Blizzo :: The Morgan Blog

I Can Do More Push Ups Than You

F. Morgan Whitney — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 01:28:02 +0000

OK, thats probably not true. It may come as a shock to many of you that the glamorous life of a software engineer/father doesn’t leave a lot of time for exercise. I wouldn’t call myself “fat”, but the Morgan from 8 years ago would have mocked me and called me lazy. On Friday my fellow platypus in arms told me about hundredpushups.com. The idea is simple, do a simple test to see how many push-ups you can do, then do push ups three times a week for six weeks and by the end you should be able to do 100.

100 push ups? Dare I dream? Yes, why not. I did the test tonight and, being very careful not to cheat at all, I did 21 solid and respectable push ups. That puts me right in the middle of rank 3 (15-29 push ups). I will follow the plan, which is easy as it requires little time and no equipment, and let you all know how I do. If I can do it, I will make a donation to the hundred push ups program creator so he can get an old school Volkswagen bus.

Gender Bender

F. Morgan Whitney — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 13:29:25 +0000

Amy took Diablo to puppy class the other day and found out that he… well, is a she. Oops. Something was mentioned at the Pet Store about the puppy being male, and I never bothered to look that closely. I respect her privacy.

A conversation from the movie Gross Pointe Blank:

Debi: So, is there a Mrs. Mysterio?
Martin Q. Blank: No, but I do have a very nice cat?
Debi: Not the same.
Martin Q. Blank: Well, you don’t know my cat, it’s very demanding.
Debi: It? You don’t know if it’s a boy or girl?
Martin Q. Blank: I respect its privacy.

After this discovery, we talked about whether or not “Diablo” was a good name for a girl. Amy says she wants to keep it, so we will. I am still not sure.

When I was young, my mom and I saw an adorable chocolate lab at a pet store and ended up convincing the rest of the family to get her. All of us came up with ideas for a name, but in the end the grown-ups decided to name her Tucker. Throughout the entire life of that dog, it slightly bothered me that she had what I considered to be a masculine name. For the record, my name for Tucker was “Mocha”.

The problem is we already have out puppy trained to the name Diablo, and the kids have bonded with her over that name. So, the name stays. If anyone asks, I’ll just tell them it’s because shes a little she-devil.

Rails Upgrade Woes

F. Morgan Whitney — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 22:23:09 +0000

The Ruby on Rails application that I work on uses a plugin called Hobo. We are using a fairly old version of Hobo, because upgrading has been difficult, but the recent security concerns prompted us to take a serious crack at it. It seems that every time I get close to pushing through, one of the three things in the stack (Ruby, Rails or Hobo) causes problems. If you are considering upgrading, keep the following in mind:

Ruby Version	Rails Version	Issues	Links
1.8.7	2.0.2	Incompatible. Specifically, Rails extends the String class with several methods that call “char[]“, but the object that is returned doesn’t support/implement [], so you get undefined errors. Joy.	Problem found in Tracks
1.8.6 p230	2.0.2	Got segmentation faults when running rake test. Rails unable to render any view that uses “form_for”, gives me the error “ActionView::TemplateError: wrong argument type FalseClass (expected Proc)”.	Someone with problems Rundown of Rubyspec problems with 1.8.7
1.8.7	2.1.0	Rails+Ruby seems OK here, but I found several problems with Hobo. Mostly around things in the Template classes. The Hobo templates seem to need a whole bunch of methods that aren’t defined.	Couldn’t find anything.

Ruby Version

Rails Version

Issues

Links

1.8.7

2.0.2

Incompatible. Specifically, Rails extends the String class with several methods that call “char[]“, but the object that is returned doesn’t support/implement [], so you get undefined errors. Joy.

Problem found in Tracks

1.8.6 p230

2.0.2

Got segmentation faults when running rake test. Rails unable to render any view that uses “form_for”, gives me the error “ActionView::TemplateError: wrong argument type FalseClass (expected Proc)”.

Someone with problems

Rundown of Rubyspec problems with 1.8.7

1.8.7

2.1.0

Rails+Ruby seems OK here, but I found several problems with Hobo. Mostly around things in the Template classes. The Hobo templates seem to need a whole bunch of methods that aren’t defined.

Couldn’t find anything.

Looking at the above, I think I have no choice but to choose Rails 2.1.0 and Ruby 1.8.7 and try to tackle the Hobo issues.

Also, looking at this post in my blog makes me woefully aware that the width of the content column isn’t sufficient for a lot of things. I have a custom thing I have worked on, and promised to develop earlier, maybe it’s time to look into that. Enjoy squishy table content during the interim.

Blue Sage Realty Sucks, Apparently

F. Morgan Whitney — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:41:00 +0000

A coworker of mine has been looking to rent a new place in Colorado. After a lot of searching they found a house they liked that is managed by Blue Sage Realty. You can read for yourself, but he was treated horribly by them. Despite the problems I am having with my house, I am glad to be an owner rather than a renter. It means I don’t have to deal with petty, annoying, unprofessional people like that.

A Weekend in the Mountains

F. Morgan Whitney — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:09:32 +0000

When Amy was a little girl, she and her family used to go up to these little cabins in the Poudre River Canyon. For a nostalgic adventure we loaded the kids and dogs up into the Subaru for a quick trip. The cabins were nice, but small. They had cold running water and a stove that was a wood burning/gas hybrid. There were shared restrooms, a little playground, and a fire pit. We spent the night there, and then on the way down the mountain the next morning we went for a hike on the Dadd Gulch trail. For me this hike was the highlight of the trip. The trail was beautiful, with lots of wild flowers, little streams for the dogs to cool off and a swarm of butterflies. I’ll let the pictures do the talking here.

Family Expansion: Dante & Diablo

F. Morgan Whitney — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 18:44:52 +0000

As I was heading out from my appointment to make an appointment to get a root canal, my phone rang. Amy extended a very innocent sounding invitation to come look at puppies at PetSmart with the kids, they were right around the corner.

I headed over and found my kids playing with this adorable puppy. He was only six weeks old, way too young to be separated from his mother already. The adoption agent told us he came from Texas, where they euthanize a lot of animals because they can’t find homes. Apparently Colorado is such a good place to get dogs adopted that a lot of them are shipped in.

Madeleine looked up with at me, dog in hand and said “Daddy, I *love* him”. I looked at Amy, and I saw in her eyes there was no way I was getting out of that store without that dog. We have talked quite a bit about getting another dog as a companion for Dante, so why not now?

The meet & greet went well:

In just a couple of minutes, the new puppy was exploring, happily licking up chocolate chip cookie crumbs that fell from Madeleines lips.

And just a few minutes after that, he was *clearly* at home:

Dante seems to like him. Oliver has no comment at this time. Now all we need is a name. The black spot around his eye looks like an eye patch, so I think we are going to find a really cool pirate name for him. After a little research we found Diabolito, which is cool but it doesn’t roll of the tongue very well. So we will call him Diablo for short. Welcome home, Diablo.

Blizzo in 12 Easy Steps

F. Morgan Whitney — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 16:40:58 +0000

So over on the Pink Asparagus blog Catherine did this mosaic thingy, where you take the answers to 12 questions, do flickr searches, and build a mosaic out of the results. It sounded like more fun than work, so I took a few minutes to do it.

The questions:

What is your first name? Morgan
What is your favorite food? right now? Pizza
What high school did you attend? East High School
What is your favorite color? Orange
Who is your celebrity crush? Jessica Alba
Favorite drink? Smoothie
Dream vacation? Danube Castles
Favorite dessert? Ice Cream
What you want to be when you grow up? Happy
What do you love most in life? Marriage
One Word to describe you. Difficult
Your flickr name. Blizzo

Originally three of the answers were all “ice cream”, but I went back and changed them so there would be more variety. Did I mention I like ice cream? I have never been one of those “ohmygodcelebritywhatshernameissohoticouldjustdie” types, so I just sort of picked one. For the thing I most love in life, “Amy” just got me a bunch of photos of random girls, so I changed it to “Marriage”. My Flickr name turned up an old picture of Mason that I shared on an SXC, a free community driven stock photography site that someone inserted birds into. Anyway, thanks for the diversion Catosaurus.

The results:

Ruby debugging with colorized logging

F. Morgan Whitney — Thu, 15 May 2008 23:08:16 +0000

One of the ways I prefer to debug is to print things to standard out and watch a console window. The problem is, in Rails, I get a lot of spam to sift through that I usually don’t need: SQL statements, routing and rendering info, etc. It makes finding your output difficult. Today I came up with this convenience method, which makes all of my output a nice orangish/yellow color thats easy to pick out.

def ppp (obj)
puts "\e[33m#{obj.pretty_inspect}\e[0m"
end

Below is a partial screenshot of what my output looks like. Everything I output with the ppp method is very easy to see.

Not especially clever or brilliant, but I find it really helpful.

Disneyland Photos, Finally

F. Morgan Whitney — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 06:56:23 +0000

I’m a slacker blogger, but I’m OK with that. Life has been very busy lately, and next month is looking to be even busier. I managed to upgrade my Wordpress install and I am so excited to play with it that now you get pictures. Lucky you!

The trip was great fun. After several weeks of cold weather, walking into the warm California sun was nothing short of amazing. I was so excited, I took excessive amounts of pictures of palm trees (only included some of them).

The trip was very organized. We got off the plane and only waited a short time for the shuttle to pick us up right outside. Upon arriving we milled around the giant letters while we waited for someone to get tickets, then the whole group went in and walked all the way to Toon Town at the back of the park for a group photo.

After that, mom and I were on our own and we had a blast, going on every major ride in the park and eating overpriced food. I only have two regrets. First, we had to leave as it was starting to get dark so we missed the parade. Second, I searched high and low for Alice in Wonderland themed merchandise but didn’t really find much. Tinkerbell has taken over everything.

There were lots of great moments, but here were some of my favorites:

Space Mountain: This ride was *intense*. It was long, fast, and really made you feel like you were flying through space.
Nemo Submarine Ride: I guess this used to be the Captain Nemo ride and was remade for the animated Nemo film. You cram your head against a little window and look underwater. There are digital screens that place the movie characters in real environments, and some of them are done so well you can’t separate reality at all. Very well done.
Indiana Jones: This was a cinematic roller coaster, full of bats, rats, snakes and the like. It was also very well done

Overall I have to say I really enjoyed Disneyland. After being to so many other amusement parks I thought that, as an adult, it would just seem like a Disney themed version of those. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Their attention to every tiny detail helps immerse you in their world completely. There were times I really felt like a little kid again, it was amazing.

The shuttle picked us up like clockwork and got us back to the plane on time. All in all we were only gone from Denver for about 16 hours, can’t beat that for a day trip!

Diesel Sweeties, A Good Time to Catch Up

F. Morgan Whitney — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:42:45 +0000

One of my favorite web comics, Diesel Sweeties, is about to hit its 8th anniversary and 2000 comic mark around the same time. As a way of celebrating, the creator is releasing the entire archives in 10 separate free PDF volumes (though donations are appreciated). DS is a guilty pleasure for me, the perfect mixture of pop culture, intelligent humor, sarcasm, irony and prurient elements. The first PDF will be released tomorrow, then one a week after that. More about the free PDFs.