to pretend that the web is different than it is. I think this would be a bad idea.
Scoble’s objection is that search results don’t reflect his notions of what is important in the world.
“As long as I’m the #1 Robert and Robert Redford isn’t as high up as me then [...]

October 4, 2005

mysql_connect(): Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server; consider upgrading MySQL client

If you receive this error message, the answer to your question is here. Don’t go anywhere else.
After wading through substantial non-sense, Pat Hayzlett points out the answer here.
The problem in a nut shell is that mySQL 4.1 changed their password hashing and now store the passwords of database users in 40 chars instead of 16 [...]

October 3, 2005

Swapping Batteries in Powerbooks

Matthew Russell has some ideas for extending the battery life of your Apple Powerbook. Since I just switched back to Macs and I was having some problems with my previous laptop’s battery life, this was an issue of keen interest. I knew about all of Matthew’s common suggestions, turn off Bluetooth (actually I had [...]