2013 – Page 3 – Ryan Hellyer

Stuttgart

I did a flying visit of Stuttgart whilst enroute to Tübingen in Germany. I didn’t stay long, but had time to do a quick tour around the city center and took the following snaps on my way through.

December 12, 2013

Deep beneath this rather boring looking car park is the location where Adolf Hitler married his wife, then promptly blew his brains out with a pistol on the 30th April 1945. He was then dragged up to ground level, doused with fuel and set on fire inside an impact hole from Soviet artillery shelling. I farted a little, then moved on.

December 11, 2013

Dachau concentration camp

This was going to be a series of posts regarding my visit to the Dachau concentration camp near München in Germany. But when I began writing it, I realised I simply don’t have enough knowledge of the history and events which occurred in this very sad location in world history. So all I’m going to do is post a dump of photos I took during my visit, and suggest that if you are interested in the camp, then do some research and look into the reports on what occurred here during World War 2.

December 10, 2013

Weird shit in Japan

I forgot to post these photos I took of weird shit in Japan. Apparently they like drinking sweat, buying coffee and cigarettes from vending machines, using electric toilets and washing their clothes with devices made by Sanyo.

The weird thing about the vending machines, is that they’re everywhere. They just leave them sitting out on the footpath, so that you can stop and buy stuff as you are walking along. They’re kinda handy if you feel like a quick snack late night.

December 8, 2013

Holidays spirit for the terminal

Install Ruby and run this …
ruby -e 'C=`stty size`.scan(/d+/)[1].to_i;S=["2743".to_i(16)].pack("U*");a={};puts "33[2J";loop{a[rand(C)]=0;a.each{|x,o|;a[x]+=1;print "33[#{o};#{x}H 33[#{a[x]};#{x}H#{S} 33[0;0H"};$stdout.flush;sleep 0.1}'

Thanks to Chris Laing for sending this to me.

December 7, 2013

Bounce, jiggle, wobble 🙂

Thanks to Milan for pointing out this terrifically informative video. I learned a lot about bounce dynamics from it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL2-9k519Gs

December 6, 2013

God/Jesus in a nutshell

Basically the old testament tells you how inferior you are to God and all the things you have to do to make it up to him. Then the new testament says, “Scratch that. This dude died for your inadequacies. Follow him and be saved.” – via @ronalfy

December 2, 2013

Jeg elsker Norge!

As of today I have moved away from Norway where I have made my home for the past two years. It feels sad, as I do love Norway, the people, and will miss my life there. But I think it was time to move on. The company I worked for in Oslo has downsized dramatically recently, which involved chopping jobs, including my own.

My chosen career path (WordPress development) involves work which can be outsourced at any given moment, and even though I could probably have found another job in Oslo, there is always a concern that my employers would simply realise they could have the same work done elsewhere for cheaper and I’d end up having to find another job again. With that in mind, I took a job working for a growing company called 10up in the USA. They don’t care where I live, so instead of living in the most expensive place imaginable (Oslo), I have decided to have a crack at living in Berlin, Germany, where costs are significantly lower.

I know very little about Berlin, apart from the fact that I always have a terrific time when in Germany and I think my mindset fits in well with the German way of doing things. I’m hoping this will be a long term move, but I hoped that my move to Oslo was going to be long term (or even permanent) too, but that hasn’t worked out, so I’m not promising anything.

I had a very poorly laid plan for my arrival in Berlin. I have no work visa (the German embassy in Oslo told me to apply after I arrived), nowhere to live (I’m crashing at a hostel at the moment) and no backup plan for if it all falls to pieces and I don’t get the work visa I need. I always seem to land on me feet though, so either things will work themselves out or I’m going to have to haul my butt to some place else until I figure out plan B.

To all my friends in Norway, I will be back! Probably not to live, but definitely to visit. There are too many people I will miss for me not to come visit. In fact it looks likely that I will be back on the 25th and 26th January for WordCamp Norway 2014.

Here are some photos I took during my awesome time living in Oslo …

November 30, 2013

Anyone able to help with my VIP Quickstart problem?

If you don’t know what VIP Quickstart is then this post is not intended for you 🙂

Edit: I’ve been reading the Varying Vagrant Vagrants page, which says that version 4.2.16 of Virtualbox is incompatible with Vagrant. That is the exact version of Virtualbox which I’m using right now, so I’ll try downgrading and see how it goes.

Edit 2: Upgrading Virtualbox to 4.2.18 did not help with VIP Quickstart, but I tried VVV instead which seems to be working perfectly.

I’m having difficulties getting VIP Quickstart running on my main Ubuntu machine. I ended up doing a complete OS reinstall in the hope that my clear out whatever was intially causing me problems (I’d been planning to reformat at some time anyway).

I set everything back up and as per my normal procedure, I installed Nginx, MySQL and PHP to get my regular local server up and running. Then later, I attempted to install VIP Quickstart. I had the latest version of VirtualBox running, but it told me I needed an older version as the new one wasn’t compatible, so I downgraded to 1.2.x. That didn’t help, so I upgraded Vagrant to the very latest one (rather than the one provided by the Ubuntu software center).

I now get the following error message when I attempt to run ./bin/vip-init:

Timed out while waiting for the machine to boot. This means that Vagrant was unable to communicate with the guest machine within the configured ("config.vm.boot_timeout" value) time period. This can mean a number of things.


If you're using a custom box, make sure that networking is properly

working and you're able to connect to the machine. It is a common

problem that networking isn't setup properly in these boxes.

Verify that authentication configurations are also setup properly,

as well.
If the box appears to be booting properly, you may want to increase

the timeout ("config.vm.boot_timeout") value.

Bringing machine 'default' up with 'virtualbox' provider...

[default] VirtualBox VM is already running.

[default] Running provisioner: shell...

The private key to connect to the machine via SSH must be owned

by the user running Vagrant. This is a strict requirement from

SSH itself. Please fix the following key to be owned by the user

running Vagrant:

/home/ryan/.vagrant.d/insecure_private_key

To try and help debug, I setup a blank Vagrant server without using VIP Quickstart and it seems to be working just fine. I can SSH into it and it is working as expected, whereas the VIP Quickstart installation won’t even boot the server.

I guessed that my regular local server may be causing problems, so I stopped Nginx, PHP and MySQL, but that didn’t seem to help either.

Today I tried to use my regular (non Vagrant) local server, and discovered that MySQL will no longer start. I’m assuming that is an unrelated issue, but am not certain (hopefully one of you will know more).
– this was fixed courtesy of the super helpful Amy Hendrix 🙂

Soooo … any ideas on where I should start debugging this?

My only thought right now is that I could reformat the whole drive from scratch again and hope that running a local server alongside Vagrant was causing some sort of glitch, but that is a royal pain in the neck and I’d rather fix whatever is wrong if possible.

November 27, 2013

Bandy

I made my first attempt at playing Bandy. For those of you who aren’t aware of what Bandy is, it is a sport which is similar to regular hockey, but is played with 11 players on each side on a huge soccer field sized ice rink with very low boards. The stick is much shorter than a regular hockey stick and you use a small rubber/cork ball instead of a puck. We were only playing in a very small area, more like pond hockey for bandy, but it was very fun. I haven’t quite figured out how you are meant to take the ball off the other person yet as I kept trying to poke check people, but failing as the darned stick was too short!

The photo below is of my lovely new friend Tessa, a Kiwi I met here in Oslo who joined me at Frognerstadion for skating and our unexpected try at Bandy.