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.

This was basically my process when I pushed out a major layout update a couple weeks ago. Everything looked good on the wife’s computer, so I went ahead and pushed it out. Fast forward to a couple days ago, and I get an email of frustration from a customer that says that “half the shopping cart is gone”. After a ton of troubleshooting later, I find out that she is apparently using IE7 (my wife has IE8), and it was rendering things totally wrong.

Look. I am aware that Firefox and Chrome are standards compliant, and therefore render things “correctly” according to how I have coded the CSS. I am also aware that IE is not standards compliant, and if history is any indicator may never be (although IE 8 is certainly much closer). I have always been in the habit of checking to make sure that the CSS that works for standards compliant browsers work for IE. What I didn’t realize is that a page that works in IE6 (due to IE6 specific workarounds) doesn’t work in IE7, but does in IE8 (due to being more standards compliant). Grrr. Instead of fixing the bugs from IE6, they just made different ones. After a lot of internet searching, I came up with a solution: force IE into quirks mode.

Logic would dictate that forcing the page into quirks mode would have the same effect on all browsers. However, what I have found is that a proper comment in the very first line of the HTML page will confuse ALL versions of IE, sending them into quirks mode, but a standards compliant browser recognizes it for what it is: a comment. Here is what I put as the very first line in all of my pages:

<!--Friends don't let friends use Internet Explorer --!>

Works like a charm.

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.

Over the course of his life, my grandfather fulfilled many roles.  He was a rancher for quite some time, working on the farm and driving the cattle into the high country every year.  He served in the U.S. Navy (although he didn’t last long due to a sleepwalking problem). He was a ranger in the Forest Service for many years, where he was regarded by all as the one that insisted on doing things the right way, the first time.  He was also a deeply virtuous man.  His loving marriage to his wife of 50+ years will be long remembered as the highest standard of a loving marriage.  He touched many lives during these years, although it is his later acts that make him truly remarkable.

In 1965, during my grandfather’s work in the Forest Service, he was approached by a stranger that was publishing a so called “mug book”, where a family would be able to purchase a page or two to write information or stories about their family, in order to preserve their heritage.  It sounded like a swell idea to my grandfather, so he took this man around to various families and old timers around the valley.  The stranger gathered the stories and information from these people, and collected the fees for publishing the book.  Shortly after collecting all this, the stranger disappeared, taking $175,00 with him, and leaving the stories.  This broke my grandfather’s heart as all of his friends had trusted him with their money and their heritage.

He decided there was only one thing to do.  He told his friends that he would gather some information and have someone write it up.  It would be a publication, rather than a book.  However, he just couldn’t find anyone that would write it the way that he wanted it to be written.  So he sat down and started writing a book about the history of the valley, compiled from the stories he had collected, along with his own knowledge, and conversations with others.  It soon became apparent that all of this simply wouldn’t fit in one book, so he wrote several books, each concentrating on a small but valuable piece of the valley’s rich heritage and history.  The books contained stories of stagecoach robbers, that would lie in wait for unsuspecting travelers coming through.  He told of the pioneers and ranchers, that fell in love with the area’s flowing rivers, and fertile soil.  Then there was the 49ers, that came in droves driven by the promise of gold.  The cowboys, and their deep relationship with each other and the land.  The Indians, with their rich culture and near-forgotten practices from before the coming of the white man, continuing to their mixed relationship with the white man, and how it occasionally turned violent.  There are stories of feuding families, and lawmen chasing outlaws that would make the greatest John Wayne movies seem boring in comparison.  All of this was printed alongside original photographs and journal entries of the people that made up the valley’s heritage.

As he started to write more books, people began to give him more stories and pictures.  After he had finished the first five books, he started on another.  He told his wife that this would be his last book.  He continued on to write more “last” books, up to the final total of 9 books.

Bob Powers died on the September 11th, 2002, the anniversary of the WTC attacks.  Many found this to be somewhat poetic, given his strong patriotism and love for his country.  Immediately following his death people from all walks of life came together to try to find a way to honor his memory.  A group formed to begin work on naming a mountain in his memory.  Overwhelming support was given in the form of letters of recommendation to government officials from the Forest Service, California congressmen and assemblymen, historical societies, various indian tribes, as well as numerous teachers and representatives from the local school district, who used his books to teach history to the schoolchildren, just to name a few.  Reading through the list of supporters gives a profound sense of the impact he made on other’s lives.

On August 14th, 2008, the US Board on Geographic Names unanimously approved the naming of a previously unnamed peak to Powers Peak.  This is the day that I first considered my grandfather to be a ‘mountain man’.  In a state that has borne many people that go on to become presidents, and yet do not get their own mountain, my grandfather, son of a rancher, and a man of little means, has had such a profound impact on so many people that an entire mountain was named in his honor.

It is beyond my skills as a writer to express the profound impression this had upon me.  My grandfather was never a great leader, never had a high level job, and never did any of the things that many of us think about when we ponder the meaning of success.  Yet in his simple life he managed to touch so many lives, that something so eternal and unmovable as a mountain was given his name.  He simply had a deep and undying love for his God, his family, his friends, his valley, and his country.  He never hesitated to do what he could for those that he loved.

I will likely never have a mountain named in my honor.  I also would not like to.  However, I often wonder if I have the integrity and strength of spirit to become that mountain man that my grandfather was.  As I write this article, I begin to search for the key attributes that make a mountain man, as demonstrated by my grandfather.

Unconditional Love

My grandfather had 5 great loves in his life: His God, his wife, his family, his country, and his valley.  I’m of course not talking about the romantic passionate love that is all the rage in the movies.  I’m talking about a sincere, dedicated virtuous love for those things that you hold important.  Aristotle referred to this as “Philia” love.  In his work Rhetoric, Aristotle defines this type of love as:

“wanting for someone what one thinks good, for his sake and not for one’s own, and being inclined, so far as one can, to do such things for him”(1380b36–1381a2)

His undying love for each of these was an integral part of what I believe made him a mountain man.  That unconditional love led him to perform such selfless acts as spend 35+ years painstakingly cataloging and conserving the history of the valley.  In today’s world, love is often exchanged in return for something else.  We will only love someone if they do things for us or treat us a certain way.  In watching my grandfather’s life, he loved because it was his duty, and his calling.  And doing so not only touched people’s lives, but it made his own life that much more fulfilling!

In today’s world, love is so often given away with a hint of selfishness. We often only commit loving acts when there is something in it for us.  My grandfather’s multi-decade quest to preserve that which would otherwise be lost certainly didn’t make him rich, and consumed a large part of his love.  But this quest earned him the respect and gratitude of the entire area.

Integrity

When it comes to the core traits that really make up a mountain man, integrity has to be at the top of the list.  Something about standing at the base of a mountain and looking up at it’ permanence reminds me of the kind of unmoving integrity of character that embodies a mountain man.  After all, you could have all of the compassion and good intentions in the world, but if you lack the integrity to stand firm in your convictions, what good are they?

Princeton Wordpress defines integrity as “moral soundness”.  However, this succint phrase fails to show the full picture of what I believe integrity is.  To me, you can sum up my grandfather’s integrity with this one statement:  He did the right thing, the right way, every time.

Do the Right Thing

It would have been extremely easy for my grandfather to just be the victim when that scoundrel took everyone’s money.  He could have dismissed it and went on with his life.  Instead, my grandfather spent the vast majority of his adult life researching and writing those 9 books, as well as finding and donating hundreds of items to the local museum, from pictures, to an old ranch stove, to an entire cabin!  All of this came about from one simple decision early on to do the right thing by his people, and to write those books.  It always isn’t the easy way to go, especially when it is at the expense of your future, and your hopes and dreams.  But these are the decisions that transform us into mountain men.

Do it the Right Way

While in the US Forest Service, a relatively new employee was tasked with the laborious job of creating a barbed wire fence that stretched for well over a mile.  He worked hard at his task, and after several hours my grandfather came by to see his work.  He took one look at the fence and told the man to start over.  When asked for a reason, he said that all of the posts must be driven to a certain depth, and they must all be at a uniform height.  The new employee tried in vain to convince my grandfather that the fence was structurally sound, and would likely last throughout the year (which was likely true).  My grandfather then explained to him how a little more time spent now would prevent someone else having to go back later on to fix the mistakes.  He also emphasized the sense of pride in completing a job well done.  That new employee’s entire career from that day forward was carried out following my grandfather’s advice.

Do it Every Time:

Many of us are content to perform some great act of selflessness, and then return straight to our normal ways.  After all, we did the right thing, now we deserve some time to ourselves. However, this was not the way that a mountain man sees things.  My grandfather was giving of himself all the way up to his very last days, by opening his home to those in need, giving in his church, finding more history that needed to be preserved, and loving his family every chance he got.  His selflessness never rested.  In our journey to become mountain men, we cannot give up on the doing the right thing, even if just for a moment, for it is in that moment that we fall short.

How to be a Mountain Man:

A stranger walked up to me on the day of my grandfather’s funeral, and said, “Your grandfather was a good man”.  Yes he was, but he was so much more than that.  He was a mountain man.  The great question is, and one that I struggle to answer every day, is what can I do myself to be a mountain man?  What have I done to impact the lives of others?  Can I be a mountain man? Can you? I believe that in order to become a mountain man, you must truly embody the principles of unconditional love and integrity, and never waver.  As men, we are not only able to be mountain men, but are called to it.

<%= observe_form 'search-form',
:before => "Element.show('spinner')",
:complete => "Element.hide('spinner')",
:url => {:action => 'search'}
%>

My solution was to hook into the onChange callback of the slider itself (ignoring the hidden fields). I used onChange instead of onSlide because I didn’t want a dozen requests going to the server per slide. I simply added the following javascript.

Element.show('spinner');
new Ajax.Request('/search',{asynchronous:true,
evalScripts:true,
onComplete:function(request){Element.hide('spinner')},
parameters:Form.serialize('search-form')});

A simple note: I suck at javascript. Not that I’m particularly dense, I just haven’t taken the time to learn it. I simply gleaned this little gem by using firebug to see what Rails had generated using the aforementioned observe_form, and simply modified it slightly. Win!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

To give you a little bit of background on my setup, I am using Capistrano to deploy to two servers, both of which are running Phusion Passenger.  One server is on a shared host, along with the SVN repository, and the second server is inside of a private network with a sub-optimal internet connection.  Both servers share a common database.  I ran into an issue running “cap deploy”, because it was trying to copy the entire application over ssh to both servers every time.  This wasn’t a large issue for the shared host, but the server in the private network would keep hanging after it got past a certain point.  This all took me days to figure out, because capistrano give very minimal debugging/logging information, and the error messages changed every time, usually letting me know that the I/O stream had closed.

I first set this scenario up using the Agile Development with RoR book, but since I was using an outdated PDF, turns out I wasn’t using the optimal setup.  Originally, the book called for the following line in my config/deploy.rb file:

set :deploy_via, :export

The idea here is that you want to export the project from the SVN repository,  but leave behind all the unnecessary subversion .svn junk.  Seemed reasonable enough to me.  However, in the updated PDF, they made a subtle, but gamechanging alteration:

set :deploy_via, :remote_cache

What this does, is it actually checks out a version of your project into shared/cached-copy on the target server(s), and going forward only runs an SVN update command, which only updates the files that have been changed.  Capistrano then uses this copy to deploy your code the same as before.

It seems like the obvious choice, and now that I know where to look, there is plenty of information about it.  But if you are stuck waiting for an hour for cap deploy to finish, or are getting random errors, it’s hard to find an answer online.  In my case, I actually manually checked out my code into the shared/cached-copy directory on both servers, as I was tired of capistrano screwing it up.  Once I got the initial code in there, further cap deploy’s take only 1 minute or so, compared to 30+ minutes previously.  Sweet!