Adventures in Nerdville

After pounding my head against the wall for quite some time trying to figure out how to get scriptaculous autocomplete working correctly in the app I am writing, I finally got it. If I were creating a new record, autocomplete would work perfectly, but when I went to edit that record, it did nothing. Looking at the log, it turned out that the id of the record being edited was being passed as the action, and the action was passed as the id. (more…)

I am not nerdy enough to do geocaching (read about it on geocaching.org… it’s basically a scavenger hunt using GPS), although I have thought about it. Upon reading xkcd (an online geek comic strip) one day, I saw a comic called geohashing. It was funny, although unless you are a geek, you propably won’t get it (as is the case with pretty much anything on xkcd). The algorithm calculates coordinates within ~100 miles of you based on the date and the dow jones average.  The whole thing got seriously out of hand. I won’t go into it further, but you can see this link to understand the depth of ridiculousness. I wouldn’t recommend actually going geohashing, but I find it amusing that an entire online community is forming around it.

up up down down left right left right b a

I knew those old things were good for something.

I posted an article a while back where I gave instructions and provided a compiled download for the PHP5-GMP package on ubuntu gutsy. Since I couldn’t get ubuntu to work on my new server (another story), I ended up using debian. I had the same problem on there that there was no php5-gmp package, so I went through the same process and voila, it worked like a charm. Then a little while back, I went to do an upgrade and there was a fix for php out (I think it has to do with the OpenSSL vunerability that has been going around). The stinking update wanted to remove my php5-gmp package, so I had to go through all the hassle of rebuilding it.

Anyways, I figured I would provide the link to the new one since far more people are downloading the Etch version than the Ubuntu version (most likely because Hardy… which I am loving on my laptop btw includes it in the repo). Without further ado, here it is.

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Anybody who I have rustled into trying linux has heard me rave about this program called Vim which, up until about ten minutes ago was the coolest text editor in the world. Well, I just found something that chews up gVim (graphical interface for vim) and spits it out (command line vim: I still love you and will use you in every ssh session until I croak) on a lifehacker post. LH has been putting out some great stuff lately, but this is a real gem. (more…)

This error gets reported and people seemed to be having problems with it in the forums:

ERROR: Error installing mysql:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

/usr/bin/ruby1.8 extconf.rb install mysql
extconf.rb:1:in `require’: no such file to load — mkmf (LoadError)
from extconf.rb:1

FIX:

sudo apt-get install ruby1.8-dev

Update: Added binary for Etch as I am trying to migrate from an old throwaway desktop to a bona fide server running Etch (although it is an old, throwaway, bona fide server).

Update 2: Updated the binary for the latest version of etch in this post

In my last post, I talked about openid and why end users should get it. This time I want to help out any other frustrated wordpress users running Ubuntu Gutsy Server who are trying to implement openid but are getting stuck with the message that says GMP isn’t compiled into php. I found a great tutorial that showed me how to build a package for php5-gmp that works with Gutsy. It took almost an hour to compile it though (my server is elderly and feeble). (more…)