It's come to that time. I'm ready to switch blog engines. This is the last post on Movable Type, and now it is off to WordPress...
If you get this via a feed, please come to the site at http://www.rhonabwy.com/wp/ and switch up your subscription. I'll leave this active for a few days, but ultimately I'll clip it out. The front page of this blog, in fact, is already set to redirect.
It was a beautiful day outside today, and I'm getting really freakin' grumpy tonight. First I spent 30 minutes driving around Capitol Hill, looking for a place to park so that Karen and I could get a bite and chat for the 30 minutes or so until her class started. I wasn't willing to pay $7 for what would be 30 minutes of parking. I ended up just driving around looking for someplace to land while Karen just got nervous about the traffic. Somehow, my frustration just added to a negative cycle that was starting to develop...
Then tonight, ZoomInfo sends me a confirmation email wanting to verify who I am, but when I follow it they're asking me for either a credit card or a verification email at netscape.com - all because the data they have referencing me was from an article on netscape.com that listed me as an author. Then when I replied to the verification email, it bounced. Come on guys - that's just the freakin' basics. Get it together. Anything else I might say here will get personally derrogatory very quickly, so I'll leave it at that.
Oh yeah - and it was trash night. I hate trash night.
And the wireless crapped out halfway during my time at Uptown Espresso (waiting for Karen's class - I bagged this shitty parking in Capitol Hill and went down to Belltown). That was annoying too.
Blah.
Jerks.
Well, it seems that my random "Shut up about the damn squares" paid off. That superbowl pool (first one I ever entered) seems to have made me a few dollars. I thought at first that they were all pulling my leg, but lo and behold - I appear to have nailed the final score. Got half the pool.
Guess I'll have a nice lunch today.
I was pounding away at the basics of Django tonight, and got myself terribly confused when I ran into a new error when attempting to set up the basic django databases (using django-admin.py init). It had worked previously, but tonight I received the error:
Error: The database couldn't be initialized.
You can only execute one statement at a time.
WTF? I thought at first that maybe it was because I was using the raw development branch of Django. After bothering the folks on the irc channel #django, that led me to trying out the code in the python interpreter. It just didn't make sense. After a few minutes, I resorted back to the Django release (0.91) and ran with that - still got the error.
Now my hackles were up. I started digging around in my prerequisites, and eventually figured out that one of the times that I had updated bits from DarwinPorts, I updated sqlite3 to 3.3.3. I still had version 3.2.7 around, so I dropped back to it. Viola! Everything worked!
After further digging, I realized that DarwinPorts doesn't make it easy to install older versions of sqlite3... so I took a look at the other component - py-sqlite. It turns out that the port is just slightly outdated - it's still referencing the 2.0.x branch, and they're up to 2.1.3 now. After a little more "sudo port ..." invocations, I had sqlite 3.3.3 back in place, and py-sqlite 2.1.3 and everything was working great.
I fiddled for a bit making a new Portfile for py-sqlite, but something in the testing and prefix setup of the whole thing knocked me sideways. I fired off what I thought should be about right for the updated Portfile to the maintainer and asked for help - hopefully I hear something in the next few days. In the meantime, I'll run from source that I manually installed - although I'd prefer to stick with the DarwinPorts setup. I probably just borked something making the new Portfile, or setting up to test it. I am NOT a port wizard, that's for sure.
Hopefully if some other poor soul runs across this problem (until we get the Portfile updated) maybe Google will help provide an answer.
Woke up this morning to a sunny day. That's damned impressed compared to what we've been having here in Seattle for the past month. I had become used to significantly more "sun breaks" during the cloudy times than we received over the past 6 weeks - so the sun is a really welcome respite.
And since it's sunny, and the windstorm from yesterday died down in the evening, things are reasonably dry. Not my basement, of course, but the ground outside is at least not a mud swamp under grass waiting to suck you in to your ankles. Actually, the basement isn't too bad - just some leftover light puddling in the low spots. I'm now a firm believer in detailed finish work on basement floors to make sure they're level... or at least bevelled to a floor drain.
We took quick advantage of the dry and mowed the lawn - well, the backyard and the verge. Step in any of the planting bed areas and your feet will sink in an inch or two, and if Karen sees it... wow. You'll get this extensive lecture about compacted soil and effectiveness of flower and bulb growth. I am now staying off any flower bed areas - even to the extent of carrying the mower around the long way. The back yard wasn't fun, but it wasn't too bad for all that. If it had been summer hours (long days, more sun), it would have been significantly more nightmareish.
And if you didn't know, today is no hereby declared "Seattle's Vacation Superbowl Day". Since the seahawks are going to the Superbowl (a never-before-happenin' sort of thing), pretty much the entire darn city except the sports bars are closing up and heading to home (or their friend's home) to watch the game. I think I'm one of the few who won't be watching it this year - I expect I'll hear what happens.
I even have some dollars in a pool at work. God knows why - mostly because I was sick of hearing Gabe blabber about "almost full board". I think I just paid the money to shut him up.
I think that's it (for now) from sunny Seattle!
The wind has been howlin'!
We've been having 30MPH winds, gusting up to 75MPH (!) in some places. Its causing enough havoc around the house that I'm sure it is going to be a delight all over Seattle. Oversaturated ground water, higher than normal tide - and now a lovely windstorm. So far we've picked up the bird feeder (chain broke) and chased two pots back from our front verge (they had been on the porch). Every window on our house is rain spattered, and it seems like a little vortex is forming on the south side of the house, where our front porch is. I'm really glad we're not at a hill peak or anything - it'd really be rough then. As it is, we're snuggled down behind other buildings without too much significant view or such.
The windstorm even made it into my dreams this morning - the wind sounds vaguely like heavy surf in the distance, so I was dreaming about heavier than normal surf surging over the house and washing things away on the inland side. Very odd. I think I'm glad I'm awake now.
I think something maybe snapped inside my head. Somewhere deep down, a "cthunk" or something. Nothing terribly obvious to anyone outside... because I was reading some documentation on Twisted, and it suddenly all made perfect sense.
I'm not sure why these things happen this way, but for some reason it just clicked and I was thinking "Yeah... so why did I think this was difficult earlier?" Odd how that happens.
I've been doing more with VMWare lately, and in the midst of generating (and breaking) various Microsoft win32 images, I snagged a copy of the Ubuntu image and started playing with it. The whole VMWare Player free application has made it really accessible, and I can't wait to see a VMWare application running on the intel Macs...
While I think desktop linux still has a way to go, I've got to admit that Ubuntu's distro is about the best I've seen so far. I fiddled around with the GUI update manager code, and felt equally comfortable diving into the command-line world to do apt-get's and get my own miscellaneous crap installed.
One of the fun tools that I've been playing with is Stani's Python Editor. I know I'm supposed to be able to make it all work on MacOS X - but I never did. There was a quick install package under Ubuntu, so I've got it all running on that image now. Very neat - I think I could easily loose a good few days to just exploring the IDE setup that he put together.
Ah, good lord Microsoft! - I'm with Wolf here - WTF?! Stop hurting the UI. You can do better than this. Shoot - Wolf's right on the money, you're making Metal look good. And THAT is hard!