Fleeting Ideas

Oct
20th

Sat

National Day Of Protest For Civil Rights in New Zealand - Sat Oct 27 - 12 noon Aotea Sq. Auckland

John Minto says: “If this legislation [the Terrorism Suppression Amendment Bill] had been in place in 1981 then it would have made it illegal to support the release of Nelson Mandela from prison and to show solidarity to the African National Congress in South Africa that was struggling to end apartheid”

Oct
13th

Sat

“If I feel I am what I have, and I have nothing anymore, then I am not. That sense of identity which is based on ‘to be’ is entirely different, because that can never be taken away from me …

I feel, I see, I love, I’m sad.

All these human experiences that can be expressed in verbs, are human activities which are not dependent, which cannot be lost or destroyed. Therefore the person who’s sense of identity is based on what he is - that is to say, on the expression of his inner faculties, potentialities in the world, or in that sense what he does, or does not in an outward sense - he does not have the anxiety to lose himself because something may be taken away from him. He is really free from that danger.”

— Erich Fromm, excerpt from interview about his book ‘To Have or to Be?’ (1976)

“The phenomena which I would call the pathology of normalcy, that is to say the pathology of the normal man. …

Anyone who really sees reality, who sees what is really real, will appear to the person who lives under the illusion that the world is alright, as a slightly crazy person. Sometimes he might be, but not necessarily so.”

— Erich Fromm, The automaton Citizen and Human Rights Lecture given at the American Orthopsychiatic Association’s 43rd Annual Meeting in San Francisco on April 13,1966

Oct
6th

Sat

All Troops Out Now - Our Right to Protest: Monday 8 October - Assemble 1pm Trafalgar Square

Sep
12th

Wed

undefined method `parse_query_parameters’ for ActionController::AbstractRequest:Class

Seems RSpec on Rails 1.0.8 is calling Rails code that’s not in Rails 1.2.3, hence the error:

undefined method `parse_query_parameters' for ActionController::AbstractRequest:Class
/vendor/plugins/rspec_on_rails/lib/spec/rails/matchers/redirect_to.rb:54:in `query_hash'

Just to get things moving I’ve copied the parse_query_parameters method from trunk ActionController::AbstractRequest into /vendor/plugins/rspec_on_rails/lib/spec/rails/matchers/redirect_to.rb

def parse_query_parameters(query_string)
  return {} if query_string.blank?

  pairs = query_string.split('&').collect do |chunk|
    next if chunk.empty?
    key, value = chunk.split('=', 2)
    next if key.empty?
    value = value.nil? ? nil : CGI.unescape(value)
    [ CGI.unescape(key), value ]
  end.compact

  UrlEncodedPairParser.new(pairs).result
end

That seemed to work, so back to autotest and the specs!

Sep
7th

Fri

Australia an APEC police state .. can you disobey unreasonable police directions? - photo by halans

If you’re in the states on Sept 15…

Sep
3rd

Mon

superclass mismatch for class Annotation

Running with Rails 1.2.3, Ruby 1.8.6, rake 0.7.3 and rspec 1.0.8, I was getting the following error when running rake:

rake -T project_name
(in /home/apps/project_name)
rake aborted!
superclass mismatch for class Annotation

I solved the superclass mismatch error by removing the version number from the rspec directories in my Rails vendor/plugins directory:

cd vendor/plugins
ls -a 
-> rspec-1.0.8  rspec_on_rails-1.0.8

mv rspec-1.0.8 rspec
mv rspec_on_rails-1.0.8 rspec_on_rails

ls -a
-> rspec  rspec_on_rails

To ensure the correct rspec directory is set in the load path, regenerate the script/spec file by running:

ruby script/generate rspec

Great, now we can get back to development! ;-)

Aug
30th

Thu

brainwave machine I built at ccc in action at h3 london - photo by mbiddulph

ccc t-shirt at h3 london, brainwave machine in hand - photo by mbiddulph