Archive for February, 2006
SOSOS
February 16
My God, this has been a horrible week for my web development work. Absolutely horrible…but only in two areas.
Well, not even two “areas”. Just two connected things that are driving me crazy.
In the development of Webpen, I’m using a wonderful little Rails mixin/gem (that’s basically a plugin to you non-Rails folk), to make objects taggable, like your photos on Flick or links in del.icio.us. Only two problems with it.
First, notice I haven’t provided any links to it? That’s ’cause there are none now. The developer’s site has gone AWOL and only the RubyForge page is still up, but that’s not the most helpful of sites when you have a problem like I do. What’s the problem? The freakin’ thing can’t use PostgreSQL, which is the database that I use here at home for my work. So I can’t test without uploading to the server. Which is a right pain in the ass since the server runs, rightly, in production mode. Which means I have to restart it for code changes to take effect. Which is more than I want to do.
This little problem leads me to the second one, MySQL. Now, I use an Apple iBook and it came with MySQL already installed. Which is fine and dandy at the beginning. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t bunged up their install of it and had to either reinstall or move on to something else. I moved on.
But now I need MySQL. Should be easy, I thought to myself this morning. I’ll just download the new package from mysql.com and upgrade. It’ll take all of 20 minutes and then I can get back to work.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. I did download the new binaries and I did upgrade, but the MySQL server wouldn’t start. I removed the old install and the new and installed again. No dice. I did this a few more times.
Then I tried installing from source. That didn’t work either. Don’t know why, but it didn’t. I nearly cried.
So furter removal, got rid of anything I could find, even removed /tmp/mysql.sock. Nothing, even though everything was returning as successful. Time to move to a better environment, I decided.
After SSH-ing into my Ubuntu box, I tried to install MySQL there. Well, that would have worked I think, but my apt-get can’t connect to the servers. So I download the Linux binary and try it. Nope, no go.
So now I’m waiting on the Linux source package to finish the make cycle. If this doesn’t work, I don’t know what I’ll do. Probably scrap the tags and find another way to represent abstract grouping.
Anyone have any ideas for either the server or the gem?
UPDATE
Well, something must have worked, ’cause MySQL is working now (which means tags are, woot!).
Thirty-five
February 1
Elijah watched Jones and the soldier walk off into the mist. His soldier, the one that was standing near him, watched them walk off, too. He seemed really nervous now that his fellow Marine, or whatever they were, wasn’t at his side. What the hell would a fully armed soldier have to fear?
Someone coughed and moaned on one of the cots behind Elijah. The moan sent a shiver down his spine; it was too eerily familiar. Oh yeah. THAT’s what he’s afraid of. Elijah shivered again. Jones and the soldier had disappeared in the hazy air. He sat and stared into the mist for a few seconds before his guard — was he really under guard? Just for a little bite? — turned and walked away toward the computer stations. Elijah watched him walk, too. Seemed he’d been doing a lot of that today.
The soldier didn’t do anything interesting. He put his foot up on a box and started chatting with another soldier who was sitting at the computer. They were talking quietly but Elijah was pretty sure they were talking about him since they kept glancing in his direction. The sitting soldier nodded several times and then got up and started rifling through a box behind him. Elijah’s soldier turned and started back towards him.
A scream and shots came from the hazy greyness in front of the tents. Another scream followed soon after. All of the soldiers were frozen for a moment, armed the next. Those near the — patients? prisoners? — cots stayed were they were, looking around both fearfully and confidently at the same time. Their eyes never left the people on the cots.
Some of the soldiers at the computers hurried over to the radio setup, the others seemed to be pecking out hurried emails. Elijah’s grunt took a few steps out into the growing fog and peered into the mist. Elijah stared after him, frozen to his cot. Nothing moved. He could just barely see the still-rotating, still-shining lights on the ambulance, but nothing else where Jones should have been. He wondered if they were going to let him drive through or make him go around.
Or had those gunshots been for him?
A cough, moan, and gurgle came from the cots behind Elijah. One of the soldiers sucked in his breath and held it. He could hear another cursing under his breath, searching for a pulse, apparently. Ten seconds passed, Elijah counting out Mississippis in his head. Twenty. Thirty. How long could you go without a pulse anyway? Fourty-five. A minute. The soldier cursed again, and Elijah heard a gun cock.
His soldier, he couldn’t help but think of him that way, reached a hand out and said, “Come on, man, don’t do that. He’s gone. Leave him alone.” Elijah’s eyes grew wider and he started shaking. He had been bitten. That was why they were keeping him here, wasn’t it? So that meant the other people had to have been bitten. So…what did it mean? The paramedic, the woman, had been bitten, too. She’d had her fucking throat ripped out, too, though. So was it the bite that had brought he back?
Elijah leapt to his feet. His soldier shouted “Hey!” at him, but he didn’t notice.
“I have to get out of here. He — ” He turned to look at the dead guy and saw what an awful color he had turned. His skin was GREEN with sickly yellow splotches, and two bright slashes of red blood on either side of his mouth. Elijah screamed, both from the pain of standing on his bitten leg and from fright. People were NOT supposed to be green!
“Sit down,” the soldier ordered, one hand on Elijah’s chest. Elijah stared at him, mouth open. The gun-happy soldier walked over and stood next to Elijah’s guard. “Now,” ordered his soldier. The other grunt raised his gun and pointed it at Elijah.
“You need to sit down,” he said, quietly and through his teeth. He raised his thumb to cock the gun, hopefully just for the threat. Another moan made his eyes dart to the side and Elijah looked, helplessly, too.
The recently deceased man had rolled his head to the side, staring at them. His tongue came out of his blood-speckled lips and licked them, smearing the red into obscene lip stick. He groaned again and rolled his shoulders over, moving to get up from the cot.
The gun in the soldiers hand started spitting fire inches away from Elijah’s head.
They could hear shouts coming from the thickening fog. Ruth hurried over to where Seth was kneeling on the ground next to the paramedic. Seth was sitting very silently on his heels, his head down. He had left the shotgun back at the ambulance. She wasn’t frightened, though, even though the gun, and especially an armed Seth, had come to mean protection and security in the last few hours. Seth looked on the verge of tears. She laid a hand on his shoulder.
“I think he’s dead,” Seth said quietly. “I — I don’t know why, but him dying really makes me sad. Like, more than anyone else so far.” He shrugged and his voice was harsh and filled with tears when he spoke again. “So far! Ha!” He hung his head down again and looked at Jones for a few seconds, then he started to get to his feet again. Ruth jumped up quicker and offered her hand for support. “He said they’ve blocked off the rest of the road. Some military blockade or something.”
Ruth hadn’t said anything yet, not sure if her voice would stand up to the stress of seeing her… protector… under such stress. “So how are we gonna get by?” Her voice surprised her. It wasn’t weak at all. “Do you think we could just go around?”
He looked at her for a second, the two of them still walking back toward the ambulance. “No. I don’t think we can.” She nodded, willing to accept almost anything that he decided today. It had worked well so far.
They reached the ambulance and Ruth went to check the soldier again after Seth asked her if he was alive or dead. His pulse was almost gone and his breathing seemed to have stopped. She nodded, then added in a whisper, “Just about.” Seth nodded back and picked up his shotgun from where it had been laying in the ambulance. He looked at the soldier one more time, shrugged, and turned toward where the shouting was coming from.
“Let’s go see what all the noise is.”
Ruth jumped up from the wet pavement and followed, her weapon forgotten.