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Friday, March 14, 2008

Nice Work Mr President

Bush Intervened to Weaken EPA Smog Rules

Thanks for the smog. What a creep! He didn't just allow car emission standards to be lowered but in order to do it he had the scientific and Supreme Court mandated acceptable levels of car emission toxins increased.

What a cretin! I hope he ends up spending his final days in LA or some suburb of it. So he can enjoy the benefits of all the exhaust fumes he is single handedly creating by getting smog laden lungs.

What a jerk! When you only crave money. You only get money. And if you think that is a good thing then enjoy your money. Life has a way of teaching the greedy to find a more worthwhile pursuit.

Jet Contrails being used for Global Cooling

I located the PBS report linked in the title for this post after I read this posting on one of my favorite sci-fi author's blog. He doesn't believe in global warming or at least not in the science used to connect it to CO2 so far.

Although I believe the shrinking of the glaciers are a clear sign the end of the water is nigh upon us. I tend to believe the science hasn't quite modeled the problem in terms of the glaciers.

If the glaciers once covered most of the world during the ice ages then the melt process is just the continuation along those lines. I take it a step further and say the real problem isn't the temperature increase but the disappearing glaciers. It looks like the short term problem of creating drinking water may already be solved by the desalination plants. But the solution to the longer term problem of a coming ice age isn't being addressed and may end up being the easier problem to deal with if our technology keeps advancing at the exponential pace it's on.

Personally I feel we are all being held back simultaneously by not being nomadic and being told the solution to our energy crises is to live in close proximity in cities. How blind do you have to be to not see all the free energy given out by the sun? Don't be fooled. We all know it only takes a magnifying glass or a mirror to release the heat energy at a level that is usable for generating energy.

Updated: 2008-03-14

I found some links to the science about jet contrails:

How Do Jet Contrails Affect The Weather

Look Up They Are Spraying Us

Rocket Exhaust Leaves Mark Above Earth

Sunday, March 9, 2008

sudoers on Mac OS X

In my last post I refer to a lot of commands that require superuser privileges without prefacing them with sudo. That is how I type the commands in.

So how do I do it? I don't login as a user with administrator privileges and I don't use su. I have a separate account with administrator privileges that I don't login to that I use as an unprivileged user in the username and password prompt to perform activities that require superuser privileges.

I used to su to the account with administrative privileges to run sudo commands. Until I educated myself a little bit by "man sudoers".

You should always use visudo to edit the /etc/sudoers file it checks the syntax of the file before committing your changes. Saving you from yourself by preventing you from thinking you have correctly made changes to the /etc/sudoers file when all you have done is locked out all your accounts with administrative privileges from performing any administrative tasks. visudo will notify you of an error and give you a chance to fix the problem or abandon your changes when you exit your editor before it commits your changes. If you decide to fix the problem visudo will relaunch your editor with the changes you made intact. It is up to you to decide whether to try repeatedly to get your syntax right or abandon your changes. I locked myself out of sudo on my Mac years ago by directly updating /etc/sudoers. I think I recovered from it by rebooting or fixing file permissions. Save yourself some time by always use visudo.

There are a couple of command line options to sudo that are very su like but stick to sudo's use your own password metaphor.

The "-s" command line option launches the user's own shell with superuser privileges. There are many options you can set that control what and whether any environment variables are carried over from the user's environment. The environment can also be cleared of certain environment variables and the forced setting of environment variables can be specified. In order to use the "-s" command line option to sudo you have to add the user's shell command to the list of executable programs. Which will usually be /bin/bash.

The "-i" command line option launches the root user's login environment. You can use an option to sudo to switch to a different user. You have to add the root user's shell to the allowed executable programs with the full path, /bin/sh.

By using either of these command line options to sudo you avoid having to repeatedly type sudo before every command. I also avoid having to add my everyday user to the administration group by adding just the commands I need for one liner's like port gem while still having a backdoor to any command through the shell command. There are a couple of installation programs that refuse to work with my setup. But they are easily fixed by logging in to my administration account to install them. The need to do that has become less over time.

Friday, March 7, 2008

Rails Requires RubyGems >= 0.9.4 Error on Mac OS X

Updated 2008-10-08:
Please note that I forgot to mention in this post the fact that Ruby on Rails is installed by default with OS X Leopard. This blog is most helpful to those who had previously installed rails using MacPorts and now want to move to the Apple supported version that comes with OS X Leopard.

I was following along with the Apple Developer Connection article that shows how to update and use the version of Ruby on Rails that comes with Mac OS X Leopard. I followed through the article without a hitch. Successfully creating the Events Rails Site and viewing it at localhost:3000. The only change I made outside of the article's instructions was to add the script/generate and script/console commands to the same place as the article recommends the script/server. I figured keeping the original data model definition commands with the rails project would help if I wanted to make any changes to the data model later. I moved the data model definition commands to a shell script located in the top directory of the project. Which will make a nice portable design convention. I have seen that method mentioned in a blog post before.

While I was browsing around the running instance of the Events rails site I decided to do a full update of all the gem packages on my system by way of "gem update" without the "--system". Big mistake or so I thought when I tried to start my own rails project a day later. I couldn't even get the generate commands to run. The response from every script/ command was the same "Rails requires RubyGems >= 0.9.4. I googled around for the solution which always seemed to say remove the Leopard version and install the MacPorts version. Which I didn't want to do since I was trying to get rid of the duplicate MacPorts packages in the first place. In fact I had thought I had removed all the ruby packages from MacPorts. But on reinspection I found 4 versions of Ruby installed and one active a la "port search ruby and installed". First I did a "port uninstall ruby and inactive" to get rid of the old versions. Then I found a ruby gem I had somehow missed when I had done a "port uninstall rb-* and installed". After removing the lone gem I got rid of the installed and active version of Ruby via "port uninstall ruby". A quick verification of /opt/local/bin verfied that there was no longer a ruby or gem or update_rubygems command left.

Of course I left out the part where I removed all of the manually installed gems under /opt/local/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems by "rm -fr / opt/local/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems". Don't quote me on that path as I am writing this post on my iPhone and recalling it from memory. I only know the path because I also reinstalled rubygems manually before I figured out what the real problem was. I would probably have missed the real problem if I hadn't installed rubygems with "ruby setup.rb" after downloading it. The install commands showed RubyGems beings installed to /opt/local/... I had to remove that copy of RubyGems manually. Which wasn't so hard. All the install commands with the full paths of the installed files were still in my scrollback buffer.

I also didn't mention that I had uninstalled all my gem packages from the Leopard side of things. Including the original packages under /System. Luckily one of the articles I'd googled had the complete list. It was easy enough to do a "gem install rails sqlite-ruby capistrano mongrel libxml-ruby ruby-openid ruby-yadis rubynode RedCloth sources ferret acts_as_ferret fcgi termios cgi_multipart_eof_fix daemons dnssd gem_plugin hpricot needle actionwebservice activesupport". The full list of preinstalled gem packages is available here. I abbreviated my gem install command to only include what is necessary as installing rails pulls in some of the other packages in the list like activerecord and rake.
Everything worked like a charm after that. Now on to writing that SFA app. After that I'll have to get back to my holy war to remove redundant MacPorts packages. I think I was up to removing those two verions of Python 2.4 and 2.5. Seeing as how Leopard ships with 2.5 and 2.4 was a buggy beast at best when compared to the speed and bug fixes of version 2.5.