Guess what I saw today driving in Lakeside…
Kind of hard to see, but yeah it is the Google Street View car. My phone’s camera is pretty bad, this was as high res at it would allow…
Uncrappifying your Qwest Modem (if it is a GT-701WG that is)
I have DSL service from Qwest. It is ok. Beats the competition. The one thing I HATE is the modem I got from them, an Actiontec GT-701WG.
The problem? It was darn near impossible to make it be JUST a modem, not act as a router/gateway, not act as a NAT, no frickin Actioncrap firewall, just give me the WAN Ip address!
Nearley, but not impossible. Here is how.
The trick is to set the modem to transparent bridged mode (I think it was labeled as RFC 1483 Bridged). You should be able to find it somewhere in the advanced setup section. The username and password needed below are also found on the same page.
Then you take your handy dandy router (mine is running DD WRT v.24, may not work with standard firmware) and change the WAN setup like this:
1. Connection type = PPPoE (Even though Qwest says they only support PPPoA
2. Username = your username… our was parts of our last name followed by some numbers.
3. Password = corresponding password
4. PPP Compression = On. At least I have it on.
Everything else in that option group set to off. While you’re at it, go to DNS and grab OpenDNS’s DNS server’s ips and throw them in there.
Now what the heck did this do? Well, now your router’s WAN IP will be the Ip assigned by Qwest. Before it was being assigned an IP by the Actiontec modem, probably 192.168.1.1XX, cause it was acting as a router, which sucks. Now, the router is the gateway and, if you’re running DD WRT or some other thirdparty firmware, a much better gateway than the Actiontec was.
Its been going for a month like this and hasn’t been power cycled. Not to mention all the much better features DD WRT offers. Sweet.
Posted in Geeky, Hosting 2 Comments
Moved Hosts again..
Moved hosts again. Taking it all in house. Yup, this fine blog of mine (and lots of other crap) is now being served off my home brew server sitting behind the TV(also acting as a fileserver). If there is one thing I freaking hate, it is moving a Wordpress install. Something always messes up and, while usually very easy to fix, it is never easy to spot.
I’ve also moved back to Apache2 from Nginx since I’ve got a lil more muscle to go around than with the Slicehost account I had. I’m going to hold on to it (Slicehost account) to see if anything horribly wrong happens. but I think this should be fun.
Alright, DNS is still propagating for yerhot.org and some others. Hopefully it’ll be done in the a.m. I’m hitting the sack.
Lemme know if you have any thoughts.
m night sucksalot
Why don’t I listen to people? Jen and I just sat through The Happening. Yes, it does suck just as much as every other M Night Shamalama dig dong movie since the Sixth Sense.
How he managed to make Mark Wahlberg and John Leguizamo completely suck beyond belief is beyond me. I’m not even sure why I’m writing this. Guess it was so bad I felt the need to let everyone know.
Our new(ish) hod rod(s) (err… bikes…)
Yes, Jen and I got some hot rods.. two wheeled hot rods with pedals…
We are now the proud owners of two Specialized bikes. Jen has a Cross Roads and I got a Hard Rock. It’s by far the nicest bike I’ve ever ridden, though both are used and a couple years old and not top of the line by hardcore biker standards.
Anyways, we’ve been riding all over our new neighborhood and I have to say it is really fun. We’ve set a goal of riding (most of) the Munger Trail by the end of the summer. Sweet. Maybe we’ll even buy some of those spandex jump suits to bike around in. :)
Jen’s got the purple-ish one and I have the white one.
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Seattle Day One
It has been a very long, but very fun day. We’re both pretty jet lagged and turning in for the day but some tthings we’ve noticed about the fine citizens of Seattle:
- They do not jaywalk.
- Pretty good and nice drivers
- They park very close to each other. Like an inch.
Heres some pictures from the day. Tomorrow I think we are going to go and see Mt. Rainier… more updates to follow.
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rentalrundown.com and Seattle trip
Two things…
First - Jen and I are taking a trip to Seattle for 7 days starting this Saturday. We’re super pumped.
Second – Over Christmas last year I started on this lil Rails app I was calling duluthrentalreview.com. Pretty obvious what it was. I get so pissed at landlords in this town, and even more pissed at my fellow renters for putting up with the crap quality of said rentals. The problem is this: Landlords in this town do not keep up their rentals because renters do not demand that they are nice and decent and that the landlords keep them up. You get the idea.
Ok, so yeah I started writing this rental review site over christmas, got like halfway though it and just didn’t have time to finish it.. till now. I re-wrote almost all of it, convertging it to REST. I’m gonna try to continue updating it over the next couple days till our trip. Oh, ad the url changed from duluthrentalreview.com to rentalrundown.com… liked the sound of rentalrundown better.
Posted in Ruby On Rails, Seattle, Vacations, rentalrundown Tagged rentalrundown, Ruby On Rails Leave a comment
Moving Day
Yesterday we moved into our new apartment. The day was ‘interesting’.
- Got up at 6:30am to get the UHaul at 7:30.
- There was a line of people at UHaul and only 1 guy working.
- Got the UHaul at around 8:15 and had to return it at 2pm.
- Loaded box after box into the UHal and by 10:30 had most of the big stuff in and the UHaul was full.
- Dumped it all off at the new place, met the neighbors (and I was super sweaty had crazy hair from moving)
- Jen’s friend Anita came over to help unload right when the last box got unloaded, but helped go get the new couch.
- by this time it was almost 1pm and we had to get the UHaul back.
- Dropped it off, ate at good old McDonalds and talked about how sore we all were from lifting all that stuff.
- I went back to the old apt to clean and get any last stuff out. Realized there were 2 closets we never boxed up. Crap.
- Took 2 car loads of stuff to the new apartment.
- Took a break from 5 – 7 to eat dinner and not die of exhaustion.
- Got back to the old apartment at 7:15 to find some girl sitting on the stairs along with tons of furniture.. my bullshit alarms started to go off. I asked if she needed help, she said ‘no’. As I walked up the stairs at to our apartment, she asked if it was our stuff in there. I said ‘yep’ we are finishing up cleaning. ”Well, (our landlords) said you would be out and I could move in today…”, to which I replied, “I haven’t told them that and I paid through the end of the month”.
- Whipped out the phone called the land lords.
- They said they told her she could move in early if we called them and said we were out.
- Ok the reasons this whole thins is BS are:
- I’ve never seen this girl, Jen’s never seen this girl. They must have showed out apartment when we were not home and without or authorization. Under law they have to give 24 hours notice to enter the apartment.
- The management never did a walk through. They said they would do one after the new tenents moved in. Umm.. no. They would have no grounds to determine what, if any, damage was our fault.
- There were multiple maintenance requests that were never addressed. I’m not understanding how they can let a new tenant move in with a drawer that has the front broken off cause the wood is starting to rot.
- The girl said that she would do the cleaning if we’d quick move what was left out and let her dump her stuff off. What the hell I said.
- We did. We went to our new home. We went to sleep.
What a day. This morning I can barley move I’m so sore.
Posted in Family, moving Leave a comment
Mongrel + Nginx: Deploying to a subdirectory
Though using subdomains is all the rage right now, there are certianly instances where you may want to deploy your rails application to a subdirectory such as:
http://www.johnyerhot.com/myrailsapp
Of course Nginx makes it super easy to do so. If you need to get your webserver ready with Nginx, PHP running as a FCGI instance, and Rails check out my other how to.
Now, onward!
First create a new virtual host. In my case, for yerhot.org it would look like this:
server {
listen 80;
server_name yerhot.org;
access_log /var/www/yerhot.org/logs/access.log;
error_log /var/www/yerhot.org/logs/error.log;
location / {
root /var/www/yerhot.org/;
index index.html;
}
}
Pretty simple setup, telling Nginx to listen on port 80 for requests for yerhot.org, where to store logs, and finally setting up the site root at /var/www/yerhot.org.
All we would have to do to have Nginx redirect to our Rails app when looking for yerhot.org/myrailsapp is make another location block (in other words, place this right before the last curly brace).
location /myrailsapp {
proxy_pass http://localhost:8000;
}
Now, all requests for /myrailsapp will get proxied to port 8000. Now fire up your Rails app on port 8000.
mongrel_rails start -e production -p 8000 -d
Restart Nginx:
/etc/init.d/nginx stop
/etc/init.d/nginx start
And….
Crap. Rails is looking for a ‘myrailsapp’ route, which there is none. No, no, don’t create one – we’ll need to use a little known feature of Mongrel to fix the problem.. the prefix.
Stop Mongrel…
mongrel_rails stop
And try this:
mongrel_rails start -e production -p 8000 -d --prefix=/myrailsapp
And… your app should fire right up. Pretty neat, if you wanted to you could use it forward to a Mongrel Cluster, a FCGI instance of PHP (from my other post), or lots of stuff.
Posted in Geeky, PHP, Ruby On Rails, nginx Tagged Deploy, nginx, PHP, Rails, Subdirectory, Virtual Hosts 1 Comment
Simple Meta Programming in Ruby
Metaprogramming. What a lovely buzz word. I guess I’ve heard it enough and knew what the short definition is. Metaprogramming is code that writes code. I think it is one of those things I just never thought about, even though I had used concepts and even written some before without realizing it until recently.
Here is a short and simple example.
class Something @my_hash = {"foo" => "1234", "bar" => "5678"} def initialize @my_hash.each do |a, b| self.instance_eval do define_method(a.to_s) {b.to_s} end end end endAnd now we can play with it.
Now, what happened here is pretty neat in my opinion. We took our hash, my_hash, and in our initialize method, created two instance methods from its values. define_method is what did all the magic. You need to pass it a proc or, like what I did, just give it a simple block (just the string value from my hash).
Pretty neat, eh?