While traveling to AA Calister’s (which turned out to be closed on Saturday evenings) Kelty and my brother Dan and I saw a huge fire off of I-80 in Salt Lake City. Since we weren’t actually on the freeway, we had the opportunity to get up close and catch it on camera. Here are some photos. I have some video, too, which I will post soon.

After winning the Republican primary last month, B. J. Lawson is now up against his Democratic rival, Mr. Price, in the general election. We need to give him the resources to win this, and bring another voice of steadfast constitutional government to Congress.

Please join me in supporting B. J.’s bid by donating this Sunday (Jun. 29th) to the Lawson Liberty Fund (i.e. donate via his Lawson for Congress website).

Imagine what power we the people wield if you and I (who have nothing to do with North Carolina) are yet willing to fund this campaign because we know that Liberty upheld over there will affect our own liberty here—in other words, if we are willing to support good women and men unilaterally on principle, rather than on location.

The lobbyists have been unilaterally supporting congressional seats for years—but for profit, not on principle. And now, it’s possible to do something about that, via the internet. We can make a difference, and maybe even reverse the lobbying trend by collectively supporting educated and principled people who know and believe in the constitution. I say, let’s do it!

If you’d like to get to know Lawson and Price a bit, watch the fourth video on the site to see Mr. Price fail to answer the question, “Did you read the bills (Patriot Act, HR 1955 etc.) before you voted in favor of them?” It’s awesome!

Liberty is Priceless!

I signed up for a 2-year Mozy account a little while ago. I like their approach to backup—it’s simple, and automatic. And it’s off-site, so if my office burns down or has things stolen, the data is somewhere else. It’s just the sort of thing I need in order to feel safe about my data being backed up.

The trouble is that this is “theoretically” safe, because I can’t seem to get it to consistently do its job on the Mac. I sent my first experience to Mozy support (their response was “make sure you’re using the latest code”) :

1. I tried backing up my home folder, a total of 70.1 GB. That 11 day process was interrupted when I closed my clamshell laptop.

2. I tried letting it continue, but realized that, actually, I don’t care about *all* of the data for now, I’d much rather know that my *most important* data is backed up. So I reduced the things Mozy should back up to about 300 MB.

3. The process continued to back things up, but paused at about 80% of 300 MB and then said it had been cancelled. I didn’t cancel it, so I’m not sure what caused that.

4. I now have the following message in my “Mozy Backup Status” window: “No successful backups yet. Last backup was cancelled 5 hours ago.”.

5. If I press the “Start Backup” button, it switches to a message that says “Backup in progress… Scanning for files…” and remains in that state indefinitely. The “Total prepared” remains at 0%, the “Total transferred” remains at 0%, and the transfer rate in both cases remains at 0.0 bits/sec.

6. I then went to my online account to see what might be listed there. Under “My Computer” it claims to have stored 268.4 MB of something (whether from the original batch, or the second, or third, I’m not sure).

Eventually, after reducing the backup load to a fraction of what I wanted to backup, it finally went through. Then I slowly increased the backup set to include most of my mission-critical files. I still wish I could backup some of my home videos and/or music collection, but that can wait.

Now, however, things are still not fully satisfactory. Today, Mozy tried to back things up again, and send my CPU into overload as it showed me that it was doing nothing (screencast here, 1 min).

I hope their Mac product is improved in the near future. I may reconsider Mozy as a backup option if not.

P.S. The 1.0 gem is available on rubyforge:

$ sudo gem install rubydoctest

As Dr. Nic mentioned in the comments of a previous post, we’ve updated the Ruby DocTest bundle for TextMate’s syntax highlighting. It’s available at:

http://github.com/drnic/ruby-doctest-tmbundle/tree/master

The syntax highlighting looks like this:

In addition to syntax highlighting, the bundle adds a “command+shift+R” command that will quickly run your current file through the ‘rubydoctest’ tool.

Install the Ruby DocTest TextMate bundle like so:

$ cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/
$ cd Bundles
$ git clone http://github.com/drnic/\
    ruby-doctest-tmbundle/tree/master Ruby\ DocTest.tmbundle

Reload TextMate, or choose the “Reload Bundles” option in the Bundles->Bundle Editor menu.

The next time you open a ruby (*.rb) document, you’ll need to choose “DocTest (Ruby)” as the file type in the footer of the window.

Ruby DocTest hits 1.0 today. I’ve done a lot of testing and work with the project. Tom Locke and Dr. Nic have been very helpful in getting this off the ground and in relaying information.

Also, a special thanks to Roger Pack for linking his version of doctest to the new project. (Well, I think it’s linked to the project… but I can’t find the link right now).

There should be a gem up on RubyForge soon.

I was browsing the language source code to the Ruby on Rails bundle in TextMate and came across a mysterious “Sune’s Special Marker”. It turns out that while editing Ruby on Rails files in TextMate, you can put fold markers in your code as a comment and get TextMate to fold large sections of text to get it out of the way.

For example:

Notice the fold arrow in the gutter that surrounds both methods. Now I can fold them like this:

Thanks, Sune!

Hopefully you’ve been curious about Ruby DocTest from a post or two recently. If so, and if you’d like to see it in action before really downloading it and setting it up (I admit, it’s not as fun when there’s no easy-install gem), here’s a screencast to clear up any ambiguity about what it does.

Ruby DocTest now has wiki documentation. I think the “What Is It?” page is especially helpful, given that it provides an “example workflow”.

Just change it! Like those darn Bush Republicans and some Democrats are trying to do today. But the constitution clearly does NOT allow this sort of fudging of the law—this is an “ex post facto” change of consequences, which is prohibited by article 1, section 9 of the constitution:

No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.

Basically, this retroactive immunity issue for the big telecommunication companies is Bush vs. the Constitution—if he has his way, then he and those who loyally supported his creeping control over our rights and freedoms will go unpunished. Everything will be swept under the carpet, as if it was 100% OK to work illegally with the government under the cover of secrecy and some winks and nods.

From a Democrats.com email this morning:

Now I must ask you to pick up your phone again and call your Representative right now to demand a NO vote on warrantless wiretapping. The vote will be Friday around noon, but please call no matter what time you get this. (The Congressional switchboard is open 24×7x365 and each office has voicemail.)

Steny Hoyer’s warrantless wiretapping bill is obscene because it gives complete immunity to the telcos that have spied on us illegally since 2001, as well as the Bush Administration officials who illegally asked them to break the law. And it lets them continue spying on us by creating Big Brother with a figleaf of meaningless “protections.”

On May 14, Democrats defeated a similar immunity bill 213-197. There is absolutely no reason for any Democrat to change his or her vote now except corrupt greed for telco campaign cash.

So call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and ask for your House Representative (not Senators) by name, or find your House Representative’s name and direct dial by entering your address on the right side: usalone.com

Or, call Speaker Nancy Pelosi (202-225-0100) and ask her to push this back or take it off the schedule. According to Democracy for America:

Speaker Pelosi can still stop this bill.

As Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi can pull the bill from the floor and refuse to call a vote.

Call Speaker Pelosi right now and demand she stand up to President Bush and stop telecom immunity.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (202-225-0100)

Suggested Script:
“I’m calling to tell Speaker Pelosi I am depending on her to pull any bill from the floor that will ultimately grant immunity to telecommunications companies who illegally spied on Americans. Can I count on Speaker Pelosi to stand up to President Bush?”