My good friend Justin just sent me this nice little bit of memorabilia. This was a brief lived band called Masterbuilt. Fun band but we just couldn’t keep it happening for some reason. That’s Kirk on the left, me in the middle, Justin on the right and Zack hidden back behind those drums.

Late last night while trying to get rails running on a server I was setting up, I ran into an odd error. Sadly, I failed to save the error message itself and my browser history has been woefully unhelpful in finding the google searches I did to track down the issue. However, I can recreate the sequence of steps I took to fix the problem. First, though, let me give you the scenario.

So, just a quick update to let everyone know why I’ve disappeared and have been unable to find even a few spare seconds to update the blog. I’ve been just a wee bit busy. Last month I attended OSCON and helped put on FOSCON II. Both of which were awesome and exhausting. I met a lot of great people and learned about some interesting things. Hopefully I’ll find time to dig in a bit deeper on some of it.

So, I finally gave up on trying to host my site using a friends generously donated space on his reseller hosting account. While the company claimed to support Ruby and Rails, I had a hell of a time getting it working and when I finally did, I could only ever get things to run as CGI. Which, as anyone who has used Rails under CGI, simply blows. I’m now on Site5.

I haven’t gotten a change to really dig into it yet, but it looks like zimbatm has created a nice little package of add-ons for Camping. I’m not sure how this jibes with the idea of keeping camping small and lightweight (on the other hand, camping does require ActiveRecord which is anything but lightweight), but it does look like most of the code (I just took a quick look at a few of the source files) is nice and streamlined – following similar goals to the Camping source code itself.

How is it that I just now noticed that Spark Fun has an RSS feed for their news page? Too many cool toys…

By way of Topher Cyll’s blog, I stumbled on the rather interesting field of synthetic biology. Looks like an area ripe for interesting work. He seems to think that he’s got a long road to get down, but I think these experiments with bacon might just qualify.

I’ve decided to give a new browser a spin and see how it handles things. As my last post may have indicated to you already, the browser in question is called Flock. It makes a claim towards being the browser for the web 2.0 world. Well, maybe not so specifically, but it integrates various web-services in an attempt to make the browsing experience a little more… well, just more. It’s hard to explain exactly what it brings to the table without simply listing it’s features and that’s just boring, so I’ll leave it to this fine review on ExtremeTech to do that for me.

I’ve long thought that it would be really slick to instrument some of my guitar effect pedals with a couple of PIC chips to add in some nice computer control capabilities. Being able to to control the volume, tone and sustain all in sync on a Big Muff pedal all while playing some whacked out Chrome-esque riffs would be truely sweet. I’ve heard of other doing things similar to this on various DIY forums and such, but it looks like Guyatone is getting in on the game with some nice (though not cheap) commercial models.

Just a quick test to see if I can post from Flock. Don’t mind me, I’m just browsing.