Visiting Notre Dame de Paris

We visited Notre Dame de Paris with the boys. Probably the best known cathedral in the world after Saint Peter's in Rome, it took around 200 years to finish. There's lots to admire but my favorites are the stained glass windows.

Travel tips:
  • Entrance is free, always nice!
  • We arrived around noon and got to witness a sermon, including a priest singing the liturgy. It was nice to experience the cathedral being used as a place of worship, and not just a tourist attraction
  • Personally, if there's a long line to climb up to the towers, I wouldn't wait. You're going to see the Eiffel Tower, right? You'll get a better view up there
  • It's worth taking the short walk around the outside of the cathedral: you can take some nice pictures in the gardens and there's a small playground for kids who need an outlet for their energy (after all there's only so many architectural marvels kids can take :-)
  • Walk all the way around the inside of the cathedral too, the stained glass windows are exquisite! 

A Genuine French Strike!

When we arrived in Paris we had a little surprise: the French were on strike! What luck! :-)

The French public sector workers were protesting the government's desire to move retirement age from 60 to 62. The banner reads "40 years is already too much! No to pension reform!" Fortunately we weren't impacted and it was fun showing the boys a real French strike.

I got a kick from the wag who'd graffitied "Porcs" (Pigs) on the back of the police van.

Rails3 Mind Map

I find mind maps useful for many purposes. The process of clearing your screen, fullscreening your mind mapping tool, and immersing yourself in a topic of interested is a great brainstorming exercise.

Today, my goal wasn't creativity, it was to build a map of main components of Rails 3. You'll likely find the PDF more useful as its nodes are clickable and refer back to the Rails API (and github in a couple cases where I found documentation to be more useful).

This isn't a comprehensive map. Let me know what I've missed.

(This map was created with MindNode Pro, an easy to use, cheap, and high quality OS X app, proving that sometimes you can have your cake and eat it :-)

No More Excuses! Using RVM to Play with Rails 3

Now that Rails 3.0 is out, it's high time to start using it. But what if you want to keep Rails 2.x around for your current projects? Fortunately, on OS X, there's a simple solution: RVM.

Once you've installed RVM, you'll need to install a version of ruby compatible with Rails 3. There are two choices: 1.8.7 and 1.9.2. Given its new features and speed improvements, 1.9.2 is the one to choose, unless you have particular dependencies on 1.8.7.

Installing 1.9.2 is simple: rvm install 1.9.2. This will download, compile, and install 1.9.2 to a .rvm folder in your home directory.

Once that's done, type rvm 1.9.2 to switch over and rvm info to confirm that you're now running 1.9.2. Note: this will only apply to the current terminal window, here's how to make it the default.

Type gem list and you should see just two gems: rake and bundler.

Now go ahead and install Rails 3: gem install rails. Confirm by way of rails --version and gem list.

That's it, you're done... Now have fun!

What to go back to your previous version of ruby? Just type: rvm system and you'll revert back to your standard ruby installation and the gems that went with it.

Scenes from the Bay Area... in Miniature

One of the advantages of having a pilot's license is taking family and friends on tours of our beautiful Bay Area. Here are some of the pictures from those flights with some tilt-shift magic added in. I love seeing all these places in miniature!

These pics were taken from a Cessna 172 with a Canon G9. Post-processing was performed in Pixelmator, a powerful image editor on the Mac (I think of it as Photoshop for the rest of us), and this handy tutorial.

In case you're wondering, in order of appearance, we have: the Golden Gate Bridge, ship graveyard, Point Bonita, Alcatraz, Waterworld, and Clayton Quarry.

John Cleese's Principles of Creativity

Highlights from a presentation by John Cleese on creativity. He lays out a few principles for achieving it

  1. Got a problem? Sleep on it. Let your unconscious mind find the solution
  2. Another way to leverage your unconscious: it will keep working on tasks you've completed. When you revisit them, you'll find improvements waiting for you
  3. Avoid interruptions, they destroy flow
  4. Ideas "don't come from laptops", they come from thinking. You won't be creative if you're "running around all day, keeping balls in the air"
  5. To foster creativity you need to establish:
    1. Boundaries of space: a place where you can think without being interrupted
    2. Boundaries of time: a clear timespan during which you will think (though he doesn't explicitly say this, I've found the constraint of a deadline is a good spur to creativity)
None of this is new, but it's a good set of principles nonetheless. Here's the video.

Steps to coax The Gimp into compiling under Macports

Macports is a great tool to easily install a ton of open source software on your Mac. The packages are generally very well maintained but that can be a little tough for very complex ones like The Gimp, the best (?) open source image processing software out there. Though you can download a prebuilt version of The Gimp, I wanted to build my own in order to leverage some third party plugins, like Tilt Shift photography.

If you haven't yet, install Macports.

Then kick things off with "sudo port install gimp". This will likely generate a very impressive list of dependencies and start chugging through them. Expect this to take hours, not minutes. Hopefully, it will build cleanly all the way through. If not, the following notes may be of use... 

My first failure (bug #26084) was quickly resolved thanks to the lightning support of the Macports maintainers (kudos to ryandesign [at] macports.org). Turns out I was a building a slightly out of date package. Following the advice to "sudo port selfupdate" and "sudo port clean libgnomeui", the build proceeded smoothly.

The next build failure was already captured by bug #25962. There are three errors listed, though I only saw the first two. These were easily addressed with a couple of "ln -s" commands as described in the bug. I also installed select_python ("port install python_select") and pointed it to python2.6 as described in the comments.

The final bug occurred when building gimp itself. You can check out #26095 and its simple fix.