Motivation

I recently took a semester of Mandarin at the University of Minnesota. For an English speaker, learning Mandarin is challenging. Not only are you learning new words and grammar, but you’re also learning new characters. I’ve used flash cards in the past to learn foreign language vocabulary, but they didn’t seem to fit in this case. Ideally, I’d have a flash card with three sides: a Chinese character, the Pinyin pronunciation, and the English translation.

With the two-sided limit of a physical flash card, I began exploring some of the free flash card web sites out there (there are TONS). I found none that would let me define more than two sides and most of them were clunky, confusing, and riddled with obnoxious ads. Ick.

Discouraged by what was available, I fired up the ol’ laptop and created a simple Rails app that gave me what I needed. After a couple of hours I had my three-sided flash cards and easily aced all of my vocabulary tests (my wife still got a better grade than me though—grr).

Flashie.org

Since then, I’ve been playing with this Rails app and adding things here and there. I’ve added some animations, keyboard shortcuts and other fun features. In the hope that others will find this useful, I’ve wrapped some authentication around it and made it available at http://flashie.org.

So if you’re a student (or an educator) and find a use for Flashie, please give it a try. You only need to create an account to make card sets. Your friends and classmates, or your students, can view your public sets without registering or signing in.

Have you seen this error in your Rails application? Do you hate it as much as I do? I’ve spent the past two days troubleshooting this and I finally found a solution. It’s ugly and hacky, but it appears to be working.

There are actually quite a few posts out there regarding this error and they all get down to the root problem: the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable is not available to the Apache user (www-data in this case). Most solutions I’ve found involve setting this variable in /etc/bash.bashrc or /etc/profile to make the variable available to all users. This fixed part of the problem for me, but it was still failing when executed from Apache via Passenger.

The “solution”

The hacktastic solution was to modify the /etc/init.d/apache2 startup script and explicitly set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable when Apache is started. Specifically, change

ENV="env -i LANG=C PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin"

to

ENV="env -i LANG=C PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/oracle/instantclient"

Note that this solution assumes you’re using the Oracle InstantClient; if you’re using the full Oracle client, you may try setting the ORACLE_HOME path instead of LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

I hope this helps somebody!