December 2007

I’m off for two weeks of holiday goodness with family and friends around Motueka and Christchurch. Totally ran out of time to write up blogs and group emails and all that, so Merry Xmas and many thanks to my former colleagues at ELC for the great time I’ve had working with them; I’m off to do some more work developing up the local scene a bit next year. Catch you soon!

Maxed out :/. Hmm, clothes, booze, macbooks… priorities…

A big problem we hit with the Ruby memcache-client library (1.5.0) is that if the memcache server connection dies, it leaves the mongrel permanently broken. I’ve written a big patch to refactor it to reconnect properly and also retry the request (once) to give it a fresh start.

When doing the post-install setup of postgresql default database using initdb, you may hit a fatal error due to the shared memory sysctl limits being too low by default.

ABC News carries this disturbing report of drugging and gang rape, followed by willful destruction of evidence, borderline kidnapping, and legal protection of in-house perps, in Iraq contractor KBR.

The turducken (for the uninitiated, a chicken in a duck in a turkey, all deboned, stuffed, and roasted) was apparently not enough. This monster roast contains 48 birds of 12 different species, and feeds 125!

Some dudes made a giant Settlers of Catan set for Burning Man in September. We wants :).

So, turns out, there has been a second costume party worth going to :). Love the Sharbat Gula prop…

Brett steers me towards a great set of nighttime photos from a urban explorer onboard SS Independence/Oceanic, a derelict cruise liner tied up at SF.

Meg, who needs a blog, brings us this alpaca song by Saleem.

When I ordered an xmas pressie in at a shop yesterday, they asked specifically for a cellphone number – didn’t understand why at the time, but they just TXTd me to let me know it’s arrived. Sign of the times :).

Interesting, Alonso’s returning to Renault for next season.

Think that’s enough bad news for one night (working down my ‘things to blog’ folder). Check out these very cool bone china cans by Chinese artist Lei Xue.

Kidnapped by masked men? Beaten and left in a field? That’s an arrestin’. (Moscow, Russia)

Saudi? Gang raped? That’s a jailin’. (Saudi Arabia)

On a bus? In a coma? That’s a tazin’. (Leeds, UK)

Haven’t had time to write anything about them, but I’ve uploaded a few photos from Friday’s Wellington BarCamp Agile and ELC NZ Xmas dinner.

Leopard comes with ruby preinstalled. Most of us use macports to install postgresql & mysql for use with rails, but if you use macports to install their ruby bindings then it will build it’s own ruby too. That works, but here’s how to compile them if you’d prefer to stick to the stock Leopard ruby.

Peak oil is so last year. Milk is the new oil. And while that means more money for NZ farmers, it will also accelerate a problematic trend.

Mac OS X open-source suffers from a lot of users and not a lot of contributers. You can whine about it, or you can help :). I’ve created a simple patch for the problems compiling the FreeImage macport on leopard, removing the need for the workarounds.

Mac OS X has a nice extensible way to add things to your PATH environment variable using /etc/paths.d.

But after this we’re pretty sure he spent the last few weeks sleeping on the sofa :).

Meg, who spends her evenings digging for tasty, nutritious tubers in the soft, lifegiving earth of Youtube, brings us these excellent video…