[When I posted my glee at this announcement, a friend asked: “Could you explain what this means in English? How is it going to change what I can do on my Blackberry?”]

( long, rambling post )

[I know it has been a long time since I’ve done one of these, but this one is directed mostly at my wonderful colleagues at Change.org. Others are more than welcome, but I think most of you will find the itinerary prohibitive. Have no fear, I plan to do another one come September (when the weather on the bridge is less capricious, and they’ve reopened the western walkway).]

Folks! We’re meeting in Sausalito! It’s a perfect excuse to grab your bike and ride across the bridge!

When:

Friday July 29th. We need to be in Sausalito at 9am. We need to work the timeline backward from there, adding enough buffer so that nobody feels rushed.

Who:

Anyone who has a bike, can manage to stay (mostly) upright on it, and wants to ride across the Golden Gate (C’mon! It’s fun! You should do it at least once!)

What:

Riding a bicycle across the Golden Gate Bridge. Also, you might want to consult your doctor about ADHD, and/or cut down on the fine herb clouding your short-term memory.

Where:

The Bridge down into Sausalito, see below

[Note to LiveJournal readers: this post is a week or so old, but I think I’ve finally vanquished the cross-posting demons]

When MovableType 5 was announced, there was a bit of a brouhaha about its lack of PostgreSQL support. Though it was completely unclear from the language of the announcement, all that meant was that PostgreSQL would not be officially supported and tested. The files would still ship with the distribution.

But when it finally came time to turn my attention to MovableType, I discovered it worked haltingly, throwing cryptic error after error (Can’t use string (“x42494e3a53455247000000000000000”) as an ARRAY ref while “strict refs” in use), with little else to go on. Well, that string is clearly not an array ref, but where is it coming from?

So, I rolled up my sleeves and dusted off the debugging tricks I’d learned when building my custom MovableType plugins (before there was much in the way of documentation for MT4)

…And I got nowhere fast. I figured out quickly that the string in question was ASCII (possibly UTF-8) encoded as a hexadecimal string. But the deeper I went, the more sure I became that this was some kind of decoding bug, because the data seemed to go into the database just fine, but it was being garbled on the way out.

A few weeks ago I sat down with Matt and we tried to puzzle it out. I'd done a lot of work to characterize the bug, but was stumped. With a fresh pair of eyes, rather than getting wrapped up in debugging MovableType’s own serialization logic, he had the epiphany to go look at PostgreSQL’s own encoding formats.

Lo, and behold! There is a new, improved output encoding format in PostgreSQL 9.0. So much improved it has been made the default. What's more, it looks suspiciously like the strings I've been looking at in the debugger.

Armed with that information, it didn't take us long to track down the means to revert a client connection to the old format, and apply it to our MovableType instance.

In our case, adding Setenv PGOPTIONS "-c bytea_output=escape" to the right portion of our Apache configuration was all it took.

A lot has happened in the last month…

First off, it appears that this information has been unevenly communicated. For that, I apologize. But I hope you agree that I had a good excuse. (At least at first.)

I’m still midway through writing a very long-winded, exhastive account (with its own summary) of what happened that nobody in their right mind would actually want to read. It’s stalled. This is getting ridiculous.

In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya: Let me ’splain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

I was hit by a car.

The evening of Friday, February 12th as I crossed the street (in the crosswalk, with the light) to catch a bus home, a car turning left onto Market from Montgomery struck me at slow speed.

My knee was broken (x-ray). Everything else was fine. (Specifically, a portion of the tibial plateau was sheared off.) I was, in many respects, very lucky.

It was a long, painful, and story-filled night.

After a long, disagreeable week, the following Thursday I had surgery to fix the (skeletal) damage (another x-ray). My ACL was torn but not repaired (I’m told that many people live full, active lives without one). My MCL was stretched rather badly.

I was (IMNSHO) discharged too early on Friday evening. I spent a harrowing night at home. Too harrowing to be story-filled. The less said about it the better.

The convalescent prescription from here is rather high-powered narcotics (which work most of the time) and no weight bearing on that joint for 10-12 weeks! After that, the real recuperation begins: 6-8 weeks of physical therapy and rebuilding.

The reason 10-12 weeks is two-fold: primarily, it’s to give the cartilage in my knee a break (ha!) to prevent it from deteriorating further. Secondly, it is also hoped that this break will also give the MCL a chance to tighten back up (at least a bit).

This greatly increases the chances of arthritis in my knee (but there is no way to predict if it will be symptomatic or not.)

I am definitely healing. I have good days and bad days with the pain, but it’s reassuring (after the fact) that I’m healing even on the bad days. I’ve regained quite a bit of mobility, but as of right now, I am still confined to the upper floor of our house.

The outpouring of support and well-wishes has been fantastic and overwhelming. Chiara, too, has been a saint to put up with so much. I am humbled by it all.

There is more I want to say, but this is already starting to get long, so I’ll save it for another post.

I have a project I call “Clubcar.” It had its genesis in my frustration at the pathological inability of a group of coworkers to chose a lunch destination, coupled with our general dissatisfaction with the day-to-day functioning of most other automated decision systems.

It was also a complex enough problem that it seemed a good way to learn Rails. Because it was my first Rails project I was as yet unfamiliar with many Rails idioms and practices. I reinvented a few wheels that really should have been patterns.

I am now going back and spending time cleaning up the code base and extending it to allow more than just the original group to use it, since several people have expressed interest in it.

One of the wheels I invented was authentication. Since a wider audience needs a much more robust authentication (and authorization, but that's a separate issue) system, now is a good time to rip out my simple implementation and use one of the off-the-shelf solutions with far more features, and far fewer bugs.

And here's the rub. By far, the most popular solution, acts-as-authenticated (and its REST-ful progeny: restful-authentication) are primarily code generators. The expectation is that you'll use them in a new project to generate the models, views & controllers that make up your authentication system. This has presented two problems, one practical, and one philosophical.

The practical: since my system already has all of these things, I tried to carefully shoehorn the generated code into my existing framework. It was a mess, I felt I'd painted myself into a corner, and the project stagnated.

The philosophical: while I was despairing and frustrated over the shoehorning, I began to wonder: why is the Rails community as a whole, which has “DRY” (“Don’t Repeat Yourself”) as a mantra so enamored with code generation? Even if it's not you writing the code, it is still repetition that makes the project harder to maintain, makes it harder to incorporate fixes and features from later version of the tool, and seems to fly in the face of not only DRY but good object-oriented design as well.

I set the project aside. In returning to it (now that I need to amuse myself on the train again occasionally.) I decided to once again look for alternatives.

I have stumbled upon Authlogic, a plugin that seems to be written by someone who shares my misgivings. It's also extremely well documented, highly configurable, and has a complete API for extension.

Fair warning: I haven't actually started moving my project to Authlogic, and I may yet find some fatal flaw. But I'm very much looking forward to trying it out, and if I do happen to find a flaw, perhaps I can patch it, and everyone using it can benefit immediately, not on their next project!

ETA: I just sent the author some fan mail, because it makes me that happy!

There are far too many words for me to write here, and I’ll never get it out if I try to capture them all. Keeping it short: The candle that burns at both ends burns twice as bright, but half as long. Horus succumbed to chronic renal failure today. Hoka Hey, little man.

Chiara and I are spending this weekend in Monterey / Carmel / Pacific Grove hammering out wedding details. To me this is poetic for on this day our relationship becomes “legal.”

18 years ago today, we had our first date. February 8, 1991 was the Snowball.

I don’t yet know if she realizes this fact, but I do know that she doesn’t expect me to remember.

Today will be fun!

ETA: She didn’t remember. I win! Off to taste some cake.

For the past few months, I’ve hoped that this evening I’d have something about which to gloat. But since about this time last night, I’ve had the immortal words of the inimitable Terry Gilliam, as delivered by an understated Bobby D on a seeming endless loop in my head:

“Listen, kid. We’re all in this together.”

There are likely to be many on the side on which I’ve been standing who are looking to destroy those on the other side, as a manner of repudiating the thinking and damage done in the last eight years. I fully expected to be one.

This morning my realization that I wasn’t in that camp prompted me to remember a well-respected Republican admonishing:

“Why, madam, do I not destroy [my enemies] when I make them my friends?”

It’s going to take every one of us to roll up our sleeves, pull the wheel, and turn the Ship of State off the suicidal course on which it has been directed for the last 8 years.

Let it begin with me. Yes we can.