http://www.billpratt.net Ruby on Rails development, photography, poison bottles and more. Mon, 29 Sep 2008 17:11:39 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Jana, Tony and I all flew to Buffalo over the fourth of July holiday for a Cellino family reunion. Everyone was great and we had a blast. We visited Niagra Falls (although we almost weren't allowed to cross the border), Tony smuggled in some Cubans, and I can't play Can ... http://www.billpratt.net/index.php/2008/09/11/cellino-family-reunion-buffalo-ny/ I have finally found some time for myself. Jana and I are spending 13 days in Tahoe with Sean, Nicole, Thomas, and Sean's Parents. We stayed at the cabin next door and have had a great time. I had some time Friday and today to shoot some photos, specifically macros ... http://www.billpratt.net/index.php/2008/08/31/macro-photography-in-tahoe/ I wanted something similar to Keychain on OSx for Linux and I remembered a shell script from years ago. I did a quick yum search and found a keychain package managed by Gentoo. You can find the full how-to here, but the basics are simple if you are familiar with ... http://www.billpratt.net/index.php/2008/03/17/keychain-for-fedora8/ Assignment 7 required us to create a natural looking landscape that included a structure of some sort. I chose to create a mountain valley landscape with a river front cabin nestled amongst Fir trees. The cabin has a lot of detail and most of the time was spent on it. ... http://www.billpratt.net/index.php/2008/03/12/7th-computer-graphics-assignment/ Well, I had fun with this rather obscure error today. The basics are simple, for some reason, app/controllers/things_controller.rb could not be loaded or did not supply the expected class ThingsController. One common cause of this is that the helper for this controller is mistakenly named in singular form instead of ... http://www.billpratt.net/index.php/2008/03/10/expected-things_controllerrb-to-define-thingscontroller/ This project entailed creating a realistic landscape scene using only terrain's and stones along with a sky and a ground or water plane. We were not allowed to use trees, plants, etc. Here are 3 different renders of the scene, each with different sky and one with fog added. Download the ... http://www.billpratt.net/index.php/2008/03/04/6th-computer-graphics-project/ For a long time I have used a program called chkrootkit for root kit scanning on Linux. This program recieved a much needed update in December of '07. To use it, download the package, extract it, and run make. Finally run chkrootkit > rootkit_scan.txt. After it finishes, view ... http://www.billpratt.net/index.php/2008/02/25/checking-for-root-kits/ I seem to struggle with installing Sun's Java on Fedora every time. Here are the quick steps to get it working including the Firefox plug-in. I hope this helps someone. Download Java from Sun as a self extracting rpm. Remove java icedtea if it's installed sudo yum -y remove java-*-icedtea java-*-icedtea-devel ... http://www.billpratt.net/index.php/2008/02/24/sun-java-on-fedora-8/ If you are a Ruby nut like I am or you are just beginning in the language, I highly recommend Russ Olsen's Design Patterns in Ruby.  The book covers many of the original "Gang of Four" patterns from the classic book Design Patterns but it applies all of the Ruby ... http://www.billpratt.net/index.php/2008/02/23/design-patterns-in-ruby/ The 5th project in Computer Graphics class was to create a composition that included modeled real-world objects built solely out of primitive shapes (cubes, spheres, pyramids, and cones). We were also required to incorporate at least one boolean in the composition. A boolean is when you use an ... http://www.billpratt.net/index.php/2008/02/20/5th-computer-graphics-assignment/