Jay McGavren’s Journal

Just watched my first episode of The Wrong Door - it’s like Flying Circus has been resurrected. (With crappy CG!)

BBC Three site

Only those with a U.K. IP address are supposed to be able to get to it, but there’s some kind of fluke that makes it available right now. I’m not gonna count on its release over here; watch while you can.

I showed Diana the demo rails site I was working on for Jeremy, but she wasn’t much impressed. She used layman’s terms, but in effect said she was sure the modelling and authentication work I’d done was very impressive, but that she couldn’t really appreciate that if all she saw was a plain white screen with some forms on it. Visual design is not my area, so I wasn’t looking forward to the effort required to make something pretty.

Well, one visit to a CSS templates site later, I have something I can drop into my application.html.erb, a default.css I can drop in public/stylesheets, and a much prettier demo. No sweeping revision of my entire code base, no GUI layout editors, and almost no hand-editing. Better yet, all I have to do to make the site skinnable is say

<%= stylesheet_link_tag(session[:user].style || "default") %>

in the default layout, and add a style attribute to the User model. (This last idea from Chad Fowler’s Rails Recipes.) Pretty freakin’ sweet.

Insane storm tonight - lightning every half second, and the thunder is a constant roar instead of single bursts. Got a couple pictures…

I got this one…

And Diana got this…

Added to “utility/enhancements.rb”…

class String
	#Uses Windows Speech API to speak string.
	def speak
		require 'win32/sapi5'
		Win32::SpVoice.new.Speak(self.to_s)
	end
end

99.downto(1) {|n| "#{n} bottles of beer on the wall".speak}

Dell doesn’t mess around on repairs. I stalled forever before requesting service on the Inspiron laptop, ’cause I figured it would be gone for 4 weeks and come back with a note saying “could not find problem” and nothing repaired.

Nope - they sent a box to pack it in, DHL shipping prepaid, it was at the depot the day after we sent it, and on its way back to us a day after that. Dunno if they reproduced the error successfully (the keyboard was sending code “141″ repeatedly, which basically only interfered with Alt-Tabbing), but they replaced the keyboard regardless. Diana just tested it, and everything’s working. (So it really was the hardware; I was starting to doubt myself.)

Anyway, except for the scripted tech support, Dell gets a big thumbs-up on customer service. (And Acer, whose Aspire died on us one month out of warranty, still gets the finger.)

Went to a local geek event a few weeks back, and suddenly found myself being pulled aside for a podcast they record every week.

Gangplank Studios Episode 5

I of course took the chance to plug Zyps, but the conversation was broad-ranging, and wound up being a good summary of everything I’ve been up to the last few months.

We’re finally sending updates to the vendor en masse, and there aren’t many errors, but the ones that do come up are interesting… For example, the spec has this phrase:

[We] will enforce U.S. Sanctions as required by the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). OFAC prohibits U.S. companies and citizens from doing business with certain sanctioned countries (such as Cuba, Iran, Iraq, North Korea and Syria), organizations, and individuals deemed to be acting on behalf of, or located in, certain sanctioned countries, terrorism sponsoring organizations and individuals, and international narcotics traffickers.

I didn’t concern myself with this much, as I doubted my own company would be doing business with anyone in North Korea. So I was surprised when this error came back…

This property record has been rejected due to it being located in an OFAC sanctioned country.

…for a customer in the Cayman Islands. I think the vendor needs to update their database…

When you’re setting up logins in Rails, the tutorials tell you to store action_name and controller_name in the session so you can redirect there later… Capture request.path instead. This works just fine:

redirect_to :controller => session['intended_controller'], :action => session['intended_action']

…until you’re using restful resources and a logged-out user clicks an edit link. When Rails tries to take them to “/entries/edit” (controller followed by action) instead of “/entries/1/edit”, it’ll bomb:

ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound in EntriesController#show

Couldn't find Entry with ID=edit

So this is better:

redirect_to session['intended_path'] #request.path stored earlier

Oh, and when they say to put this in your ApplicationController:

before_filter :authenticate, :authorize, :except => [:login]

Do this instead:

before_filter :authenticate, :authorize

…and then put this in specific Controllers where you need the exception:

skip_before_filter :authenticate, :authorize, :only => [:login, :verify]

Cox’s stupid Scientific Atlanta cable cards won’t sync with it, and even the people who got theirs working start missing shows every 2 weeks and have to reboot (unacceptable after the smooth operation we’ve had with our Series 2).

No release date announced for a fix, and it looks like Scientific Atlanta is the one that needs to produce it. (But gee, don’t they have their own DVR now? Wonder how quickly they’ll move to fix the problems their competitor is having?)

Was fidgeting with my wedding ring this morning when I felt an odd bump on it; looked down to see a lovely little scratch in the gold. Had to stop for a minute and think how it could have gotten there…

That’s when I realized that wearing it through the Lava River Cave was probably not the smartest thing I’ve ever done. It’s the easiest cave imaginable short of going in and paving a walkway, but I was propping my hand (and therefore the ring) on the walls, floor and ceiling pretty much the whole time. (The alternative was slipping and cracking my head open.)

Oh, well, I’m sure a jeweler can get the ring back to like-new condition. I need to think about the fact that I’m wearing it more often, though.

We made it all the way to the end of the cave, by the way, even Lenny. (I think he had an easier time than I did, in fact.)