Shawn Sorichetti

My Saturday started off fairly normal. Took the kids to karate, quick lunch, build a shed. At 4:45PM EDT, that’s when things got interesting.

I’d received an IM from Kristopher Tate, he was recovering the Zooomr PostgreSQL and needed some help. I’d offered him help during the initial 10 minute launch, and now he was taking me up on that offer. The issue, being the RAID adaptor had died, and left the database in an unstable state.

After trying a couple things, the root cause of the database problem became apparent, and the only choice left was to restore the pre-launch database. By 8:30pm we’d worked our way through the restore process, and reset the database to where it was at launch time. Kris had a couple other fixes that needed to be made prior to launch.

During this time I was allowed to access the sandbox system, take screenshots and share them with everyone. I was very impressed with how much quicker Mark III is, and with the new features. I created a couple groups, one of the joys of getting early access.

Just prior to launch there were a couple more database issues, and an issue with Gmail not accepting mail or marking it as spam. The database issues were fixed, but Gmail would have to wait, it was time to launch.

The launch went fairly smoothly and Zooomr Mark III was here to stay. There were a couple of adjustments required, but everyone seemed happy. At 3:30am with things looking pretty good, it was time for me to crash. I no longer have the ability to stay up all night coding like Kris. To be 19 and full of energy again.

Congratulations to Kris and Thomas on rolling out a fine update to Zooomr.

I am making my way through learning Ruby and Rails with a couple projects that I’ve always wanted to write. Rather than writing sample applications I find it a lot easier to learn if I have a need to use a tool, and these projects provide that need.

As I’m working through each one I’m discover gaps in what I have learned thus far, and have found these various tutorials helpful.

• Creating Two Models in One Form
• Creating Many Models in One Form
• Creating Variable Number of Models in One Form
• Basic User Authentication in Rails
• Starting Ruby on Rails: What I Wish I Knew
• Railscasts
• attachment_fu and ImageScience

This list will continue to grow as I find more useful tutorials.

While working my way through Agile Web Development with Rails (yes I’m learning Rails and Ruby, more on this too later) I ran into the following error:

while trying to add a column through a migration. Searching Google took me to a couple of places, but it took a while to find a result that explained how to resolve this issue.

Luckily I came across this post by Mark Cornick, which explained that the issues was caused by the version of SQLite3 that is included in OS X 10.4.

After downloading and installing (from source) the latest version of SQLite3, and uninstalling and reinstalling the sqlite3-ruby gem

I was able to run the migration to add the column and continue on.

Last night was the annual, though this may have been the first, Toronto Perl Mongers Tools Night. People select their favourite tool and do a short presentation or demonstration in hopes of helping their fellow Perl Mongers.

There were a couple of talks that I found interesting. Selenium for web application testing and Jifty::Script::Schema.

I’ve seen talks on Selenium before but this quick demonstration drove home it’s usefulness. I’m hoping to get this implemented for some integration testing I have to do.

Jifty::Script::Schema sounded really interesting, but in order to use it you have to install all of Jifty. I’m a big fan of CGI::Application and the idea of making a move to Jifty doesn’t interest me, and even less so with the Mason requirement. Luckily Jifty::Script::Schema led me to DBIx::DBSchema which I actually can use, and looks to fit into a number of projects.

For my part I did a short presentation of some of my favourite and maybe lesser known Vim Tricks.

Another benefit, I actually got around to creating my presentation page. Now I just need to finish populating it.