Wolfmans Howlings

Painting exterior siding

Posted by Jim Morris on 2006-06-11 15:11:28 +0000

I took off a month from work and needed a project, so I decided to repaint the outside of my house. It is an old house with wood siding, the last time I had it painted I asked the contractor to strip the old paint off first as it was peeling badly, I suggested he sandblast it or something first. That was a bad idea, he rented a sandblaster and had never used one and discovered you can't sandblast wood siding (the siding disappears :). Rather than wait for me to come home and tell me about it he decided to go ahead and paint anyway over the old paint. Needless to say that paint job did not last long, you can't paint on top of old peeling paint and get away with it.

So this time I decided I'd do the job myself, after researching the web for how to remove old paint, it was apparent the experts were saying you cannot avoid scraping it off, no mention of sandblasting, but power washers were mentioned, saying they could damage the siding too. Ignoring this I got myself a 2,500 psi gas power washer (Exccel, Home Depot, $299), and indeed found that if you get the head close enough to strip off the paint you also damage the wood, you can get the loosest paint off when the head is about a foot from the wall without damaging the wood, but not much paint comes off, I found the rotating head was most effective.

Posted in DIY  |  Tags siding,painting,stripping  |  5 comments

metaWeblog api in typo fails on some posts

Posted by Jim Morris on 2006-06-03 23:32:02 +0000

I was using a ruby script to post my blogs from the command line, and it used the xmlrpc/client which would occasionally fail with this error...

/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/xmlrpc/client.rb:546:in `do_rpc': HTTP-Error: 500 Internal Server Error  (RuntimeError)
    from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/xmlrpc/client.rb:420:in `call2'
    from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/xmlrpc/client.rb:410:in `call'
    from send2blog.rb:103

Posted in Rails,Ruby  |  Tags typo,metaweblog  |  1 comments

Capistrano deploy from local repository

Posted by Jim Morris on 2006-05-26 17:08:00 +0000

UPDATE 2006-12-06 I have replaced this with a full blown SCM module that works much better, see this posting

Posted in Rails,Ruby  |  Tags ruby,rails,capistrano,deployment  |  no comments

Howto format ruby code for blogs

Posted by Jim Morris on 2006-05-26 00:14:00 +0000

How do I get that nice formatted ruby code inline?

Well if you are on typo trunk use this...

<typo:code lang="ruby">
   ...ruby code...
</typo:code>

Posted in Ruby  |  Tags ruby,syntax,highlighting  |  10 comments

Create Rails ActiveRecord Models from DDL

Posted by Jim Morris on 2006-05-24 23:20:00 +0000

I had a database with about 60 tables in it, most where simple lookup tables with simple has_many and belongs_to relationships, and I didn't want to manually create all the models, with the associations by hand. I googled around and came across Bill Katz's dbmodel, which takes the output of dbdesigner and creates the models with the relationships. However I already had the Databases and schema setup, and I didn't have (and couldn't find) a copy of dbdesigner to use. So I hacked Bills dbmodel to read a DDL file that was created from the command rake db:structure:dump, as I was using Postgresql this file had all the relevant relationship info in it plus a bit extra.

I added the ability to create the relationships that had non standard table names and foreign keys, and also added some validations to the created models.

Posted in Rails,Ruby  |  Tags rails,ddl,activerecord  |  5 comments

An Admin page for Rails Role Based Authentication

Posted by Jim Morris on 2006-05-20 13:19:00 +0000

This is an example of an admin page for the Rails Recipes book Role Based Authentication, using a tree control and checkboxes for HABTM.

I used the Silverstripe tree control to render two trees, on the left a list of all Roles and what Rights they have. On the right a tree with all controllers and a checkbox for each action for each controller, under that a set of checkboxes that allow you to apply the selected rights to the selected Roles.

Posted in Rails  |  Tags ruby,rails,rbac  |  10 comments