When setting up rails with apache, if you get the error message “Invalid command ‘RewriteEngine’ ” in the apache log when apache’s trying to parse the .htaccess file, it’s probably because by default the necessary module is not enabled.

Find and uncomment the line

LoadModule rewritemodule modules/modrewrite.so

in your apache config (perhaps conf/httpd.conf) to get to the end of level baddy.

It does say in the getting started to check this is done. shakes head.

Keywords: ruby, rails, setup, apache 2.0.46, windows, “getting started”, basic installation problem. “Internal Server Error”. rewriteengine, mod_rewrite. rtfm.

the cat in the hat, obviously. bom fim de semana.

A guy invented a one-button universal tv remote that switches all tvs off - Wired article.

“The idea for TV-B-Gone was born at a restaurant in the early 1990s, when Altman and his friends kept paying attention to a TV in the corner, not to one another. They chatted about how to turn off all televisions, and he wondered if it would be possible to string together a series of “power” commands.”

Required reading! George Monbiot on why it is that the media churns out what it does. Straightforward good read from George Monbiot showing the context in which the majority of journalists are working today.

“Now to own a national newspaper or television or radio station, you need to be […] a multi-millionaire.

Now what multi-millionaires want is what everybody wants: a better world for people like themselves. A better world for multi-millionaires is, by definition, a worse world for everybody else, for the simple reason that it relies upon vast levels of inequality. […] They want to remain richer and more powerful than everyone else.

So they have a problem. Their interests are plainly at variance with those of their readers or viewers, who are much poorer than they are. They can’t instruct their editors to write “we want a better world for people like us, and a worse world for people like you.â€? What they must do instead is to present a picture of the world which favours their interests. In other words, they must misrepresent the key issues. They must misrepresent the choices we face. They must portray those choices which are in our interests as being against our interests, and portray those choices which are in their interests as being in our interests. They must create a world which is in many ways the opposite of the real one.”

How NOT to go about a programming assignment via slashdot. Also available in spanish.

via slashdot

neillzero bookmarks at del.icio.us, and rss feed.

Just started.

Seeing as I only really blog bookmarks, perhaps i don’t need this blog any more.

jim’s blog.

Tom Waits is touring but I don’t see Mozambique on the schedule. What a dick. 23rd nov in london, 15th November in Berlin, and I understand 6 other European stops. Will try to look at flights later today, but I expect the concert tickets themselves are now rarer than the air tickets, given he hasn’t played in the UK in 17 years.

Oh it’s a messed-up world when this news doesn’t get to me sooner even though i’m reading every day; it didn’t make apache news, cafe com leite, OR erik thauvin’s links: miscreant traitors and masters of deception every one. Next they’ll not be telling me… there IS?? New album out. Fizz! what am i here, dead? <blink>Warning, your aggregator may not be telling you everything you need to know…

From the manning book Bitter EJB (wait! don’t stop reading!), comes a good sample chapter called Bitter Messages on anti-patterns in JMS (and, largely, messaging in general). Tate also wrote Bitter Java and Better, Faster, Lighter Java, which has a focus on Spring and Hibernate.

also from metafilter,

1. contemporary origami

front page

mefi post.

1. I am learn, a text-churning blog, which the mefi comments rightly suggest would be cool if it pulled its sources automatically from other blog content.

A book is being written collaboratively on Constructor Dependency Injection.

What’s of interest to me is that they’re going to attempt to write it using the beautifully simple txt2tags, rather than the increasingly popular xml doctype, docbook [2], which they reject on the basis of editing and reading difficulty (angle brackets).

Time will tell if txt2tags supports them in the task. Hopefully, they’ll tell, too.

Of course, once they’ve brainstormed most of the content down into the document, they can always start to mark it up more rigourously as needed, but most of the docs we work with are living things, so I’m most interested in the tool that supports us during that scramble.

The current build of the book and The cvs repos are available for the nosy.

The only thing I miss about writing docs in a visual editor is that I don’t have a good visual table editor in docbook (xmlmind is almost there, but incredibly that software doesn’t have a plain text editing view, where most, I think, would still spend their time).

Video for “The Sad Song” by Fredo Viola -

“This is a video I made for my song entitled “The Sad Song”. The video was created entirely using 15 second jpg movies from my little Nikon Coolpix 775 still camera, reconstructed in AfterEffects.” nice.

Via onde I can’t remember.

update: ah, it was from this metafilter post.

John Pilger | Foreign Policy | Paradise Cleansed. From today’s Guardian. Very interesting. A brief history of the lies around the british “cleansing” of the island of Diego Garcia to make way for miliary bases.

For once I wish I had a telly, because… “Stealing a Nation”, John Pilger’s documentary investigating the expulsion of the Chagos islanders will be shown on ITV on Wednesday 13th October at 11 pm.

Epa! Scorcher yesterday, 43 degrees. 7th October. Really dry, too. Back to normal today (mid-high 20s). Here’s October’s weather and here’s last year’s Sept - December.

The How and the Tao of Old Time Banjo on creative commons. via boingboing.

Elliotte Rusty Harold reviews some of the UML class diagram editors suggested to him after he freaks out trying to use ArgoUML, and finds that most are terrible. (search down the page for “Tolke”)

Unfortunately for me his favorite discovery is a mac only product, omnigraffle, and the version he tried and liked was payware. But perhaps it’s bundled with your mac, like it was with his.

I personally don’t mind Poseidon CE’s “draft” background, but wouldn’t go near the product for anything other than class diagrams, and that at a push.

Our little team is still using Alex Moffat’s excellent “sequence” sequence diagram editor with glee. I see just now that he’s just updated, too! Headless mode should work now, he says. Nice. Be ware that the last source dist required javacc and javahelp to build.

Now to put the sequence diagram source text in the docbook articles and have ant build all the diagrams at doc gen time… Or I could get some more work done.

presidential debate: (an automatic) linguistic analysis at overstated.net

Creole eclipse code-visualisation plugin (I tested with 3.0).

I shall definitely goof with this some more. I found the zoomable interface got in the way, so far. Could only zoom fully on an artifact (a package, a class, a method) but couldn’t be told with any rubber banding technique to zoom to a region i found interesting (say, a group of calls to a set of methods).

As the release notes predicted, this ran out of memory doing a fancy diagram on my first non trivial test case (~150 classes).

Only played with it at 30 mins. Will return. Great stuff.