Allow me to save you some time.

First problem: the bundle executable isn’t in your PATH environment by default, either for login shells or non-login shells. The fix is simple – just add the right path to your .bashrc and .bash_profile: export PATH="/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/bin:$PATH"

Second problem: you need to make sure to use bundle install properly to resolve and install your dependency gems. Simplest solution is to add require 'bundler/capistrano' to the top of your deploy.rb.

Those two small additions will resolve problems deploying Rails 3 apps via Capistrano on Dreamhost. Happy coding!

I’ve started to see it as a bit of a parable for the current global situation and the probable future scenarios that await us: the constant hunt for food and shelter, and the vigorous and brutal means used to secure those same essentials. While most of the population of our world hasn’t turned into actual zombies, there’s a lot of parallels between our world and that of the comic.

Consider survival. Regardless of your current financial situation, you will be affected by the crisis and your ability to maintain your quality of life will face increasing strain. Are you prepared? I remain dumbfounded at the shabby state of Canadian and Americans’ finances, and individuals’ overall lack of restraint or planning. A quick run through the numbers courtesy of GreaterFool.ca shows that there are a lot of people out there who:

• Lack of significant savings: According to Garth, seven in ten Canadians have no corporate pensions, sixty per cent have no money saved, and only five in ten have RRSPs. Of the fifty percent of Canadians that do have an active RRSP, the average amount saved is a little over $40K.
• Have significant debt: Canadian families owe $1.45 for every dollar they earn, and carry an average debt of more than $25K.
• Are overexposed to risk: Canadians are funneling a more and more money into real estate. Average cost of a house in Vancouver is upwards of 8x on average household income.
• Are at or nearing retirement: There are nine million boomers comprising 32% of the population of Canada. The country is aging, and it’s only going to get worse. Oh, and we’re not alone.

No sweat, I hear you saying, I’ve sorted my own finances out. Which is just fantastic – at least someone’s been thinking ahead. In preparation for the Financial Zombieland that awaits us, you’ve at least been stockpiling cans, guns and ammunition. You’ll at least make it past the first wave of the outbreak.

Unfortunately, the fallout of the crisis will last slightly longer than a winter storm that knocks out the power. It will also dramatically reshape our society – permanently. While your larder may be full now, I believe the breadth and depth of the crisis will conspire to drain your reserves slowly but steadily in a number of ways:

• The safety net will slowly disappear: Governments, being borderline insolvent, will look to dramatically trim expenditures while expanding taxation. One only has to look at the four-year “plan” in Ireland, and the economic restructuring in England to get an idea of what’s on the horizon for previously government-provided social services.
• Things will cost more: Anyone who’s been paying attention has noticed that resources are becoming more hotly contested. China is playing chicken with the IMF by gobbling up resource rights in Africa in exchange for infrastructure, a flagrant violation of IMF’s rules that require those rights to be used to pay each African nation’s outstanding debts. Not only will resources cost more, but demographics and entitlements will force governments to find new sources of revenue. Read that: raise taxes.
• Growth will be constrained: The natural response on the part of consumers and companies will be to find ways to conserve cash. In the wake of the economic crisis, US savings rates have increased dramatically. Canadians, believing they’ve avoided the worst, have decreased their personal savings rates; however, this will change as it becomes clear that no one can escape the grasp of the global economic decline.

The upside of this reshaping of our society is that it might be just what we needed. Just as in “The Walking Dead”, this crisis may have an upside. If nothing else, it may force us to shuffle our personal priorities. Perhaps we’ll reduce our consumption, redefine how we work, and reverse some of the global destruction we’ve wrought.

7) Retail will start to resemble Mexican drugstores

In Mexico, if one wishes to buy a toothbrush, one goes to a drugstore where one of every item for sale is on display inside a glass display case that circles the store. One selects the toothbrush and one of an obvious surplus of staff runs to the back to fetch the toothbrush. It’s not very efficient, but it does offer otherwise unemployed people something to do during the day.

A couple of years ago, Ashley and I were living in Anguilla, a British protectorate in the Caribbean. It’s a small island with a similarly diminutive population and economy. At one point we had to visit the immigration office to get appropriate documentation added to our passports to allow me to work. At the door, we were greeted by an immigration employee who instructed us to sit in the chairs until we were called. There was no one else in the office, but we did as we were told.

Despite the lack of other patrons, we waited for ten minutes until a second employee called us up to the counter. She asked us a few questions and eventually asked for us to provide our passports. When we surrendered our passports, the second employee handed them to a third employee, who dutifully noted our passport numbers in a large, leatherbound ledger.

Keep in mind that this was, by all accounts, rush hour in the immigration office and we were the only patrons. One couple being served by three separate employees for a single transaction.

At the time, I thought it was a unique incident; however, ever since returning to North America I’ve noticed similar patterns with increasing regularity. Whether it’s the DMV, customs, and even areas of the private sector, the pattern of surplus labour leading to invented jobs and weirdly inefficient processes has become inescapable. In my eyes, we’re all Anguilla now.

For those of a geeky bent, the date has another layer of importance – it is made up entirely of ones and zeros, the binary language of computing. Kevin Cheng and Coley Wopperer of San Francisco have been waiting nearly two years for their wedding date to roll around, having realized over dinner with friends in 2008 that, as one suggested, “you could have a binary-themed wedding!” he recalled.

But the nerdiness of this occasion will not end there. In March of 2008, I sent Kevin an email with a GPG-encrypted message:

Hey Kevin,

This is a very important message. Store it in your archive – you will need it at some future time, but for what purpose, I can’t say at this point. The following is plain text encrypted using GPG to a passphrase I will reveal to you at some point in the future, once an important event has come to pass. It’ll be a nice surprise when I do, trust me.

Sorry for the James Bond factor, but it’ll all make sense in the future. Here’s the GPG encrypted text block:

—–BEGIN PGP MESSAGE—–

Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (Darwin)

jA0EAwMCgjMYeM6sMKdgycCyKEE22UyVt1zel3HuOPAsQvFOUt10gCQar6ivqTDt

q5v9becLtkp00bo0/43zG/X0jKNo0Lhh0TVNEVmmFaeEIizDTlMrqZCRByPGN83q

QIUWs/MgOQ4zmeEllUyzHbbBYWtCMqlNKUY9vy3NNa0KCJGbAQ8NT67suV9wKUXR

p2Z1/+iJwDnOzaJw32CnJhnLc9Edb3BkkOwMivAhQw0kwKMByejw7melXemf75cK

fhjx0+LMFwl1YcdBFkRUJLQArT3KuiUzbXHp8vLtXGKeUgClHqUAOEiPmdjFQHir

CXc8E0Vy20pmgNVfaAPy8GZFekslyM9Nb9InvBWufF63tg3KAOT3E8xl1qPMi4Gs

vgkrkfo2tnQKDg2BS5/VJ+WC6eBZ+wk8FGoU3X5b6oSTADJetDzlM+wsrERbXqyG

k0hV8J1Ijf2MP5s8aMMq7MezYzQS50bH4tW//SehXhCTrLo8/bxGDgfL/KwkhPeo

Ru71Gg==

=0gbj

—–END PGP MESSAGE—–

Brendon

—

Brendon J. Wilson

www.brendonwilson.com

Now, on the day of his marriage, the time has come to reveal the passphrase for the message to reveal the message. So, my gift to you Kevin and Coley, as small a token as it may be, is the passphrase to that message: itoldyouso.

I loved it so much, I whipped up a quick version for my desktop wallpaper, courtesy of Adobe Illustrator’s “Live Trace” feature. Here it is for your downloading pleasure in three tasty resolutions:

• 1440 x 900px
• 1280 x 800px
• 1024 x 768
• Adobe Illustrator (vector format)

They’re all Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported licensed. Enjoy!

Oh right, when a broadcast-style system fails, the single-point-of-failure brings everything down.

Well.

Good-night then!

Ray Kurzweil demonstrated similar technology three years ago at the Singularity Summit at Stanford. As I summarized his demo at the time:

Using the device, Ray took a picture of the page with the device and had it read the page aloud on his behalf. This is apparently a project that Ray started working on with the National Federation of the Blind about five years ago, but at the time the technology was not sufficiently advanced to enable the application. At the time of original investigation, digital cameras didn’t have enough resolution to enable good pattern recognition, and pattern recognition algorithms had not yet been designed to handle the difficult environment in which such a device would need to operate. All this changed in the intervening five years.

And it would appear that it has changed again in the intervening three years. Not only is it possible, the solution is relatively cheap ($1500) and readily available as a consumer product. Interestingly, it appears that this is not an updated version of the device Kurzweil demonstrated. Kurzweil is, in fact, working on a competing device called the KNFB Reader. Not only is the future here, it has competitors!

For the record, my original comment:

I think a bit of perspective is required here: Let’s assume that the number of homeless is 15K, as suggested above. BC’s population is an estimate 4.4M according to BC Stats, which means that the homeless comprise 1/3 of a percent of the population. Even if the number is doubled, it’s still only 2/3 of a percent.

Am I happy there’s people who are homeless? Of course not. But by the same token, I think it’s unrealistic to expect nobody to be homeless, much in the same way it’s unrealistic to expect 100% employment.

I don’t have a solution to this problem and, in all honesty, I’m not sure one exists. However, I don’t think giving people cheap housing is going to solve the problem – it’s a hand-out that doesn’t solve the fundamental underlying issues, and it insults the rest of the hard-working population in the interim.

First, let me be clear: I’m in favour of programs to reduce homelessness. However, I have a problem with programs that choose to throw money at symptoms rather than causes. If history is any guide, these programs will not provide the desired results (one only needs to look at the $1.4B invested in the Downtown Eastside with few results), which does a disservice to those working hard to pay their taxes to pay for these ill-conceived projects.

According to the original Straight article, there are between 12,000 and 15,000 homeless people (note that we’re talking about genuinely homeless people here, not those who are struggling with housing affordability – I’ll come to them in a moment). Contrary to popular belief, the problem for these individuals is not a lack of housing – that’s a symptom. For the majority, the root cause is untreated mental health issues and substance abuse. These factors limit employment options and create the conditions that lead to homelessness.

The real solution is not to throw money at cheap housing, the solution is to provide proper, comprehensive mental healthcare in BC. Proper mental heath treatment can reduce or eliminate the factors that limit these individuals’ ability to be fully functioning members of society. That is the real solution.

Unfortunately, even comprehensive mental heath services are not sufficient to cure homelessness. Although one commenter called it “disgusting” for me to state that it’s unrealistic to expect nobody to be homeless, I stand by this statement. Even when adequate mental heath services are available, there are some individuals that simply will not adhere to treatment regimens required to enable them remain functioning members of society. For example, some schizophrenics complain that they don’t feel themselves when they’re on their medications, and choose to stop taking their treatment. My mother, a psychiatric nurse for twenty years, can attest to this phenomenon.

Unless we discover a way to cure mental health issues instantaneously or choose to, as one commenter suggested, put individuals who aren’t capable of functioning in society under the care of the state, the root cause of homelessness will remain. And as long as there is one person without a home, there will be homelessness. It’s an unfortunate, horrible thing to say. But it’s also reality.

Of course, housing affordability is also a major problem. Proponents of social housing projects, such as Wendy Pedersen of the Carnegie Community Action Project, are quick to point out that money spent on the new convention center could have bought 4,250 deluxe inner-city homes. So let’s pretend that happened –what would be the result? Without the convention center project, we would have missed out on the benefits of the project:

• 4500 direct and indirect jobs
• $1.6B economic activity during the convention construction
• 61 events between now and 2012 (which could not have been accommodated without the new facility)
• $2 billion additional economic activity in the province between now and 2012

Not constructing the convention center would have eliminated a recurring source of jobs and economic stability. In other words, the very things that enable people to afford housing in the first place and that decrease the likelihood of people slipping into homelessness. The very result organizations such as the Carnegie Community Action Project would like to see.

The solution here is not simply to build some subsidized housing and pat ourselves on the back. It’s addressing the real problems, namely lack of proper mental healthcare. And the money required to provide that solution has to come from somewhere – namely income generated from new economic activity.

Given the dire economic straits we find ourselves in, I would argue that it’s more prudent for the government to focus on addressing the 7.6% unemployed British Columbians, rather than 1/3 of a percent homeless. After all, the money for all of these social programs has to come from somewhere, and lack of employment only increases the possibility of people becoming homeless in the first place.

These are not nice choices for a society to have to make. But in a world of constrained resources, you can’t have it all. You need to focus on the root problems, not symptoms, and try to generate the best result for the most people. To do otherwise is impractical.

If I were to summarize the tone of the conference in one word, that word would be ‘fear‘. The publishing world is rapidly approaching a crossroads, and it doesn’t seem like its inhabitants are any better prepared for the transition to digital media than their brethren in the music and movie industries. Sean Cranbury‘s session on digital rights management could have been about the music industry if you replaced the word ‘book’ with the word ‘song’ in the discussion. This is somewhat disturbing, since there have been numerous examples of what works and doesn’t work in digital media.

The concerns of publishers boil down to economics. Publishers are struggling to reconcile the costs of book production with consumers’ unwillingness to pay for content. Regardless of whether the content is delivered via the Internet, or as an electronic book, consumers are less and less willing to pay for content, much to publishers’ chagrin. For many attendees, I think the real shock came from comments by publishers on the time and costs associated with producing physical books:

• Profit margins in the publishing industry are about 4%. For those of us from the software industry, 4% is an amazingly low number (software profitability runs around 30% depending on industry).
• The timeline on book production, once a complete manuscript has been received from the author? A year and a half on average.
• Book printing costs only account for about 20% of the cost of a book. This is surprising to many consumers who, judging by audience reactions at the conference, believe that physical production and distribution is a major component of the price of a book.
• Author royalties comprise only 10% of the cost of a book, another fact that shocked the audience.

The part I found most concerning: a professed lack of willingness on the part of publishers to experiment. Despite widespread agreement that technology publisher O’Reilly is leading the way in revolutionizing the publishing industry, few publishers professed a willingness to take a chance and undertake experiments of their own to determine how to chart a course through these new waters. It’s disappointing, especially when O’Reilly has already created many of the new models publishers might employ to stave off extinction, such as monetizing books through new formats (finely sliced content offered as PDFs, subscription-based reference libraries), and partnering with readers during the production process.

One conversation I had with a publisher highlighted the extent of the tunnel vision: the publisher admitted that they would not only be unwilling to accept any price cut when offering books in electronic form on devices such as the Kindle, but also that they weren’t even willing to try offering books in electronic form at all. If this attitude is widespread in the industry, the publishers’ fates are already sealed. The future of publishing may rely on a new breed of author-entrepreneurs adhering to the tenets of “lean publishing” to continue in their stead.

By installing this electronic faucet, this facility is demonstrating its commitment to water conservation and protecting/preserving our environment.

The mind boggles. Apparently, conserving water requires electricity and someone figured that adding a solar panel to the device would turn the conservation-cred of this faucet up to eleven.

It’s almost comical. For one thing, a solar-powered faucet can’t be solar-powered when it’s indoors – solar implies the light source is the sun, but in this case the light source is the fluorescent lights.

But really, focusing on the idiocy of an indoor solar-powered faucet overlooks the biggest problem: a faucet that requires electricity to run in the first place. The primary touted benefit of an electronic faucet is its ability to conserve water – something which was already achievable with spring-powered faucets. So, if it was already achievable without electricity, what’s the point of this thing?

The answer lies in the secondary benefit: touch-less operation. While I doubt there’s a high risk of contamination from a faucet in a bathroom, I suppose there can be a case made that it reduces costs to keep the faucet clean. There is, however, an alternative solution: a pedal-based faucet. We saw these in France, and I thought they were brilliant: no power, water-conserving, touch-less operation (I don’t think the bottom of your shoes are at any increased risk of contamination).

It the greenwashing by companies like Sloan, the manufacturer of this device, that fuel resistance to attempts to fight climate change and reduce our impact on the environment. Critics view these devices as a cynical attempt by companies to make a buck – surely the whole environmentalism thing is trick to make us buy different stuff!

Seriously Sloan, knock it off.