Sho Fukamachi Online

If you’ve experimented with Captchas in Rails, especially in OSS projects like Apache’s PIP, you might have had some difficulties getting RMagick to read system fonts – or, indeed, any font at all. Turns out all you need to do is give the font as the full path: for example,

:font => '/Library/Fonts/Arial'

Bingo. Simple enough but took me a few minutes to find the solution.

Intalling rmagick in RHEL4:

Installing rmagick in MacOSX 10.4:

curl -O http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/\
freetype/freetype-2.1.10.tar.gz
tar xzvf freetype-2.1.10.tar.gz
cd freetype-2.1.10
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O http://superb-west.dl.sourceforge.net/\
sourceforge/libpng/libpng-1.2.10.tar.bz2
bzip2 -dc libpng-1.2.10.tar.bz2 | tar xv
cd libpng-1.2.10
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz
tar xzvf jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz
cd jpeg-6b
ln -s `which glibtool` ./libtool
export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.4
./configure --enable-shared --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O ftp://ftp.remotesensing.org/libtiff/tiff-3.8.2.tar.gz
tar xzvf tiff-3.8.2.tar.gz
cd tiff-3.8.2
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O http://easynews.dl.sourceforge.net/\
sourceforge/imagemagick/ImageMagick-6.3.0-0.tar.gz
tar xzvf ImageMagick-6.3.0-0.tar.gz
cd ImageMagick-6.3.0
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

sudo gem install RMagick

(Courtesy the indispensable HiveLogic)

You would think that, given the incredible number of database-driven web sites around the world, that find a good countries/subcountries/ suburbs/cities multi-lingual database source would be easy. Well, you’d be wrong! I know of no such resource, and so I’ve had several hours of fun trying to create my own from many and varied disparate sources.

I want a few things in my database:

Countries table:

- proper ISO-3166 country IDs – numeric, Alpha2 and Alpha3

preferably the primary key of the table should be the ISO country ID but in a pinch it doesn’t HAVE to be.

Subcountries table:

- related to the countries table by country_id = ISO-3166 *number* – this is apparently a totally new innovation, since everyone seems to relate only by Alpha2 code

Cities & Suburbs tables: a hopeless mishmash of useless crap, with no standard numbering, no standard sorting, not even standard fricking *names*. And I would really like populations in there so I could sort by them for user convenience.

I’d furthermore like to tie localisation into all of this by use of ISO-639 language codes. You’d think that there’d be an embarrassment of riches with all the iso-639 tables floating open-source around the net .. but no. Looks like I’m going to have to do it all from scratch.

All I want is an ISO-compliant, cross-referenced database of countries, subcountries, cities and locales with readings in English, Chinese, Japanese and Spanish – the only langauges I really give a fuck about.

I want it to look like this (let’s choose a city in australia):

countries table:

36 Australia

subcountries table:

id 1
country_id 36

cities table:

1 Sydney
population 4100000

languages table

id 1
alpha2: en
alpha3: eng

loc_countries table

id 1
country_id = 36
language_code = eng
reading = Australia

loc_subcountries table

id 1
subcountry_id = 1
language_id = 1
abbreviated_reading = NSW
full_reading = New South Wales

loc_cities table

city_id = 1
language_id = 1
reading = Sydney

and then i can also add

languages:
id = 2
alpha2 = ja
alpha3 = jpn

cities:

city_id = 1
language_code = ja
reading = シドニー

I would have thought there was a standard way to do all this .. seems I was wrong.

Just LOOK at this shrine to His Holiness at, you guessed it, his own fucking flickr site:

And let’s not forget this lovingly self-scanned photo from his own blog’s “about” page. Don’t forget to read the sickening text:

David Heinemeier Hansson, you are a Grade-A Wanker. I may love your framework and have bought most of your books but boy, I’d love to sock you one right in the cakehole, just to wipe that smug fucking grin off your ugly “I am a Gay Danish Gap Model” face.