/Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Support/lib/builder.rb:86:in `blank_slate_method_added': stack level too deep (SystemStackError) from /Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Support/lib/builder.rb:86:in `blank_slate_method_added' from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/builder-2.1.2/lib/blankslate.rb:84:in `method_added' from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/builder-2.1.2/lib/blankslate.rb:104 from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `gem_original_require' from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `require' from /Users/jbasdf/projects/red/vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/basic_object.rb:21 from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `gem_original_require' from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `require' ... 32 levels... from /Users/jbasdf/Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles/RSpec.tmbundle/Support/lib/spec/../spec/mate/runner.rb:36:in `chdir' from /Users/jbasdf/Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles/RSpec.tmbundle/Support/lib/spec/../spec/mate/runner.rb:36:in `run' from /Users/jbasdf/Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles/RSpec.tmbundle/Support/lib/spec/../spec/mate/runner.rb:24:in `run_focussed' from /tmp/textmate-command-31296.rb:3

The solution is pretty simple. Just add this to spec_helper.rb:

 
$:.reject! { |e| e.include? 'TextMate' }
 

Turns out it makes a big difference. I normally ride a Madone 6.9 which is a pretty nice ride. The S3 felt faster. It is a bike that flies. Now the S3 comes with Zipp 404s while I ride XXX Lites. I'd really like to throw those wheels on my bike and get a feel for the ride difference (I'm thinking I might need some wheels for Christmas).

We had a great time. The fit on the S3 was great. I was frequently surprised at how fast I was going given the power output. I have a good feel for how fast I should be going at a given effort and the difference was noticeable. It is a super light bike. It is an incredibly fun bike. It accelerated fast. It was easy to keep going fast. However, it sends up a lot more road noise than some of the other super bikes I've ridden (like my Madone or a Time). It wasn't as comfortable as my current bike but on shorter rides old guys like me wouldn't notice/care.

Would I buy this bike? I think so. It was a heck of a lot of fun and I think I would buy it just for that. However, it's probably a couple down on my list. My next bike will likely be a custom titanium from Carl Strong. Someday I'd like to buy one from Crumpton or Calfee. You don't drop 7-10k on a bike everyday and so in that class there is a lot of incredible hardware to choose from. Also, I feel like for the money those bikes deserve a higher place in the queue. The Cervelo is made in China and is rumored to have a few quality problems. In the end the ride and the fun is what matters but those factors being equal I'd pick the higher quality bike with the sexier pedigree.

I could only see the error in production. In development everything worked fine. I swore a lot because that is the worst kind of error. yYou feel like you need to debug on the server or setup a staging server. Running my local box in 'production' mode didn't help. I couldn't reproduce the error until I remembered a recent RailsCast about subdomains in Rails 3. He had mentioned a couple of domains you can use that others have kindly set to point at localhost. I used 'http://smackaho.st:3000/'. Sure enough, the javascript errors started showing up which led me to do a bit more searching. I discovered that if you load jQuery and then load it again it will essentially reset your environment. I searched all my code to make sure I wasn't committing this sin and sure enough I wasn't.

The fact that the error only showed up when the domain changed to a production style domain led me to the javascript that we've inserted into the site to make third party services work. I started removing them one at a time and sure enough as soon as I removed userfly everything started working again.

I didn't investigate their code in depth but I'm betting they load jQuery and that it resets the jQuery environment essentially dumping everything I load.

Lesson learned, sort of. These days we rely on third-party services for everything from analytics to usability to comments and the list goes on. It's hard to not use these services as they make your life a lot easier but don't be afraid to throw them aside if you start getting random errors on your site.

Drop in there and chat with any of the guys in blue shirts. Tell them you want an SFR 3G microsim card. Most of the guys speak English and are really nice. The card will get you three days of unlimited data access and costs 9 euros. After that you can recharge the card at any kiosk around town - one day costs 6 euros. Do the math. Buying more sim cards is cheaper than trying to find a so I just bought two.

Don't buy the ATT international plan before you come over and do take your microsim card out on the plane. If you don't have a plan data costs about $24 a meg. If you do have a plan it costs a bit more than $1 per meg.

One other thing. You likely activated your iPad in the US so you won't have the right settings for the new SIM. Go into Cellular Data -> APN settings and then type in websfr for the APN.

You should be good to go.

Devin is different. His approach to violence is far more, well, violent. He screams at his sisters, "I hate you!". At least he used to. We threatened to feed him soap so now he says, "I hate ...., I don't like it when you do that." I've been trying to teach him to say, "you vex my soul!"

He's the first of our kids to make guns out of anything he can find and he frequently 'shoots' his sisters and tells them he's going to 'kill them'. We don't let him watch anything but the Disney channel. I've not taken him shooting and don't own a gun. There's just something in the DNA that comes coded ready to shoot, kill, yell, jump, hunt.....

Anyway, I'm in my office today coding my brains out 'cause that what I do all day when all of a sudden I hear a loud explosion and then a boom. Being the good dad that I am I yell, "what the hell?!!!" and run upstairs. Devin has found the latest box of junk we ordered from Amazon and is jumping on the packaging to make the air packets explode. To boys things that explode are really cool. Boys don't grow out of that. The explosions just get bigger and more colorful.

Last sunday in church, at full volume Devin screams out "What's in my pants? What is in my pants?!!!!"

I should have been horrified, but instead I laughed out loud. You can't imagine how many times I've wanted to yell that in the middle of a sermon.

 
  user.google.portable_contacts.all
 

As long as user.google is a valid token provided by oauth you will get back a list of the user's contacts from gmail.

That is unless you have the Fireeagle gem included in your application. In that case you will spend the night swearing like a sailor and then weeping openly like a little girl. If you include fireeagle 0.8.0.1 in your project and make that call you will get an error like this:

ActionView::TemplateError (wrong number of arguments (1 for 0)) on line #7 of /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/muck-invites-0.1.12/app/views/invites/_gmail_oauth.erb:
    /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/oauth-0.4.0/lib/oauth/consumer.rb:154:in `create_http'
    /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/oauth-0.4.0/lib/oauth/consumer.rb:154:in `request'
    /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/oauth-0.4.0/lib/oauth/tokens/consumer_token.rb:25:in `request'
    /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/oauth-0.4.0/lib/oauth/tokens/access_token.rb:11:in `request'
    /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/oauth-0.4.0/lib/oauth/tokens/access_token.rb:24:in `get'
    /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/portablecontacts-0.1.0/lib/portable_contacts.rb:55:in `get'
    /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/portablecontacts-0.1.0/lib/portable_contacts.rb:43:in `all'
    /Users/jbasdf/projects/muck-oauth/app/helpers/muck_oauth_helper.rb:32:in `gmail_contacts'
    /Users/jbasdf/projects/muck-oauth/app/helpers/muck_oauth_helper.rb:16:in `gmail_contacts_as_array'

Naturally you will follow the stack trace down to the call in the oauth gem to create_http. Then you will look at the call to it and everything will look fine. The oauth gem works for everyone else. Why does it not work? WTF? Stupid code. I should have dropped out of engineering and become a business major. Seriously WTF? This code is never even called. What the hell!!!!!

Then you will remember that ruby is the best, most awesome language ever and you can replace methods dynamically on the fly, and you will figure out that the create_http method being called is not the one in the file you are looking at.

Next you get to figure out what method is being called. It took a lot of colorful language, some lost hair, my wife almost left me, but by luck I found it:

 
# FireEagle addition to the <code>OAuth::Consumer</code> class
class OAuth::Consumer
  alias_method :create_http_with_verify, :create_http
  # Monkey patch to silence the SSL warnings
  def create_http_without_verify #:nodoc:
    http_object             = create_http_with_verify
    http_object.verify_mode = OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_NONE if uri.scheme=="https"
    http_object
  end
  alias_method :create_http, :create_http_without_verify
end
 

Death to the bastard that wrote that code.

Here's what the code inside oauth looks like:

 
    # Instantiates the http object
    def create_http(_url = nil)
      if _url.nil? || _url[0] =~ /^\//
        our_uri = URI.parse(site)
      else
        our_uri = URI.parse(_url)
      end
 
      if proxy.nil?
        http_object = Net::HTTP.new(our_uri.host, our_uri.port)
      else
        proxy_uri = proxy.is_a?(URI) ? proxy : URI.parse(proxy)
        http_object = Net::HTTP.new(our_uri.host, our_uri.port, proxy_uri.host, proxy_uri.port, proxy_uri.user, proxy_uri.password)
      end
 
      http_object.use_ssl = (our_uri.scheme == 'https')
 
      if @options[:ca_file] || CA_FILE
        http_object.ca_file = @options[:ca_file] || CA_FILE
        http_object.verify_mode = OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_PEER
        http_object.verify_depth = 5
      else
        http_object.verify_mode = OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_NONE
      end
 
      http_object
    end
 

Notice that the new method in the oauth gem takes optional parameters while the monkey patched version doesn't? MonkeyPatching causes me to use words that destroy my eternal salvation. Stop it.

I couldn't figure out why no one else has had this problem. Maybe someone has but it was the combination of gems I was playing with that caused the problem. I dropped fireeagle from the project and everything magically started working.

I would be wrong in that assumption.

Instead of just working anytime I try to run a 2.3.5 app (most of my apps at the moment). I get this:

Missing the Rails 2.3.5 gem. Please `gem install -v=2.3.5 rails`, update your RAILS_GEM_VERSION setting in config/environment.rb for the Rails version you do have installed, or comment out RAILS_GEM_VERSION to use the latest version installed.

So my next step was to uninstall 2.3.8. I still get the error. I uninstalled and then reinstalled Rails and things seem to be working.

Heroku has the answer: http://docs.heroku.com/rails236.

This is why it's usually a good idea to wait a little while after a Rails update. I have to keep reminding myself of that.

The hashrocket guys have a great writeup on configuring your development environment. I didn't need some of their bash configuration but it's a great starting place.

Once you have mysql installed with homebrew it can still be handy to customize your mysql configuration. Here's an article on how to configure my.cnf.

My configuration ended up looking like the code below which I got from this article. Here's more info on the values you can specify. I placed the code into '/etc/my.cnf'. That's probably more global than most people want, but it works great for me.

[mysqld]
#Max packetlength to send/receive from to server.
max_allowed_packet=64M
#socket = /var/mysql/mysql.sock
character-set-server = utf8
default-character-set = utf8

#This option makes InnoDB to store each created table into its own .ibd file.
innodb_file_per_table

[mysql]
default-character-set = utf8

[client]
#socket = /var/mysql/mysql.sock
default-character-set=utf8

Here's how I ended up installing the mysql gem. (Always a pain to get this right).

sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" gem install mysql --no-rdoc --no-ri -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/bin/mysql_config

Snow be damned when everything else falls apart you simply must ride so I and Joel headed up Left Hand Fork in a spring blizzard because, well, after you get dressed up in tights there's no going back.

When we parked the truck the snow was falling pretty hard. The sky was darkening. It was getting cold. We had driven all that way so turning back wasn't an option.

Further and further we ascending, snow attempting to drive us back to the warmth of the truck, but by hell we were men in tights and guys with that level of resolve don't turn back.

Then the weather cleared and we did what any self-respecting guy would do we kept going higher and higher. Time finally forced us to turn back and in a way time was finally on our side. Not long into our decent the snow returned for revenge and our epic spring ride began. Unable to feel our fingers we gave up on using the brakes (real men don't need them anyway). Faster and faster we rode, the snow piled in our path, wolves howled in the distance. We faced the pedaled to the very edge of death and came back victors.

Back at the truck I warmed my fingers just enough to find the keys hidden in my jacket. As the blood returned to our extremities the sting, more than a normal human could bear, reminded us what it means to be alive.

You might think us crazy for riding in the mountains, far from help, snow and cold pushing us towards death, but you'd be wrong. That's not what makes us crazy. That we're going to do it again tomorrow is what makes us crazy (oh and the tights probably mark us as a bit nuts too).

I thought I would move the blog from bluehost to webbynode and so I've spent the past few days trying to do just that. I had high hopes for using webbynode as a low cost host where I could put my blog and then stage a Rails site or run a few experiments. After several tries rebuilding the server and trying different deploys I gave up and now I'm back to my old account.

I still think Webbynode is a great service. They make putting up a Rails app a trivial process. I don't think that running a php app (Wordpress in my case) next to your Rails app is very good idea unless you move up to the larger plans which means spending a lot of money just to run a blog. If you're going to end up paying that much more you may as well keep a basic account for the blog and run a separate account for your Rails experiments.

Anyway, electron vacation is over and the site's back up. I know you missed me.