We just watched the new movie Enchanted and really loved it. It’s about how true love can exist even in this modern world. It’s about how taken on their own, both humdrum reality and fairytales are kind of empty, but when combined, the results can be truly beautiful.

I found it really inspiring. It’s one way of looking at what I want to do with my life; to bring some more colour, magick, and beauty into the dry grey world that most people live in.

Yay! I got my shiny new Rimuhosting VPS. They had pre-installed some packages at my request, like Ruby, Rails, emacs, and Postgres. My first order of business was to get my Ruby on Rails test application moved over from my Windows laptop to my shiny new Rimu Linux server. First step, create a user account. Whoa, I have no idea what I’m doing. I google some basic sysadmin tutorial stuff and learn how to tweak the /etc/passwd file. I try that, but then I don’t know the password to use when I try to log in as myself. FAILED.

Eventually I discover the useradd script, which lets me set an initial password for the new user. SUCCESS.

I zip the directory tree and upload it to usualerror.com (just for temporary storage). I try to use scp to download it. It just hangs. FAILED.

I try ftp. Command not found (!). FAILED.

I think, “Aha, I can just use lynx to navigate to the page and download it that way!” Command not found. FAILED.

I try to figure out how to download ftp. I had thought it would be standard in any Linux distro, but apparently lots of things I expected to be installed weren’t installed. But I can’t think of any way to download things without using scp, ftp, or lynx. FAILED.

Eventually I dig around hard enough to stumble upon sftp. ftp isn’t installed, but sftp is. So I try that but it hangs just like scp. Google tells me that Lunarpages (where usualerror.com is hosted) doesn’t work with sftp. FAILED.

Finally I find lftp. I think I found it by doing rpm -qa. Sigh. All this pain caused by one missing l. lftp has some small amount of success — I can connect to usualerror.com and navigate the directory tree, but as soon as I try to do an ls or download a file, it hangs. FAILED.

Luckily, I remember a similar problem I had about 6 years ago. It had something to do with passive mode. I dig around and find that you can turn off passive mode in lftp by the “set ftp:passive-mode false” command. I do that and download the file! SUCCESS.

The file was zipped on Windows, but I decided to be optimistic and try to unzip it on Linux. And to my astonishment, it worked! SUCCESS.

Next, to start up a MySQL server. (I’m planning on ditching MySQL as soon as possible, I was just using it for testing.) Where is MySQL? It’s not in /usr/local/bin. It’s not in /opt/local anywhere. It’s not in anywhere I’m familiar with on a Linux system. I dig around for about a half hour and still can’t find it. FAILED.

Eventually, I think by interminable googling, I find it in /usr/libexec. I had never even seen that directory before. I start it up. But I can’t do anything because the permissions on some directory are set wrong. FAILED.

I figure out what directory is flummoxed and set the permissions. SUCCESS.

I start up my Rails app and it works perfectly fine! SUCCESS!

I had a similar debacle trying to figure out where to put the ruby-mode files for emacs. Fortunately, by this time I had figured out to just use find . | grep emacs, so that saved some time.

And after that began the PostgreSQL wrangling. After 3 hours, I finally got postgres to work on its own, but Rails still can’t hook up to it. It keeps giving me the error message FATAL C28000 Mno PostgreSQL user name specified in startup packet Fpostmaster.c L1540 RProcessStartupPacket. Sigh. I am so not cut out to be a sysadmin. Debugging code is so much more fun than debugging installation issues.

Today is the Transgender Day of Remembrance, which is set aside to remember trans people who were killed because of transphobia or prejudice against transfolk.

It’s good to raise awareness of the fact that trans people are being killed simply for the crime of being who they are and expressing who they are. That’s simply horrible, and it’s good to show the world that horrible things are happening; we can’t solve a problem if we don’t even know the problem exists. It’s good to raise awareness of trans issues in general; the more familiar something becomes, the less likely others are to fear it. All this is good. But I want to provide a counterpoint to all that. Here is my offering for the DoR.

This is the story of my transition from male to female. This is a story of a transwoman who wasn’t murdered for being who she was, but is instead living a very happy and very fulfilling life. Let’s try to make the world a place where more stories can be like this one instead of like these.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few months ago, we watched ‘What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire’. Like most documentaries in it’s genre, it assumes the watchers are not quite awake yet, and uses scare tactics to make it’s points, and by the end I felt battered and terrified and sick. We stopped half-way through to check-in, and I was nearly hysterical and totally hopeless and cried so hard I couldn’t breathe.

See, I live in an intentional news-free zone, so I literally had no idea how bad it’s getting out there. Sera and Pace knew, so the stuff in the movie didn’t hit them as hard, but I was in the dark. On purpose. I don’t regret that, but it’s no longer the way to go. My intention with living news-free was to keep out the political garbage that I don’t care about, to keep the media’s manipulation to a minimum, and to protect myself (as I’m very sensitive) from the dark and bloody depression in which news tends to wallow. However, as a consequence of that, I was also keeping out the state of the planet, which I care very much about. As such, this documentary, with it’s scare tactics and harsh wake-up call and no-holes-barred approach to the facts, beat me with a big metal stick.

We finished watching the documentary, and I cried for quite a long time. I felt sick. I felt like everything I’m doing right now is pointless and stupid. I felt clingy to my wives, my son, my friends – after all, if the world is going to end in a few days, I’d best spend what precious little time I have left with those I love. (I have a mild tendency for melodrama.) Seriously, I was super-freaked out by the facts of the movie, and had no idea whatsoever what to do. I nearly hyperventilated many times.

I spent the following 36 hours or so in that state; near panic, barely able to breathe, hopeless and scared. Pace and Sera and I talked it out a lot, and I managed to calm down enough to function, but I was tinged with panic, just below the surface. We discussed Pace and Sera being windows to the outside world for me, filtering in news they know I want to hear without bombarding me with the stuff I don’t want, and offering it to me in such a way as to not beat me with it. We discussed why we live the way we do, our plans for the future, our desires and hopes and our Life Purpose, and they promised me again and again that apocalypse is not just around the corner, and no matter what happens we’ll face it together and make our lives good and happy. All that helped, oh so very very much, but it didn’t completely ease the pounding fear in my heart.

Yesterday, Sera and I took a long drive. On the way home, I listened to my new CD and watched the rain river down my window. I watched the world speed by, watched the trees dance and the fences blur, lightening flash, sunflowers spin. I thought and thought and thought about the state of the planet, the humans, the other animals, the gods. I thought about how so many humans believe there’s One Right Way To Live, and how that way is so harmful and hurtful. I thought about the way we live, the unsustainable way of life we are accustomed to in Western Culture. I thought about how I, even for all my love of Gaia and my desire to help, don’t want to give up all the comforts of my life. I mean, who wants to become a hunter/gatherer when they’re used to internet, air conditioning, and food at their fingertips?

No one, that’s who. No one.

Then I understood, as lightening flashed inside my mind and outside in the rain. We cannot go backwards. If the only way out of this high-speed train of destruction we’re on is to become hunter/gatherers and eat berries and live in huts made of mud and straw, we’re destined to go down and take the earth with us. We’re too spoiled and too lazy to go back to that way of life.

But that isn’t the only way out!

The way out, as I see it, is to find ways to make our current way of life sustainable. Since we need air conditioning, let’s find ways to make it not poison the air. Since we need cars, let’s go solar or electric. Since we need farms, let’s stop poisoning the ground and the food we’re growing. I don’t see us giving up what we have, so let’s find ways to make what we have impact the earth far, far less.

I don’t have answers yet, I don’t know how to do it. I don’t even know all the problems we’re facing, I’m sure. But I love humans; we’re strong, we’re brilliant, we’re amazing. If we band together, build communities, and start talking, we can do this. We can find ways to make our footprints smaller, to stop hurting Gaia so badly with every move we make. We may not can undo a lot of what we’ve already done, but we can surely stop doing it. With a lot of ingenuity, which we’re famous for, we can make our lives better and cleaner and less harmful.

We have a tendency to think we own the earth. We act as gods. But in order to sustain life, to stop the rapid death of our planet, we must remember that we’re just another creature on her face. We must walk in the hands of the gods, and return to our rightful place in the circles of life. We can do that. We can.

The most beautiful line of code I have ever seen is the following line of Ruby code, which I snagged from the Pickaxe book:

(words[key] ||= []) << word

Granted, if you don’t think that Perl can be beautiful and elegant, you’re not likely to think that Ruby is either. But I think that the above line of code is the most beautiful, elegant, and eloquent line of code I have ever seen. Let me walk you through it.

First we have

words[key] ||= []

which is shorthand for

words[key] = words[key] || []

just like i += 2 is shorthand for i = i + 2. So what does this do? If words[key] (the result of a hashtable lookup) is non-nil, it does nothing. But if words[key] is nil (uninitialized), it initializes it to an empty array. It’s a very nice Ruby idiom for initialization.

Then it wraps up the resulting array (Ruby, like Lisp, is functional, so every expression returns a value) and appends a new word to it.

It’s equivalent to the following 4 lines of C++-ish pseudocode:

if (words.lookup(key) == null) {
  words.set(key, new Array());
}
words.get(key).append(word);

One of the guiding principles of Ruby is that code is read more often than it is written. How lovely it is that we can end up with such elegant and eloquent results.

A while ago, there was a piece done about magazine covers from the future. Artists imagined what the covers of various magazines would be like 100 years from now. It stuck in my mind, because while most people found them to be cool or funny, I was horrified.

People with clay skin to defend against global warming. People living to be older and older. People living their lives faster and faster. Technology, technology, technology.

That’s what Mother Culture says. Sure, there are problems with the environment. But we’ll fix them in the next hundred years. How? By doing the exact same thing we did the previous hundred years, but better.

Me, I hope there are no magazines in 100 years. Now that would be “progress”. (:

I’ve decided to go with Rimu to host my upcoming Ruby on Rails application application. (That is, the web application to handle job applications.) They seem very knowledgeable, very dedicated to customer support, and they provide root access on a VPS. I was worried about becoming a full-time sysadmin/babysitter of the RoR app, but they sent me the following email that clinched it for me. And I also learned something about Ruby on Rails uptime, admin, and deployment that I hadn’t been able to get a straight answer to until now.

About keeping your rails app up, rails is usually stable enough on most modern deployments to not need too much babysitting. But we can help you set things up such that your mongrel processes and other stuff get restarted, just in case they crash.

For the quick and routine stuff, we usually do the admin free of charge. But if things do get hairy, we charge $10/15 mins. And we tell you if something will be charged before we do it, so you won’t get unexpected charges.

When you get your hosting with us, you get really good support. All our support people are real linux engineers. We’re not call center people. We are knowledgeable about things and some of us are even rails developers. So if you ever get yourself into a tight spot, we will be able to help you.

When you’re ready to order your VPS, just head on to this page:

http://rimuhosting.com/order/startorder1.jsp?type=18

Just mention that you want the rimu rails stack to be installed. Also mention any other special requests you may have or what other specific apps you want installed. If you have other questions, just email us.

Sincerely,
Sim

Welcome to the Usual Error blog! We wanted to dedicate our first post to Megan, our biggest fan, and the one who inspired us to create this blog in the first place. How did she do such a crazy thing? By blogging like mad about her experiences at Usual Error workshops!

So here you go. Read about one person’s experiences attending some of the Usual Error workshops, and see what you think. (:

Communication Dynamics

• Communication Dynamics at the Usual Error Intensive (liveblogging!)

Boundaries

• Boundaries Part One: Musings
• Boundaries Part Two: Meat
• Boundaries Part Three: Wrapping Up
• Boundaries at the Usual Error Intensive (liveblogging!)

Turning Conflict Into Communication

• Turning Conflict Into Communication, Part One
• Turning Conflict Into Communication, Part Two
• Turning Conflict Into Communication at the Usual Error Intensive (liveblogging!)

Conflict Resolution

• Conflict Resolution, Take Two
• Conflict Resolution at the Usual Error Intensive (liveblogging!)

Positivity

• Positivity (Preview)
• Positivity (Part One!)
• Positivity (Part Two!)
• Positivity (Part Three!)
• Positivity and the Usual Error
• Positivity at the Usual Error Intensive (liveblogging!)

Here is a short video from GOOD Magazine about the business of death. Yet another example of how our culture’s fear and isolation from nature is breaking the cycle of life in an unsustainable way.

So, I decided to go with Ruby on Rails for this project, because I got so many opinions from either (or both) sides of the fence that it seemed like I couldn’t go wrong with either RoR or Django, and the tiebreaker is that Ruby is more Lisp-like, and Lisp is my favourite language. Boy, was this a good decision.

Ruby is SO COOL. It’s like a wacky chimera of Lisp and Perl, magically brought to life by a wizard waving a magic OO wand.

Ruby has many of the things I love about Lisp, like lambdas and closures:

def n_times(obj)
  return lambda {|n| obj * n}
end

times23 = n_times(23)
times23.call(3) -> 69

Ruby doesn’t have macros (that I’ve learned about yet), but it does have code blocks, which are really frickin’ cool. They’re kind of like Java anonymous inner classes but far more flexible. Get this, as a toy example of a Lisp with-file macro:

class File
  def File.with_file(*args)
    f = File.open(*args)
    yield f
    f.close()
  end
end

File.with_file("testfile", "r") do |file|
  while line = file.gets
    puts line
  end
end

The do..end block forms a code block that is sort of passed to the with_file method as sort of an additional argument. It’s actually more like a coroutine to which control is surrendered by the yield statement. And the parameter passing can go both ways — yield can pass parameters back to the code block, as in this case it passes back the file handle, named f in the method and with a formal parameter name of file in the code block. If with_file were a Lisp macro, yield would be the comma.

And not only is the language itself really cool, but I really like the Ruby community. The foreword to the book I’m reading made me tear up:

“I believe that the purpose of life is, at least in part, to be happy. Based on this belief, Ruby is designed to make programming not only easy but also fun. It allows you to concentrate on the creative side of programming, with less stress. If you don’t believe me, read this book and try Ruby. I’m sure you’ll find out for yourself.”
-Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, creator of Ruby

This post and its code examples were inspired by the PickAxe book.