Sometimes I forget that not everybody in the world comes into contact with Spanish as much as us Usonians… if that’s the case, please allow me to explain that “juevos” means “eggs” in Spanish.
Except, it really means balls.
Technorati sent me a link to an interesting article at the ever-awesome LJWorld.com (the little paper/media empire that Django built):
Split-apart nation comes together
The paper is about a family reunion, of sorts, and a long overdue one: the two parts of the Ponca tribe have been living as as two separate entities in Nebraska and Oklahoma since the 1870s.
I happened to stumbled across this history before, because I was digging around in the Wikipedia article on the Omaha, who speak a related Siouan language. This detail in the article caught my eye:
Congress terminated the tribe in Nebraska in the 1960s, and it was reinstated in 1990. The northern tribe is still feeling the effects of that period, as the Nebraska members have no fluent speakers of the Ponca language.
“In order for us to continue to be a strong nation, Poncas, we need to have that language. We need to have that culture,” Wright said.
Coffee place:
Lady: Excuse me.
Me: Hi.
Lady: Do you know anything about Microsoft Works?
Me: No.
Lady: Oh. (Looking at my (Ubuntu) laptop.) Microsoft Works.
Me: No, absolutely nothing. I know absolutely nothing about Microsoft Works, I am using Linux, I don’t know Microsoft Works, I don’t know what Microsoft Works is. At all. [I really said that.]
Lady: ?Me: …
Lady goes away. Finally.
Does this make me a jerk? I don’t think so. And in fact it has nothing to do with Microsoft or Linux or anything, it has to do with the fact that why should I stop what I’m doing and get into what’s basically guaranteed to be a “oh and could yo ufix my…” twelve hour session. I’m happy to do that kind of thing for people I know, but, somebody off the street?
Sorry, I got stuff to do…
It suddenly occurred to me today that I really don’t know what the right way to install Python packages is, any more.
This state of affairs drives me inSANE.
I’m just a run of the mill guy who uses Python for lots of stuff. And increasingly, I find that I just don’t bother to figure out how to install things that I might like to try, because I really just don’t feel like taking the time to install yet another installation system.
Maybe I sound like a whiney bastard or something, I don’t know. Maybe there’s something utterly heinous about $ python setup.py install that my little brain just doesn’t get, I dunno.
What I DO know is that I now officially loathe installing Python stuff. That means that I’m installing less Python stuff. Which means that I’m increasingly looking for Ruby stuff.
Which bums me out, because personally I like Python way more than Ruby.
Olly carp, I love my school…
You can:
RAD.
Here’s what I had to do to get Ruby on Rails to run on Ubuntu LTS with a functioning console (and irb).
(By the way, Wordpress has kind of borked up the formatting of this post, there’s a plain version at:
It comes down to:
gem)Building on posts by:
Thanks guys.
Mostly via Ed Howland’s post (I believe termcap-compat, which he lists, is no longer necessary, since libc is up to 6 or uh erm… well I don’t rightly know, but that package wasn’t in the repos and everything seems to work for me without it! ☻).
sudo apt-get install gcc sudo apt-get install build-essential sudo apt-get install bison byacc gperf sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev sudo apt-get install libreadline5 libreadline5-dev sudo apt-get install libncurses5 libncurses5-dev sudo apt-get install libssl-dev Download the Ruby source:
wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/ruby-1.8.5-p12.tar.gz tar xzf ruby-1.8.5-p12.tar.gz And build it. Make some coffee, this takes a while. ☻
cd ruby-1.8.5-p12 ./configure make sudo make install Not sure why this is necessary (ActionMailer?)
apt-get install postfix You’ll also want Ruby’s documentation stuff:
sudo apt-get install rdoc ri irb apt-get install mysql-server mysql-common mysql-client libmysqlclient15-dev libmysqlclient15off apt-get install libmysql-ruby1.8 We’ll be using this to install Rails:
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/11289/rubygems-0.9.0.tgz tar xzf rubygems-0.9.0.tgz cd rubygems-0.9.0 sudo ruby setup.rb Actually the easiest part, I’ve never had trouble with this (knock wood).
sudo gem install rails --include-dependencies sudo gem install mysql Note that the mysql gem is really the DB connector for Ruby; it’s not Mysql itself. (We already did that.)
Now that I’ve explained what worked for me, let me explain the problem I had, in case you’re interested or facing the same problem.
When I originally followed the steops in Richard Crowley’s post, everything seemed to install fine and Rails worked great.
But I found that my console wouldn’t work, just like Paul Ingles:
Loading development environment./usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/irb/completion.rb:10:in `require': no such file to load -- readline (LoadError) from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/irb/completion.rb:10 from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/irb/init.rb:252:in `load_modules' from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/irb/init.rb:250:in `load_modules' from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/irb/init.rb:21:in `setup' from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/irb.rb:54:in `start' from /usr/local/bin/irb:13 This means no readline in irb, and no script/console whatsoever, which I gotta have.
So I tried his solution, which consisted of building readline from source, and then building Ruby. I’m not totally positive (though I’m going to find out soon when I rerun this whole process on my laptop), but I think that the steps I’ve described above obviate building readline from source on Ubuntu.
And now this works! \o/
./script/console I’d really appreciate comments about this process, especially corrections or simplifications.
I’d also just like to get in touch with other folks running Rails on Ubuntu! Believe it or not not everybody using Rails is on OSX. 
The Swiss company Novartis is taking the Indian government to court over its legislation pertaining to generic drugs. Novartis wants to make it more difficult for Indian companies to produce generic drugs. According to a report at nature.com MSF is collecting signature under a petition calling on Novartis to drop the case. The medical charity points out that ‘India is the pharmacy for the developing world’.
Further information about the background to the MSF campaign can be found here:
http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070115/full/070115-1.html
The petition is available here
Via technoliberation
BBC: $100 laptop could sell to public
Mr Bletsas said that a philanthropic organisation would be formed to organise the orders and delivery of the laptops.
“It’s much more difficult to do this than making the laptop,” he said.
The aim is to connect the buyer of the laptop with the child in the developing world who receives the machine.
“They will get the e-mail address of the kid in the developing world that they have, in effect, sponsored.”
Wow, I’ll buy two, maybe four. That’s so awesome.