Drapetomaniac

NPR (All things Considered) had a story today where they expressed surprise and adoration at a mixed race rapper who got a college degree (J Cole).

The story dwelled on the idea it was was rare for rappers to have a college degree and at one point asked if it hindered or helped his career.  This was the most bizarre question, considering it is in a career based on language and communication.

I remember back in the day, degrees of Kool Moe Dee, MC Lyte, Sista Soulja and Chuck D were out front and they promoted education. Others still do.

Contributing to the false stereotype of praising ignorance results in praising ignorance.

GOOD has a slideshow of other very well known artists with degrees here.

One would hope that J Cole would push back at the stereotype as well.  With his college education, he must know how the proliferation of stereotypes can harm him, his profession and others.

There are several posts and questions going back years about the jquery plugin jCarousel not working in Chrome or Safari.

Basically, instead of loading, you see a straight unordered list.  While there were many teaks to the code offered, and the code base the recommendations pointed to were dated – I had the idea to look for bad html  the code since the plugin basically structures and organizes a list into a pretty-pretty format for me.

After closing some image tags properly, all that was left was to validate the html.  For some reason, while creating a row of thumbnails with text and links, I ended up with something like:

<li>
<a href=”etc”>
<div><img src=”thumb.jpg” alt=”" /></div>
<span>text under thumbnail</span>
</a>
</li>

All I had to do was remove the <div> from inside the a tag.  Putting blocky elements inside an a tag isn’t valid.

The amusing part is everything I saw pointed at the maker of the plugin, it makes me wonder how many people validated the html they were using the plugin against.

Another problem I ran into was when I accidentally initiated the carousel twice, it pushed the buttons in two extra <li> widths, so the carousel started from the center.

Decided to get started using RVM on my Mac, unfortunately, right before continuing development on an otherwise sturdy app.

Upon start-up, there were errors in the log starting with


/!\ FAILSAFE /!\ Sat Dec 11 17:17:47 -0600 2010
Status: 500 Internal Server Error
uninitialized constant MysqlCompat::MysqlRes
/Users/username/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p302/gems/activesupport-2.3.4/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:440:in `load_missing_constant'
/Users/username/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p302/gems/activesupport-2.3.4/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:80:in `const_missing'
/Users/username/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p302/gems/activerecord-2.3.4/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/mysql_adapter.rb:9:in `define_all_hashes_method!'

From other posts, it appears mysql simply wasn’t being loaded properly.

The full fix probably depends on whatever hacks you took to get mysql and ruby on your system the first time. I didn’t see the steps al in one place, so here they are.

1. Uninstall the mysql gem
gem uninstall mysql

2. Uninstall rvm’s ruby
rvm remove ruby-1.8.7

3. Install RVM considering the i386 architecture
rvm_archflags="-arch i386" CFLAGS="-arch i386" LDFLAGS="-arch i386" rvm install 1.8.7 --patch osx-arch-fix

4. Install mysql gem with architecture flags
env ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386 -arch x86_64" ; gem install --no-rdoc --no-ri mysql -- --with-mysql-dir=/usr/local/mysql/lib/ --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config