Huge, huge changes are flowing freely through our web server. Massive-huge.

I'm overdue for posting a note to let visitors know what's going on as they're seeing weird changes and content moving around. Just suffice to say there will be a bunch of our sites that are now falling under fewer umbrellas than before. Where sites used to live out on their own, they are now being brought into the fold of core sites and forming "networks" of sites... wheee!! Big stuff, trust me -- even if you can't see what's going on out here on the surface.

The first of the sites, www.ThisWorked.com, is now integrated and the content has been copied over (along with the comments, I hope -- let me know if I missed something). I've tried to get all the users moved over, but there were a lot of spammer accounts throughout our sites, so it's been hard to distinguish the real people from the bots at times. If you tried logging in and you had trouble, please send me a note and I'll look into it. It's possible either your account was not moved or maybe the passwords weren't copied properly for safety reasons -- often they need to be recreated/restored during moves like this, unfortunately. If all else fails, I can just re-create your account.

Before all is finished with this particular move, the following sites will all be rolled into the NearlyEverything.com blanket:

• www.NearlyEverything.com (of course)
• www.ThisWorked.com
• www.PointlessRant.com
• www.GameDevSchool.com
• (...and a couple more down the road)

A user account at any one of these sites will ultimately grant you access to all the sites in the network, but that might not be working immediately. I'm working on a system where you can sign in once and jump between sites, but that's been problematic so I'll have to research it more.

Quick problem I encountered when I upgraded my Ubuntu distro to 9.04 from 8.10.  Periodically a dialog would pop up from the Tracker app saying something like this:

Three buttons to either "Reindex all", "Cancel" or "Accept" (if I recall correctly.)  Clicking these in just about any combination doesn't seem to do anything as the dialog keeps coming up.  Here's what to do:

Problem
Ubuntu Linux 9.04 Tracker Applet stuck in an error loop where it's claiming "index corrupted."  There is a known bug that will be fixed soon (it's actually already fixed and committed, but the patch has yet to roll out through the Ubuntu updater.)  Clicking any of the buttons will do apparently nothing, bringing up the error dialog again... you won't get any work done if you keep clicking that button.  If you're looking for a stupid button to click, you might as well score some points doing it! :P

This Worked
Quick fix is to do this stuff -- I don't know what it really does, and can't be bothered to research it -- to kill off the error and make life grand again:

Open Terminal of your choice (ahem Yakuake rocks! cough) & run these commands:

This is really cool, IMO:  I've installed a really sweet little module that will allow you to "watch" posts that you're interested.  Quite simply, it will toggle on/off and give you access to receiving email when a post is updated/edited/commented/etc.  I've set up some basic defaults that I think most people will want most of the time, but if you want to change your Watcher settings, you can log in and go to your profile page.  You'll see a "My Watched Posts" tab that brings up your Personal Binder of all the stuff you're watching.  Nice!

In there you can also change up the settings as you like.  You can choose to disable the defaults or turn on the "Sharing" option and let other registered users see the posts you're watching.  That's interesting, but I don't know why anyone would want it.  Heh.

For now, if you post a comment, you will automatically have the option to watch that post for replies.  This will hopefully solve the problem where I'm missing comment replies on some of my sites!  Doh!

So, to watch a post/thread, look for the link titled "You are not watching this post, click to start watching."  When you're already watching a post, you'll see another link to turn off watching, as well as a direct link to your personal Watcher Binder.  Again... nice!!

OK, enough on this topic.  I think this is really great and ought to help people keep tabs on stuff their interested in.  You can even watch something as an unregistered visitor -- but I haven't tested that yet to see how it works, TBH.  I need to stop playing with this stuff and get back to work.  :)

At first glance, this may seem like a strange article topic. However, if you're one of the many who have tried to get their domains away from 1&1 (aka: 1and1.com, Schlund & something-or-other, etc.), you'll be painfully aware of how much the process sucks the peel off a rotting lemon. Yeah, it's bad. There are a lot of steps and they seem to make it intentionally difficult to accomplish (conspiracy or just crappy programmin??)

So, the most recent "no way! That's just plain stupid!!" event in my last batch of domains being transferred to my preferred registrar (not mentioning it here -- contact me if you want suggestions) made me start writing this article to help folks get through the process a little smoother than I did at first.

Here we go...

Really quick post here:

I'm trying to run some Rails apps I'm tinkering with from a while ago. It seems my local Ruby Gems version was out of date and running the suggested "Please 'gem update --system' and try again." didn't do anything. The error here was:

Ugh. So I had solved this problem before in another environment, but of course didn't record it anywhere. Here's me recording the solution:

sudo gem install rubygems-update

"1 gem installed" and now the version is correct. Nice.

...uh... that actually didn't work apparently. Still getting the "need version 1.3.1" message. So, I found this and it worked:

Moving on...

I was working with some old Subversion projects I had on my workstation but it a couple were coming up as "locked." Since I hadn't been working with these particular projects for a long, long time, I had no idea why they were locked. Here's a quick fix:

Problem
Performing an update (in my case) to get the latest files from a Subversion (svn) repository, I got the message that the "Working copy '/path/to/project' locked". The locking of files is done by SVN to prevent multiple copies of files from being edited in multiple places at once. If one user is performing certain tasks on a file, the system sets the file as "locked".

...Well, that's my lame way of explaining it, and it may not be exactly accurate, but you get the idea of the concept of Subversion file/directory locking. For more detailed info, look elsewhere. :)

In my particular case, I have not been working on the project and I don't know or care about anything that would be destroyed by just getting a new current checkout copy from the repository. I've seen notes online where people thought this often happens with interrupted checkout/in functions, among other situations. If the locking is unintended or you want to reverse it, I have a way that worked in my situation.

This Worked!
(Man, this is a long post for such a simple solution, but hey, give me a break! I'm trying real hard here to maintain a consistent format for posting these problem/solution pairs! Hopefully most of you appreciate the effort I'm putting in here.)