Rails vs Whitewater

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately working on getting the asset pipeline for my application working. A lot of things weren’t very clear from the documentation at the time of this writing, so I am going to narrate the process I went through in case anybody else has the same issue.

For a background on the asset pipeline, please read through the rails guide and these two excellent railscast by Ryan Bates. These got me about 90% of the way there.

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So, I read this cool article on one of my favorite blogs Consumerist. I fired off a quick note to the editor Ben to suggest a budget spreadsheet roundup. I also gave him access to collaborate on the document. I was just trying to be helpful and I expected to see a post in a few days to announce a roundup. Much to my surprise, I got an entire post of my own!

This threw me off quite a bit. I wasn’t quite sure what the best distribution model for the spreadsheet was, but I’m pretty sure it’s not google docs. Also, when converted to Excel the formulas get all wonky. Now I have a good number of readers that are more annoyed by having to figure out how to properly get and use my spreadsheet than they are helped by using it.

I’m not quite sure what the best way to handle this is. If anyone has any ideas, let me know. I want to allow collaboration, but I don’t want the entire internet to be able to change it at will (if only to preserve the integrity of the formulas).

Update:

I’ve decided to host the file on AWS to simplify posting updates. Here’s the linky:
Debt Spreadsheet

Disclaimer: It is the middle of the night, and I’m still coding. And I’m not happy about it. This post is mostly for venting purposes.

I work on a linux machine to do all of my coding (and, well, everything else). This has so far worked great, with one minor exception. I can’t test photify.net in Internet explorer (easily). So far, my workaround has been to code and test using firefox and chrome, and then when things are nearly complete, hop over to my wife’s win7 laptop to make sure everything looks good. Not efficient, but it has worked alright in the past.
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Note: This blog post is a notable departure from the usual programming posts I tend to make. This article is one that I wrote for the Art Of Manliness Lessons in Manliness group writing project. The goal of the project was to write an article about a man in your life that taught you a valuable life lesson. In this case I chose my grandfather. Although it was conveniently timed for the project, it is an article I was wanting to write anyways, after being inspired by so many other stellar articles on the Art of Manliness blog. Enjoy!

Lessons in Manliness: A mountain of a man – Bob Powers

Written by Justin Powers

My grandfather (Robert “Bob” L Powers, 6/7/1924 – 9/11/2002) was born in the beautiful and serene Kern River Valley in the majestic Sierra Nevada mountains of California.  He was the 5th generation of his family to live in the Valley.  He was born the son of a rancher, and spent his young days learning about the family trade.  At the age of one, his family made their yearly trip up into the mountains to set the cattle loose in the high sierra grazing grounds.  My grandfather made the 50+ mile trip on the front of his father’s saddle.  He was later told that he kept kicking the horse in the shoulders, nearly getting them bucked off several times.  He was riding a horse on his own at the age of three.

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So today I set up observe_form for one of my search forms. I’ve been wanting to get rid of the submit button for my form, so that when users change a search field, it would just update the search results, in real time. Think kayak.com. It took surprisingly minimal work, and the result just feels good. One problem though, is that nothing happens when I change the time slider on my form.
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The saga of Movember is now officially halfway over (or halfway started, if you’re that type of person), and the Mo is coming along quite nicely. I feel confident that I’ll have a winning stash by the 30th. Here is a preview of the current status:

Wanna support my efforts? You can do so in only two simple steps.

1) Go to my movember page, and vote for my ‘stache!

2) Donate to the cause. You can do so by visiting my donation page.

Movember is an awesome charity that I’ve been following for the past couple years. To the best of my knowledge, no other organization has harnessed the power of the moustache (aka “mo”) like these guys have. Movember is a month long moustache growing competition. As your moustache grows, you recruit sponsors, who give generously to the cause of fighting men’s health problems, specifically prostate and testicular cancer. The month ends in parties and awesome ‘staches.

I have decided to join the fight. Yesterday I honed my straight razor, and without mercy dispatched all of the manly hair from my face. Here’s how I percieve the timeline:

Before:

Now:

29 Days from now:

If anyone has any ideas for the particular style of moustache, let me know in the comments! Use this for inspiration.

Disclaimer: I am a Github newbie, and I am still learning the various concepts. If I misrepresent something in this post, please let me know in the comments!

I recently switched my project over from SVN to Github. My reasons were varied, but a large reason was because I needed to create various branches to accomodate my ADD style of development (work on layouts for a bit, then switch to security, then switch to fine tuning my models). I also need to create a branch for productions servers, as well as a branch for my staging server, which is set up at home. The latter was a bit confusing at first, until I found a great tutorial here.

First, a couple of notes about my setup. I am the sole contributor to my (private) repository. Up until now, I have not had a need for this “forking” business that I see from time to time. In configuring up my multistage setup, I ran into an issue when I tried to use set :branch, "2.0" in my staging deploy.rb file. Even though I had created a branch for “2.0″ like so:
git branch 2.0
I was getting the following error:
`query_revision': Unable to resolve revision for 'invalid' on repository 'git@github.com:*****/******.git'. (RuntimeError)
This confused me for quite some time, until I found out that the set :branch isn’t referring to the branches that I had created locally, but to github forks. To create a fork from the branch, I simply had to do the following:
git checkout 2.0
git push origin 2.0

The origin bit is what does the magic. As soon as I refreshed, I was able to see the newly created fork in the github web UI, and my deploy recipe worked like magic. Brilliant!

Note: I still have to find out how this will affect my git workflow, but since the clone URL is still the same, it seems that I should still be able to continue with my current way of doing things.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about my online presence. I mean, if I ever start to market Photify.net to other companies, and if anyone there is anything like me, then they’ll instantly type my name into google. So, I put myself in their shoes and did a little ego-search:

It doesn’t look too promising. The first result is for the director of Pot Zombies. Great. The second? An ad for penis enhancement pills (which, according to google, is also hosting malware. Don’t go there). Skip down a couple and you get a facebook profile. That shouldn’t be too bad right? Click on it and you’re greeted with a picture of some dude drinking what appears to be Jack Daniels straight out of the bottle with his buddy flipping of the camera. Awesome.

None, however, are quite as disturbing as justinspowers.tripod.com. This is most disturbing since the URL clearly has my middle initial, which so far is the only thing distinguishing me from the lower classes of Justin Powers. It is a simple animated cartoon implying that I giggle, and openly announce that I am homosexual. Promptly followed by a solicitation to kill me. Please don’t.

Part of the point of this blog is to raise my google standing. I suppose it will be some time before it breaks through the ranks on google. I also created a google profile, which is nicely placed at the very bottom of the first page, forcing the would-be searcher to wade through mountains of the stoned undead, underage drinkers, and death threats. Not so long ago my linked-in profile was at the top of the ranks (see Justin Powers), but it has fallen almost completely from Google’s view.

I’ve been a little hesitant about putting in credit card processing into Photify.net, and it turns out is was with good reason.  The set up is just plain annoying!  Due to client needs, I had to go with Skipjack as my portal.  They seem relatively developer friendly, except that their customer service is about 50/50, literally.  I’ve called there several times during normal pacific hours, only to find out that in Eastern time I’m actually calling fairly late.  They only have two reps, one of which is helpless, and the other of which is knowleadgable and helpful.

After doing some digging, the best solution for processing payment in my rails app seems to be using ActiveMerchant.  It seems fairly well documented, at least if you are using a mainstream credit card processor like Authorize.net.  For skipjack though, it’s a little lacking.  For example, it’s not clear what, if anything, you need to put in the ‘password’ field.  And no matter what I do, I can’t get any non-standard (by ActiveMerchant’s terms) fields to transmit, such as “comment”.  But perhaps the most frustrating thing of all, is when I had everything working and fine tuned in development, and I tried to throw the switch to production, by changing the login and using “:test => false” in the login hash.  After all, that is the only indication of where to send the transaction.  However, after several days of beating my head against the wall, I find this little gem (pardon the pun):

ActiveMerchant::Billing::Base.mode = :production

I almost slapped myself when I saw that.  Why in the world are there TWO places to set the mode?  Anyways, credit card processing now works, there is balance in the force, and everything is right in the world.