Guy Roberts

I know that the Ruby language and associated tools are created for free by enthusiasts, but quite often there are little issues that spoil the experience. Like this one;
I needed to install Rails on Ubuntu 8.04.3. After installing ruby gems 1.3.5 I did this;

$ gem install rails
$ /usr/bin/gem:11: undefined [...]

Note to self, instead of peering at wrongly formatted JSON like this;
SyntaxError: missing ) in parenthetical cannot parse JSON response: { “success” : true, “msg” : “This is the message !”, “rows” : [ { "task_id" : "jbpm$2", "description" : "Can you look at this buddy ?", "status" : "Not Yet Started", "priority" : [...]

Here is a groovy front seat view of a glider launching. I don’t often take a camera up but on this day Rob Taplow did the flying from the seat behind me. All I did on the launch was to press Record. And to find a Rolling Stones song to [...]

Bimbling means to glide aimlessly around the sky, as opposed to purposefully racing off on a mission to get somewhere else quickly.
Here is a GPS trace from a bimble I did yesterday with Les at Buckminster Gliding Club in the Vale of Belvoir.

The spiral shapes are the circles we flew in thermals being blown [...]

I had a lot of time to think as I cycled to Scotland. And one of the thoughts was that all of the phone boxes are fading to pink. Nothing stays the same.
The one pictured here was the first example I found on flickr. Its in a village called Holme, Nottinghamshire [...]

Today I handed over the administration password of Make One Change Today to West Bridgford’s foremost community organiser, Kate Troy (not Kate Tory as I wrongly spelled it earlier).

Here is a screenshot of the new web site that I have built and hosted for Broxtowe Youth Homelessness, a charity that acts to reduce the number of young people leaving home prematurely.

For the Community Accounting web site I used Google Maps to display the locations of seventy organisations around the UK. I provided John, the administrator with a web page so that he could edit the locations by automatically geocoding postcodes. I stored the long/latitude in a MySQL database and generated the necessary [...]

Late last night I found that Passenger 2.1.3 and Rails 2.3.2 don’t work if I try to use a sub URI, like www.guyroberts.co.uk/community_accounting_map where community_accounting_map is the Rails application.
Great. (The reason I am changing to Passenger in the first place is that Mongrel does not seem to be supported any more [...]

The disc on the server that hosts this web site went wrong last weekend. Happily I had backups of everything, but unhappily I’ve had to put it all back together by hand on top of a new OS image. These are the things I had to get working;

The iptables firewall
Apache
Php [...]