http://selfamusementpark.com/blog I have nothing interesting to say. Don't believe me? Read this: Mon, 17 Nov 2008 18:54:56 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I'm writing this in a coffee shop, and when I'm using a public wireless network, I like to secure my network traffic using a virtual private network (VPN) that I set up on my server at home. Without this, anyone else close by could spy on what I'm doing (including ... http://selfamusementpark.com/blog/2008/11/17/fixing-a-little-vpn-annoyance/ I've been tinkering with developing software for the Android phone platform (and loving my G1 phone that runs it)... the Android folks at Google hired Ascender to create a new font family for the phone, the only family that the phone comes with. Here's a sample from Ascender's press release. It ... http://selfamusementpark.com/blog/2008/11/15/android-fonts/ "I find I'm so excited, I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it is the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across ... http://selfamusementpark.com/blog/2008/11/04/hope/ I'm working on a couple of Android projects; one has an Android IDL file (.aidl) for a service, and for some reason, the development environment didn't automatically generate the corresponding .java file from it. I wasn't able to figure out what caused this, and recreating the .aidl file didn't fool ... http://selfamusementpark.com/blog/2008/09/30/android-aidl-regeneration/ I frequently reinstall Ubuntu from scratch, so I've set up apt-cacher on my fileserver to cache the packages I install - this not only reduces my impact on the mirrors, but also speeds up my installs. Occasionally, though, I see strange problems during installs: apt-get install retrying the download of an ... http://selfamusementpark.com/blog/2008/09/15/clearing-apt-cachers-cache/ While following another great Ryan Bates Railscast, I had a couple of problems on my Ubuntu 8.04 development machine: Rails 2.1.0's ActionController wants version 0.6.1 or later of the ruby-prof gem, but the usual gem repositories only have 0.6.0 now. I found suggestions to install Jeremy Kemper's fork on Github, but ... http://selfamusementpark.com/blog/2008/08/29/rails-scriptperformancerequest-needed-a-little-help/ I used Rails 2.1's named_scope to implement various ways to sort things on OsoEco. When I implemented "most discussed" on the Question model (questions have many comments), it involved joining in the comments table to count comments for each question. Initially, it looked something like: named_scope :most_active, :joins => :comments, :group ... http://selfamusementpark.com/blog/2008/07/10/named_scope-joins-includes/ {gallery blog/7day_web.jpg--width=47--height=106--class=photoright} I like chocolate milkshakes, in ways that the HTML "<strong>" tag can't really convey. So a couple of years ago, to keep myself from going all Elvis in my senectitude, I adopted a rule: I'd only have a milkshake as we reached each thermometer milestone of 10 degrees Fahrenheit: ... http://selfamusementpark.com/blog/2008/04/11/i-drink-your-milkshake/ Five other jobs that have fallen off the end of my resume: Made salads & bread baskets, & worked the snack bar; Sandcastle restaurant, Malibu, 1978-1979 Parking attendant, Paradise Cove, Malibu, 1978-1979 Census taker, United States of America, 1980 Shipping/receiving & answering the phones, The Computer Store, 1979-1981 (Turned down by McDonald's, 1978: hair too ... http://selfamusementpark.com/blog/2008/04/10/and-before-that-i-did-this/ While working on setting up FestivalFanatic.com, I realized that some of its features would be useful to conference attendees as well... and since the obvious domain name was available, I registered it. Cut to yesterday evening: when I actually finished the work setting up ConferenceFanatic.com, I twittered about it (and mentioned ... http://selfamusementpark.com/blog/2008/03/27/basking-in-benefits-of-connectedness/