Mitya000 and I got into this huge debate last night about the definition of a grotto whilst bumperman played the role of the armed moderator. Mitya000 defined it simply as “a place where Satanists meet”. I didn’t think that was right. So, I wikipedia’d it, and they describe it as “when it is not an artificial garden feature, is a cave, small or quite large, usually near water and often flooded or liable to flood at high tide.” The argument wasn’t about the definition so much as it was my condemnation for him defining something in terms of an uncommon use. I feel that this is equivalent to me defining a duck as “something I wear on my head while yelling the constitution backwards in my neighbor’s yard”. Yes, I could do that with a duck, but that wouldn’t really describe the essence of a duck. This debate went on and on, and ended with Mitya000 eventually claiming that all information in wikipedia was wrong because it was typed in by an overweight guy Star Wars fan living in his parents’ basement. The weird thing was, previous to that statement, he used wikipedia to lookup Satanism to prove that they do indeed meet in Grottos sometimes. Bumperman thankfully moved the conversation in the direction of old timey gingersnaps after that and kind of saved the entire evening.

This morning, my entire Media Wiki installation was repurposed as a link farm by some spambots. As a result, I had to revert all the changes, protect all the current entires and forbid edits from anonymous users from now on. Some of the links that were added by the spammers were made to be invisible to avoid detection by the sysop (me). Google actually penalizes sites that attempt to hoodwink an increased Pagerank score these days. So, why do spammers continue this exercise in futility? Argh….

Being the resident Unix nerd in my group, about once a year, someone asks me “How do I remove file named -blah”. The problem arises because the hyphen character is the option delimiter for the shell commands. So, typing “rm -blah” or even “rm \-blah” usually results in “rm: Not a recognized flag: b” on most systems. The solution to this problem is so amazingly stupid that the asker usually walks away with his or her pride obliterated. The answer? rm ./-blah. Ivo told me about the alternate solution of using rm — -blah to do it. I like the ./ way better though because it’s so obvious once you know it. I think Jerome might know a better way though.

OK, how do I make file_column work? I did the following (after installing file_column) which seems like it could be correct, however, it doesn’t work.

1.) Added a database migration

class AddOpmlFileColumn < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    create_table :opmlfiles do |table|
      table.column :id, :integer, :null=>false
      table.column :file_name, :string, :null=>false
      table.column :created_at, :datetime
      table.column :user_id, :integer, :null=>false, :default=>'0'
    end
  end

def self.down
  drop_table :opmlfiles
end

end

2.) Created an Opmlfile model

class Opmlfile < ActiveRecord::Base
  file_column :opmlfile
end

3.) Updated the generated controller’s constructor

class OpmlfilesController < ApplicationController
  def new
    if request.get?
      @opmlfile = Opmlfile.new
    else
    	@opmlfile = Opmlfile.new(params[:opmlfile])
    	@opmlfile.save
    end
  end

4.) Designed an upload form

<%= start_form_tag :action => 'create', :multipart => true %>
<p>Upload file:
<%= file_field('opmlfile', 'file_name') %>
<%= submit_tag('Upload file') %>
<%= end_form_tag %>
<%= link_to 'Back', :action => 'list' %>
</p>

OK, the thing is, it looks like it is uploading during the HTTP POST, however, I don’t get any files in my public directory. An opmlfiles directory was created, but nothing ever gets there. Also, the filename is always blank in the model and database. What the heck am I doing wrong?

Update: SOLVED!!!!

BLARGH! The last problem was that my form needed to be defined as this:

<%= start_form_tag({ :action => 'create' }, :multipart => true) %>

and NOT this:

<%= start_form_tag(:action => 'create', :multipart => true) %>

Rails was erroring with “Do not know how to handle a string with value ‘hoyhoy.opml’ that was passed to a file_column” before I made the change.

Also, dopplertx was indeed correct, I needed to have a column in my database table for the filename. It is called file_column after all. Thanks everyone.

I was talking to the infamous bumper the other night about how OS X is killing the open source desktop movement. Gnome and KDE seem to have lost their appeal to a lot of the moderate Penguinistas. A lot of these people are using OS X hotness now. Apple has been doing a bang-up job innovating on the desktop for the past 5 years while my Gnome Desktop still looks like a third rate clone of Windows 95. I’ve used recent versions of KDE too, and it fairs no better. Xgl is a step in the right direction, however, it still is fairly alpha right now.

I think the Mac might not be just killing the Open Source desktops, but the OSS movement itself. I don’t care very much about compiling stuff and trying to make it work on a Linux desktop anymore because everything that I could possibly want to use on Linux already works on OS X. So, I don’t spend time evangelizing Linux on involution.com. I’m too busy having a blast on my Powerbook much like an 8-year-old mesmerized by a large tank of colorful plastic balls. OS X comes in the back door because “IT’S BSD,” but way prettier. After that, you’re not coding Gnome widgets anymore. You’re sitting down with a latte, posting pictures to Flickr and using the word “cognoscenti” on Livejournal.

The problem has only gotten worse since I started using NetNewsWire. This fiendish little Mac program allows me to keep track of thousands of RSS feeds at once. I’ll be eating breakfast hitting next over and over again like a crack addict taking hits from the Macpipe. I’m starting to understand why Donald Knuth totally gave up email in the 90s. He could see the writing on the wall for how distracting this big old party can be. He could have never imagined Email+RSS+Livejournal+Flickr+IRC on a Mac (+ Starbucks in RL). I blame him for all of this in a lot of ways. Him and bumper.

* This post is ridiculously old, I typed it up months ago, but never posted it. I quit IRC and Starbucks thrice since writing this.

I made a bunch of changes to my Rails on RHEL Wiki tonight. I added a chapter for installing Rails 1.1, Ruby 1.84, example VirtualHost entries for Lighttpd+FastCGI and Apache+FastCGI all running on the same Apache installation. Some spammer hit me with a bunch of invisible links on the wiki too, so I had to clean those old boys out. I also fixed some error that was pointed out by the mysterious wgillett who I don’t know.

I upgraded hudge today to Ruby on Rails 1.1 and Ruby 1.8.4. It could be psychological, but my RSS reader seems to run a little faster, and dooky.org seems to be working like the clappers.