Risk Night at Jesse’s
December 31st, 2005Aaroneus Maximus is Back
December 31st, 2005Volunteering at the U-District Food Bank
Kim and I took the afternoon on Friday to spend some time helping out at the University District Food Bank. We sorted through food and and brought food up to the food line until some other volunteers left, then we moved up to hand out food in the line. Most of the other volunteers were teenagers. I forget the name of the guy who was supervising the operation, but he seemed like a really cool person and I admire his commitment to such a worthy cause. It always surprises me how many people are in need of something as basic as food. I’m guessing about 150 people came through just in the few hourse we were there. It makes me realize how fortunate I am and wish I could do more.
Christmas
December 28th, 2005Neti Pot
Lately Kim and I have been using a neti pot. I first found out about these devices when Kim and I went to Kripalu yoga center this past summer. Kim finally bought one, and despite my skepticism over flushing water through your nostrils, I love it. I never realized how much more clearly I could breath – through both nostrils!
Basically you pour water through one nasal passage and it comes out the other, flushing out all the crud in between. Much more effective than even a good nose picking. I’ve been using it whenever I feel even a little clogged, which is most mornings in the winter.
Snowshoeing Marten Creek
Kim and I went to go snowshoeing near Mt Pilchuck on Saturday, but there really wasn’t enough snow to call it that. It was, however, a gorgeous day. After a slow start in the morning, we bought another year of the Northwest Forest Pass at the ranger station to park at the trailhead to Marten Creek. We hiked for a while and it looked like spring, with no snow on the trails and warmth in the air. Then we got higher and hit some snow but it was crusty and packed so we didn’t need snowshoes. We probably hiked in 2 and a half hours, and then stopped to have lunch. We sat on a log in the sun and had hot mushroom soup with bread and cheese. We hadn’t seen anyone to this point, but some older fellows who started earlier hiked back down past us and one guy who got a late start caught up to us and turned around at the same spot.
Apache and FastCGI Setup
I had a heck of a time setting up Apache on Windows with fastcgi so that I could run a Ruby on Rails app on a production server. The best guide I found for doing this was http://electricvisions.com/rails.html. I used XAMPP for Windows so that I wouldn’t have to download and setup Apache, MySQL and PHP all separately. It’s not too hard to do if you want to do it separately, but after all the uninstalling and reinstalling of those apps I did while trying to get FastCGI to work, I got sick of going through the steps.
I had already installed the One Click Ruby Installer earlier when I was just using Webrick to develop my ruby apps. After installing XAMPP I just ran the FastCGI Installer from the electricvisions guide. I had to copy the mod_fastcgi.so file into the apache modules directory since the installer didn’t find my apache directory in XAMPP automatically. I come to find out later that mod_fastcgi.so is really just mod_fastcgi-SNAP-0404142202-AP2.dll renamed, which is downloadable from the fastcgi site.
Anyway, after that I followed the instructions, made the changes to the httpd.conf and .htaccess, and started up Apache. It looked like fcgi was working! Then I tried to open my rails app and got this in the Apache error log:
[Wed Dec 14 12:02:06 2005] [crit] (OS 3)The system cannot find the path specified. : FastCGI: can’t start (dynamic) server “D:/rails/tooltime/public/dispatch.fcgi”: spawn_fs_process() failed
[Wed Dec 14 12:02:11 2005] [alert] [client 127.0.0.1] FastCGI: failed to connect to (dynamic) server “D:/rails/tooltime/public/dispatch.fcgi”: something is seriously wrong, any chance the socket/named_pipe directory was removed?, see the FastCgiIpcDir directive
[Wed Dec 14 12:02:11 2005] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] FastCGI: incomplete headers (0 bytes) received from server “D:/rails/tooltime/public/dispatch.fcgi”
[Wed Dec 14 12:02:16 2005] [crit] (OS 3)The system cannot find the path specified. : FastCGI: can’t start (dynamic) server “D:/rails/tooltime/public/dispatch.fcgi”: spawn_fs_process() failed
[Wed Dec 14 12:02:26 2005] [crit] (OS 3)The system cannot find the path specified. : FastCGI: can’t start (dynamic) server “D:/rails/tooltime/public/dispatch.fcgi”: spawn_fs_process() failed
I looked up a ton of crap on google to try to fix it to no avail. Finally, I deleted the dispatch.cgi and dispatch.rb from my public directory, leaving just the dispatch.fcgi, and tried again. It seems to work!
It seems like fast cgi is enough in demand that it ought to be included as an Apache module by default, or at least in XAMPP. Maybe someday soon.
Company Christmas Party
December 12th, 2005Steph’s Birthday Party
December 12th, 2005Moroccan Restaurant
For Jessie’s birthday she got together a big group of friends to go to Mamounia’s last night. Kim and I weren’t hungry, but were required to order food, so we got an appetizer and some soup. Later the waitress came out and told us that they would have to charge us each an extra $5 since we didn’t order a meal. Very lame. I had already spent $20 on drinks. So we got a couscous dish. The only price on the menu was for the $18 five course meal, which was just too much.
Aside from the lack of prices on the menu and the inflexible ordering options, the place was really nice. The couscous dish was tastier than I expected (it sounded boring on the menu), and the belly dancing was awesome. Jessie got up and danced with the belly dancer and it looked like she had practiced. I didn’t know anyone, but the group of people Jessie assembled was really interesting and fun. There were so many people our age who also loved traveling and working for good causes. It really makes me want to just pick up, and head out traveling right now, but I need to wait just a little longer until this wedding thing is settled.