Monthly Archives: July 2006

Useful error messages save time

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It is almost hard to convey how nice it is to have useful error messages. This can be the difference between spending hours tracking down a problem and being able to solve a problem in five minutes.

I was trying to get ruby on rails setup on a new machine that didn’t have it setup originally and got it working except it was continually running my app in webrick instead of lighttpd. So I manually run ./script/server lighttpd. After doing this I get the useful message:

=> Booting lighttpd (use ‘script/server webrick’ to force WEBrick)
PROBLEM: Lighttpd requires that the FCGI Ruby bindings are installed on the system

So to fix the problem I simply have to run: apt-get install libfcgi-ruby1.8

This is a great example of why ruby on rails is great. Useful error message make a huge difference when you’re trying to solve problems.

On the same note though they still have room for improvement. The path to ruby was incorrect in my dispatch.fcgi file and the error message displayed makes it look like there was a problem with fcgi somehow rather than the path to ruby being incorrect.

Another useful firefox extension – verizon minutes used (TMobile too)

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I found another really neat firefox extension. Its called minutes used and it tracks the number of minutes you have used and then gives you detail on whether the minutes are in-network, peak, off peak, etc. It even gives you the ability the make the number red when it goes over a certain threshold.This is really neat and well done extension to make sure you don’t go over your minutes. I got the one for verizon since my phone is verizon. It looks like there is an extension for TMobile too though. Go see for yourself here.

The courts say no more cleanflix

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It seems Hollywood has gotten what they want and there will be no more cleanflix or similar companies. This means people cannot get edited family-friendly versions of movies. This is unfortunate for those who used this as a means to let their kids watch movies they wouldn’t normally let them watch. This is a difficult issue because parents want to control what their kids see but give them some freedom at the same time. Typically they are ok with a particular movie except for the language or a couple scenes that make it inappropriate for kids. One alternative that is still survived this ruling is clearplay. This is because they don’t actually edit the movie but only change what appears on the screen through their software.

See the article here.