mattoneill.com

Rhode Island is the shiz.

2008-08-06T13:03:00.005-04:00

I was up in Narragansett a couple weeks ago for the "Blessing of the Fleet 10 mile Road Race" and like usual, the weekend was sublime. There's something about RI that I love, but can never quite put a finger on it. In any case, here are some select pictures from the weekend.

Nelson Rocks

2008-07-01T10:40:00.003-04:00

I went camping this last weekend up in the shenendoah, and on Saturday we made our way over to a place called Nelson Rocks Preserve. It's a pretty crazy rock formation, but what really attracted me was the fact that they have had a via ferrate course in place for a number of years, and I've been dying to check it out. Apparently it's the only one in america, and one of three in north america. In any case, it was first rate. I discovered that heights don't bother me one bit, but they sure do bother some of my friends.

To give a sense of scale, here's a suspension bridge that was probably 150 or so feet off the ground about 1/3 of the way up the course.

And here is that same bridge seen from the top of the headwall (highest point of the course).

So, it was somewhat of an exciting afternoon. You can check out more pictures on smugmug.

- Matt

god, this is more work then i thought.

2008-06-10T23:16:00.002-04:00

But I'm going to get a little more religious about it. I've been pretty busy the past 3 months, and a lot of things have happened, but it's time to freshen up the site a little. Maybe add some details on some projects, update the old portfolio, even add a picture or 3.

Here's what I did last weekend.. My wife decided that having a big pile of wood stacked next to the house and covered with a blue tarp was no good, so this is the result of that conversation:

29 Years of age.

2008-02-06T22:20:00.003-05:00

<sigh>. For realz, I am old as hell. I don't even want to think about next year. But my wife got me a sweet ass birthday present.

The Dewalt DW618PK. I'm gonna start carving up some wood like Norm Abrams, son.

blocka.

2008-01-23T23:14:00.000-05:00

Not too much going on lately. I've started working on a couple technical articles, hoping to get them up on alistapart... We'll see tho, I never have much faith in my writing.

Anyhoo, I went bungee jumping about 2 weeks ago, and finally got around to putting a picture up yesterday. It was somewhat weaksauce, seeing how the platform really wasn't that high at all, but exciting nonetheless.

Also, I didn't realize until I was halfway down that the shoulder harness was really going to dig into my screwed-together collarbone, and my scream went something like "MAAAKEEIIIIITTTTRAAINNNNNOHHHHCRAAAAP OWWW MUTHA #$*@#$$#@".

Life Lesson learned: Don't bungee-jump headfirst if you're wearing a shoulder harness and have a screwed/plated collarbone.

That's all I gots for now.

Toodles!

cards showed up

2008-01-18T12:42:00.001-05:00

Thinner then I thought they would be, which is disappointing. Other then that, I think they look pretty good, and the printing and finish is straight-up quality. Now I just need someone to give them to? What the.

/big/south/is/official

2008-01-18T12:21:00.000-05:00

Sarah and I went down to the DMV this morning and got our TN licenses. I guess I'm officially a southerner.

These licenses look like they would be really easy to make fakes, right? MD and PA were no joke, all sorts of holograms and such.

Had some cards made up, yo

2008-01-14T00:34:00.000-05:00

Well, I was pretty bored tonight so I went ahead and ordered some business cards.. I ordered them from print100.com, so we'll see how they come out. It should be a pretty thick stock, and I got rounded corners as well.

Not that I really NEED business cards... But I always feel kind of retarded when people ask for my number / email and I have to write it down of them on a random piece of paper. Also, I just realized (after I placed the order) that "freelancery" would have sounded cooler than "consultancy". Dammit.

Mongrel cluster startup permission errors...

2008-01-07T21:50:00.000-05:00

One last thing that was causing me problems when trying to get multiple apps deployed using deprec.. After deploying with capistrano, I couldn't access the website. Checking the mongrel logs @ /var/www/apps/[appname]/log/mongrel.8000.log, it was apparent the mongrel was dying on startup when it was trying to read something like "/config/../public/blank.html".

Checking the slicehost forums provided me with the solution yet again. Just had to run the following two commands to change the owner of the file and restart the mongrel cluster.

sudo chown -R app_[app_name] public/
mongrel_rails cluster::restart -C /etc/mongrel_cluster/[app_name].yml

And FINALLY I've got multiple rails apps up and running on the intertubes.

Good freaking lord.

2008-01-03T23:42:00.000-05:00

While I'm having a good ole' time doing rails development, getting a slice up and running has been, well, a real pain in the ass.

After building a rails stack manually a couple times, I decided to go with a automated route using deprec. Which almost went smoothly. Only a couple hours of frustration.

First problem: Not really a problem, but installed Rails 2.0 instead of 1.2.6. However, since I'm a noob when it comes to rails, it took me a couple minutes to figure this out.

Second problem: "uninitialized constant Gem::GemRunner (NameError)"
Solution found here. To sum up, you need to edit the install_rubygems task in recipes.rb to include the following lines at the end of the task:

sudo "mv /usr/bin/gem /usr/bin/gem.old"
sudo "ln -s /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/bin/gem"

Third problem: "undefined method `require_gem' for main:Object (NoMethodError)"

Ugh. Shoot me in the face. Turns out, I needed to downgrade to rubygems .95. See how to do that here.

Beyond that, it actually wasn't all that bad. Took a few hours instead of 15 minutes, but it should go a little smoother next time.

Hello!

2008-01-02T15:18:00.000-05:00

Well, I've finally got my site up and running. Well, mostly. Please excuse any errors you run into, those are, uhhh, ~~bugs~~ features...

Anyways, there will be plenty more to come. If you need to get ahold of me, check out the contact page.