dual booting windows 7 and ubuntu 11.10 on lenovo x120e

This was a bit trickier than I hoped it would be. I didn't really want to reinstall windows 7 and the default ubuntu install didn't seem to detect the right partition to overwrite MBR (or Windows 7 was doing something odd). In lieu of digging into what was really going on I ended up adding an entry to the windows 7 bootloader using BCDEdit, following these directions. I diverged from those instructions by running the "dd" command immediately after install while still within the ubuntu live environment (thereby avoiding the reboot). Following that route seemed to be the quickest. I tried the alternate iso route earlier but it turned out that wasn't necessary with 11.10.

Hope this helps out anyone else out there dealing with the same issue. If this is unclear I can add more details. This was done with the amd64 11.10 iso, default partition was /dev/sda5 for me, I could mount the main windows 7 system partition with the ubuntu disk utility (it mounted to /media/Windows7_OS). Those would likely be the defaults for someone else going this route as well but YMMV.

a couple videos from DjangoCon 2008

Cal Henderson on why he hates Django, covers issues of scaling and how Django may implement better scaling features in the future. Some of these are likely implemented now.



Guido on the Google App Engine:

upgrading PostgreSQL on Debian/Ubuntu

I've been upgrading pg on a few servers today. One from 8.1 to 8.4 (debian) and the other from 8.2 to 8.4 (ubuntu). In both cases the process worked as noted here (though I used aptitude):

1. backup your db(s)


2. add backports repositories ubuntu, debian instructions (don't forget about pinning)

Then

aptitude install postgresql-8.4
pg_dropcluster --stop 8.4 main
pg_upgradecluster 8.1 main

Once you're sure that's working:

pg_dropcluster --stop 8.1 main
apt-get remove postgresql-8.1

mysql string search and replace

UPDATE [tablename] SET [fieldname] = REPLACE([fieldname],"[oldstring]","[newstring]");

The code above would operate on every row in the table but you may want WHERE conditions. Example:

UPDATE profile SET homepage = REPLACE(homepage,"blargh.example.com","foo.example.com") WHERE first_name="Joe" AND last_name="Schmoe";

Will change Joe's homepage to http://foo.example.com/ instead of http://blargh.example.com/.

added open graph (facebook crap) to YAT

Thanks capotej.

added Markdown to YAT

Thanks BlueCloth and whoever wrote this tutorial.

first rails app

Yet Another Testament is now a rails app. I have a rails client now so I needed to get a feel for it. There's not much to it but before it was a form with a single textbox. Some features:

• An RSS feed (only currently applies to posts when they're first created)
• Full revision history on every YAT (thanks Vestal Versions!), full text of all but the most recent revision is currently hidden from the user.
• Anyone can comment on or edit a YAT
• The most recently modified YAT will show up on the top of the front page

You may be asking "But what is Yet Another Testament?" It's the scripture of Church of Mike. Mike is a distant cousin of Bokonon.

I'm mostly a Python (Django) dev but Rails is pretty fun. Capistrano too, great stuff.