The last two weekends I have been wakeboarding at JB Ski

JB’s is probably one of the best places to board in the UK, if not Europe. To be honest, it is my preffered place to wakeboard.

Despite all the planning permission issues they had to overcome last year (which resulted in one of the buildings being removed as well as the bar), JB’s is still going strong. Phil Perry has recently handed over to James Murphy as general manager and Lee Debuse has just started up a new coaching school for beginners to pros which is going really well.

There is still a strong university attendance on wednesdays, and the weekends are getting more and more packed. If you are going there on a saturday, I would recommend getting there early afternoon -> evening as it seems to get a little quiter around then.

JB Ski are located near Chertsey, just off the M25, have a look at the map below.

View Larger Map

I went wakeboarding over the weekend to Box-End Park near Bedford which is a Cable Park in a fresh water lake originating from a spring. This means that the water is always nice and clean, which certainly makes a difference to the stagnant water at JB’s!

The cable is 5 corners, making it tighter than a four corner cable. The lake has a little barrier all the way down the middle which really keeps the chop down. Even though it was fairly windy over the weekend, the chop even on a wakeskate was fine.

The lake is lower than the rest of the land around it which makes it pretty sheltered.
There is a really nice new restaurant and the changing areas are really super clean.

In terms of riding, there are a couple of medium sized boxes, a small rail and quite a large A-Frame, as well as two substantial kickers (one either side) before the final corner and a small kicker / slope at the end of the first straight.
The edges of the lake are pretty close, a lot closer than somewhere like JB’s which makes it easier to swim to, but they feel almost so close that you have to watch not falling off badly from a raley, in case you hit the shore.

The people at Box-End park are really nice and helpful, and it is a really friendly atmosphere down there. The level of riders was pretty good, there were few beginners there, but I think this is more due to the water temperature at the moment!

Price wise, you are looking at £16 for an hour, £20 for 2, which is pretty standard at the moment.

I would definately recommend Box-End and it is a nice place to take the family during the winter, as they can sit inside the cafe and watch from the warmth!

Box-End has a pro shop, restaurant, cafe and both Cable and Boat. Their website is here: http://www.boxendpark.com/

Blogging Efforts have been moved

I have moved my efforts at blogging over to blog.dynamic50.com. I will still be maintaining this blog, albeit much less often!

I came across this error today trying to run merb server.
For some reason my file permissions on my home directory are messed up.
To rectify this, the home directory itself needs its permissions set back to normal.

Simply run the following command on your home directory:
chmod 750 /Users/myhomedirectory

My user name is jasongreen so I ran:
chmod 750 /Users/jasongreen

Today I started messing around with Rails again, after having spent the best part of the last months on Merb.

Anyway the common link problem for the mysql adapter reared its ugly head as usual.
No such file or directory - /tmp/mysql.sock

The solution to this is to create a symbolic link from your mysqld.sock to /tmp/mysql.sock

But where is your mysqld.sock?

For Mac OSX it is usually in /opt/local/var/run/mysql5/mysqld.sock.
Check where it is with locate.

locate mysqld.sock

Now create the symlink:
ln -s /link/to/where/mysqld.sock /tmp/mysql.sock
on my Mac, I ran:
ln -s /opt/local/var/run/mysql5/mysqld.sock /tmp/mysql.sock

Facebook Connect came out on the 23rd of this month, and is a much modified and improved version of the notorious Facebook Beacon.

It allows external sites to authenticate a user and share detailed information including friendships, albums and personal profiles through facebook.

It is facebooks alternative to OpenSocial (and a little bit of OpenID), and it is going to be huge!

If you want a Facebook Connect application, or a Facebook application written in Ruby on Rails or Merb, give us a call.

I have finally got an IPhone 3g from an O2 store which happened to have two left, so can now use my phone contract properly again!

Anyway, what you get with the jailbreak for the 3g IPhone is the installer app to install non apple-sanctioned software. At the moment not a huge amount is available, but this will definately expand over time.

There is however an openSSH shell, a pacman emulator, and a NES emulator, which more than makes this upgrade worthwhile!

Lets get started! So first you need to download PwnageTool. Currently at 2.0.1. you can download it direct from the authors here or here or here

You will need a copy of the firmware for the phone for the install. There should already be one on your system, if there is not, the IPhone 3G firmware is available here.

What the PwnageTool does is create a new backup to restore the Iphone with. It creates a new .ipsw file for you. So follow the instructions on the screen to create this .ipsw

When PwnageTool is finished, it will open up ITunes. At this point you must restore from this new backup PwnageTool created. To do this press and hold down the “alt” key and click on “restore” in ITunes. This will bring up a file selection, select the new .ipsw you just created and restore!

Here at dynamic50 we use the sake gem and associated tasks to keep merb and datamapper up to date locally.

Why would you want to do this?

• It automates the compilation and installation of each individual gem
• It does automatic updates on your local gems from source
• You want to stay up to date as things are changing on a daily basis

To use sake, you need to install the gem first:
sudo gem install sake

If it bums out, you are probably either missing some dependencies, or don’t have the right versions of the dependencies.

Once installed get the sake recipes here:
sudo sake -i http://merbivore.com/merb-dev.sake
sudo sake -i http://datamapper.org/dm-dev.sake

You can then install merb and datamapper as follows:

Decide on where you want to put them:
mkdir merb_resources

Clone the repositories
sudo sake merb:clone
sudo sake dm:clone

Now install them!
cd merb
sake merb:install
cd ..
cd dm
sake dm:install

You can get a list of all available commands by typing
sake -T

I have decided to take my guitar out of its cover this morning, and have started to attempt the old favourite: Stairway to Heaven, by Led Zeppelin.

I grabbed the tab from here.

Led Zeppelin, Stairway to Heaven

The new Apple 3g IPhone has been out for a while in the UK now. I had the misfortune of losing my old one about two weeks now, and despite my best attempts to get either a replacement or an upgrade, I am now stuck in limbo, or Apple purgatory, with my contacts saved on to my IPod, and a new sim in my old Nokia.

Apple please supply some more phones to the UK!