Snagged from http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/5621 and posted here so I can find it later.

Installing a gem without the version works fine; installing a gem using “-v 2.x.x” or whatever version you like ends in:
spec_fetcher.rb:254: warning: getc is obsolete; use STDIN.getc instead

Guess what? RubyGems 1.3.7 doesn’t play nice with OSX 10.5.8. So downgrade to 1.3.6, or if you’re using RVM, do this:
echo 'rubygems_version=1.3.6' >> ~/.rvm/config/user ; rvm remove 1.8.7 ; rvm install 1.8.7

(assuming you are using 1.8.7 in your RVM, otherwise, use 1.9.1 or whatever)

Voila, works like a charm.

Thanks to Wayne E. Seguin for his help on irc.freenode.net #rvm (and for RVM in the first place!)

PS You may have to downgrade to 1.3.5 to get “rake gems:install” to work.

Stuff grew! The big foof of green you see on the left is parsley; I had to separate it out from the others so they didn’t hog all the sun. The rest in the tray is oregano, basil, tarragon, and catnip. The plant in the soda bottle bottom behind the parsley is a marigold I got from the UU church’s earth day service. Thinking tomorrow will be a good day for planting outside.

Being prepared for zombies on my lawn: Priceless.

Well, here’s yet again another attempt at me starting an herb garden. Difference this time is that I actually have land to plant on. Yay, home ownership! I’ve got parsley, catnip, oregano, thyme, tarragon, and basil. Any tips from you green thumbs out there? ‘Cause generally anything I plant dies pretty horribly. Black thumbs run in my family. I know I need to keep them watered, but not too watered or I’ll get root rot. When should I water them? Every other day? Every second day? I have them at a west-facing window so they’ll get some sunlight filtered through the pine tree back there every day.

Any useful advice appreciated!

I did a website for recently an established webcomic and some of the old archive images were showing up in negative on some browsers, and not showing up at all in others. But it didn’t happen to all the images, and not on all browsers. I beat my head against this for a while.

When you can’t figure out what’s wrong with an image, you look at the image properties, rather than beat your head against a wall. This is what I suggest, anyway, because I didn’t do that.

They were CMYK.

CMYK images show as negative in Safari, and don’t show up at all in some versions of IE.

Yay. Great. Converted them to RGB, re-uploaded, all fixed.

“env: ruby: No such file or directory”

Maddening.

Turns out I didn’t have a environment.plist file in my /Users/(username)/.MacOSX/ directory, and even though it worked just fine before without it, that was no longer the case.

Here’s where to get a nifty little Ruby script to build it and even stick it in the right place for you. Note, the file must already exist, so you’ll have to make a .MacOSX directory in your user directory, and create an empty file “environment.plist.”

When using the autocomplete plugin that uses jQuery instead of scriptaculous, you need to add a route:

map.auto_complete ':controller/:action',
     :requirements => { :action => /auto_complete_for_\S+/ },
     :conditions => { :method => :get }

As per this post by the author of the plugin, who for some unknown reason hasn’t included that step with the instructions for the plugin. (WTF?) Otherwise it just sends the request to the show action, which looks at you stupidly and replies, “Couldn’t find FileData with ID=auto_complete_for_yourfieldname”, replacing “yourfieldname” with whatever you’d actually like it to return.

George Tiller, M.D. provided late term abortions. He was one of a handful of doctors that would. Why would someone get a late term abortion? What if, at 21 weeks, you found out your fetus had a severe birth defect that would cause it to be constantly in pain and live only a few years?  Dr. Tiller understood that sometimes you have to make hard decisions, and that those decisions should not be made harder by not being able to find quality care. He did not encourage people to get abortions. He only performed them when the woman had made the very difficult decision to have one. He provided quality care with respect.

Abortion is legal in the United States. Whether you agree with it or not, it is a legally available procedure. Murdering doctors for providing a legally available procedure is not heroic. It’s murder. I agree with President Obama that we should be working towards the goal of lessening the need for abortions – sex education, providing birth control, and being open and frank when discussing pregnancy. Regardless, I still believe that women should have the option to end their pregnancy if they feel it is necessary. Dr. Tiller thought so, too. I hope that his service to the respect and independence of women helps his soul rest easy.

1. Everything will take longer than you think.
2. Cake is hard work, but it does make you popular.
3. Try not to break your dishwasher’s faucet coupler before a large baking project.
4. The Point of Diminishing Returns is not just a theory.

And, without further ado:

Wedding Cake for Carrie Dahlby and Josh Rasey, 5/30/09
Bottom tier – vanilla sour cream cake w/ vanilla buttercream
Middle tier – chocolate cake w/ vanilla buttercream
Top tier – low sugar chocolate cake w/ low sugar Italian meringue buttercream
Entirely covered in marshmallow fondant with fondant roses and heart decorations

Based on a Sedona Wedding Cakes design

(photo by Jered Perez)

Reduced sugar devil’s food cake with half sugar/half splenda swiss meringue buttercream. Marshmallow fondant used to cover the cake and for pink heart decorations.