Jay McGavren's Journal

A face made for radio...

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.

State sponsors of tourism...

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…

Just got an RMA for the Tivo HD...

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?)

Learned the hard way...

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]

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.)