*scottstuff*

Over the past five years, my view on traveling has shifted; before I really took up photography as a hobby, sightseeing was something that I did for fun, and took pictures to document the sightseeing so I could remember things better and share the trip with others. Now, sightseeing is purely an excuse to go someplace new and take pictures.

So, between November and December, I spent over three weeks in California. How many pictures did I take? None at all, because my camera’s shutter died at the end of October, and I delayed sending the camera back to Canon for repairs until after my first paycheck, just to make sure that I could actually afford the bill.

As usual, Canon surprised me; the repair charge was about half of what I’d expected, and they got the camera back in my hands just in time for me to fly back to California last week. So, yesterday was my first day off of work in California with a working camera. It’s a big state, and I had a hard time deciding where to start, but in the end I decided to drive down the coast a bit and see how it went, without any real plan. In the end, I ended up driving from Mountain View down to Santa Cruz, then along the coast to Monterey, through Carmel, along the Big Sur coast all the way down to San Luis Obispo, CA. All told, I put around 400 miles on the car yesterday and took around 250 pictures. I would have taken more, but the light was bad for the first half of the trip, and then as soon as the light started getting good, my battery died. I left my spare battery in Washington, oops.

Still, I ended up with a few decent pictures of the land and the sea:

The best part of the drive was Piedras Blancas beach, just north of San Simeon. I was driving along and noticed the nice sandy beach out of the corner of my eye, and wondered what geologic process produced a beach with so many big, round rocks:

Oh, wait–those aren’t rocks, they’re Elephant Seals. Piedras Blancas has developed a huge Elephant Seal colony over the past 15 years; the first pup was born there in 1992; now they estimate that there are nearly 2,000 pups born there every year. The pups look kind of like this:

January is birthing and mating season, all wrapped up in one.

Unfortunately, my battery died about halfway through Piedras Blancas, so I didn’t have a chance to get a shot of the whole beach with hundreds of seals, or any pictures of the rest of San Luis Obispo County, with its rolling hills and massive volcanic stone outcroppings. I’ll probably do the drive again in early February and concentrate on the south half of the coast.

I just released a new version of my Rails Schema Generator;. There are two changes in this release:

• Migrations should finally work correctly using either old-style (1_migrate_to_foo) or new-style (001_migrate_to_foo) numbering.
• SQL Server support has been added.

There’s also some support for Oracle hiding in the tree, but it’s disabled as I can’t see a way to get it to work without having all of the Oracle OCI libraries installed. So, if you’re using Oracle with Rails, and you care, try uncommenting the Oracle line in schema_generator.rb and then leave a comment telling me what happens.

It’s taken forever, but I finally have a version of my schema generator that works with Rails 1.0. The actual fix was fairly minor (7 lines), but getting to a point where I could test it has been amazingly difficult–my new PowerBook had a bit of disk corruption and Ruby stopped working. Rebuilding the entire Ruby distribution from DarwinPorts wasn’t enough to fix the problem, somehow, but installing a new copy of REXML did the trick for reasons that are too obscure for understanding.

So, go and enjoy.

Update: I just bumped it to 1.0.1 to fix a MySQL dependancy bug that I’d forgotten about for 1.0.0. Have fun.

I just released a new version of my Rails Schema Generator on Rubyforge. The schema generator takes a collection of Rails database migration scripts and assembles a complete set of SQL schema files using only the information from the migrations. This release supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite; it can generate schemas for all three DB types even if the databases aren’t installed on the system.

We’ve found that the schema generator drastically lowers the work needed to keep Typo working correctly with multiple database types.

This release fixes a number of bugs and should finally work correctly with all common migration operations, including field renaming. This has only been tested with Rails 0.14.4, and at least one API has changed recently, so this may not work with earlier 0.14.x releases.

To use the schema generator, run gem install schema_generator, and then (from your Rails project directory) ./script/generate schema. This will create several schema files in the db/ directory, prompting you before overwriting existing files.

I just committed a big patch to Typo that adds the first part of a notification framework. This piece adds the ability to send email or Jabber messages whenever certain events happen. The events currently supported are new article creation and new comment posts.

This is still a work-in-progress, but it should be safe for a few brave people to use. You’ll have to edit your user settings in Typo to configure your notification settings and then edit the general settings to configure which email address Typo should use. After that, it should just work.

Just to be clear, I’m finally back at work enhancing Typo. I was working on email notification before my entire schedule disintegrated last week; I’m now able to devote at least some time to Typo hacking. Right now, I have email notification mostly working in my tree, but I need to do a bit more work (and write more tests, as usual) before it’s ready to commit. One way or another, I should have it committed before the end of the weekend, and possibly sooner.

I just wanted to say that I’m still here, I’ve just been really busy the past week or so dealing with Thanksgiving, flying to California, and starting a new job. I think tomorrow will be a relatively light day, so hopefully I’ll be able to get back to Typo hacking, so I can get my notification code into the tree sooner rather then later. Once that’s committed, I can start closing the big pile of bugs that has piled up over the last week.

I just uploaded my photo montage software to my Subversion server. It’s still a bit rough around the edges, but it’s usable. I’ll upload it to RubyForge when I have time, but for now I just want to have it out in the public eye before I start at Google.

I have arrived! I’m in Mountain View now, and will be for about 4 weeks. Hopefully I’ll have time to post a bit more after I’ve tracked down dinner.

So here’s my big news: I’m starting work as a Site Reliability Engineer for Google, starting on Monday. The job is based in Kirkland, WA, but I’ll be spending a lot of time in the very near future at Google’s HQ in Mountain View, CA.

So what does this mean for me and Typo? I have no idea. The next week is going to be completely insane, and I doubt that I’ll have time to finish the email notification code that I’ve been working on, much less fix the Flickr bug that’s been discussed at length recently. Once I get settled in at Google I’ll have a better idea how this sort of thing works.

It looks like the Nokia N90. Ritz is going to be the first US dealer with it–it’s a high-end cameraphone, so apparently it goes to the camera stores first. Ritz will be selling it for around $400 with activation. That’s cheaper then expected–I heard rumors that the N90 would be in the $700+ range, even with activation. I’m still waiting for the N91 or E70, but I’m feeling a bit better about them. If Nokia can get the N90 into US consumers’ hands in a reasonable timeframe, maybe the other two won’t be too far behind.

I just committed a minor new feature for Typo–there is now a route-of-last-resort that can generate HTTP redirects out of a database table. This is something that people have asked for for months, because it’s of the easier ways to keep old URLs working when moving to Typo.

At the moment, none of the converters know anything about it, so if you want to use it, then you’re going to have to do a bit of coding. I suspect that we’ll see patches within a few days that will help people make the jump. The basic code for adding a redirect is pretty simple:

  Redirect.create(
    :from_path => 'archives/000001.html', 
    :to => '/articles/2005/11/17/first-post')

This would be a bit cleaner if from wasn’t a reserved word in SQL. The from_path bit should be relative to Typo’s root, and shouldn’t start with a slash.

Unfortunately, none of Typo’s URL helpers are available inside of converters, but it shouldn’t be too hard to code this up. Send me mail if you need help.

It looks like Asterisk 1.2 is out. From the release announcement:

This release of Asterisk contains over 3,000 improvements on version 1.0, including hundreds of new features and applications.

I’m planning on upgrading my home Asterisk server soon, possibly today, and then I’ll look at migrating pieces of my dial plan to RAGI and/or AEL.

Typo 2.6.0 is out. Tobi suggested that we bump the version number from 2.5.9 to 2.6.0; I probably should have done this for 2.5.7, but better late then never.

This is largely a bug-fix release–it fixes one brown-paper-bag bug in 2.5.7/2.5.8 (renderfix.rb was in the wrong directory), as well as adding a couple additional cleanups and 0.14.x compatibility fixes.

There are two fixes in here that theme contest users need to pay attention to. First, as part of the live search fix for 0.14.x, I moved the observer for the search field from the layout (default.rhtml) into the search partial (_search.rhtml). This matches the current trunk, so it’ll make themes more portable, but if your theme’s default.rhtml still has the search observer in it, then weird and wonderful things will happen when users try to search. So either nuke the observer in default.rhtml or override _search.rhtml to make it match. I also back-ported a second change from the trunk–each sidebar item is now wrapped in <div class="sidebar-node">. I’d be amazed if this managed to break anyone’s CSS, but theme builders might wish to use it to style the sidebar.

At this point, I have no plans for any further releases between now and November 28th, the last day of the theme contest. If any major bugs pop up, I’ll put out a new release to fix them, but I’m not planning on adding any additional features to 2.6.x, *or* releasing the trunk (as Typo 4.0–it’s a long story) before the end of the theme contest. Good luck.

I just made it into my hotel in Sunnyvale. The Grand Hotel seems nice enough–the rooms are big, it comes with free breakfast, and they don’t seem to charge for IP. There’s no wireless access, but there’s a convenient jack in the wall and an Ethernet cable in the desk. Of course, it’d be a bit more convenient if there was a working DHCP server on the network, but I wouldn’t be here if that sort of thing was really a problem for me.

It looks like I’ll be meeting a few people for dinner tomorrow at Kal’s BBQ on Matilda in Sunnyvale around 7:00; feel free to drop by if you’re interested in saying hi.

Finally, I’m still planning on putting out another Typo release tonight, but it’ll be another hour or two.