08.10.06

Dead Lines

Posted in Toys at 10:27 am by Soabirw

Finally launched the project I’ve been working on the last two months. Just hoping it doesn’t fall on it’s face as soon as it gets heavy load. My code is flawless, of course, but we have an API to another service that is pretty nut sucky. Even on the test server with very light load it can take up to 20 seconds for a simple call. And it only makes it that far because I had to code in a retry X times method. Wish they would have gone with somebody reputable instead of this open source garbage. I like open source apps and languages, but not so much on open source businesses. They tend to be of low quality. Oh well, this should make the company so decent revenue, which will make me some decent revenue.

To celebrate I picked me up a 60gb iPod. Been wanting one for a while since my laptop doesn’t have a lot of space. Rather hook the iPod up to all my various computers instead of carrying around a copy of my massive stash for when I’m off our network. This thing does a lot more then I thought too. Not only does it sync my videos and music, but photos, calendar, and contacts. Also plays games and has all sorts of neat utility apps, like a stop watch. I have about 25gb of music videos I’ll probably throw on it. I never watch them on my PC since I have better things to do. I’ll finally get some use out of them now.

Got a docking station so it will hook up to my PC/Mac as well as TV. Put an episode of House on the TV with it. Doesn’t look horrible, but doesn’t look allt hat great either. Guess it doesn’t blow up to 92″ that well… It will work as a last resort or only option though. Videos look amazing on it’s screen, so will still work great for traveling or random boredom.

All in all I’m pretty damn impressed with it. Now I just need to get the hookup for my new Yamaha reciever and see what that does. That’s the real problem with these things. They interface with damn near everything. And none of it is cheap.

Soa on Rails

Posted in Development at 10:32 am by Soabirw

Now that this deadline is out of the way I can start focusing on Ruby on Rails again. I have a blog mostly working with it. Just need to finalize the login scheme and polish up some features. Development time is just amazing with it. I got a complete WordPress replacement in a matter of days. And that’s with the learning curve and me redoing it several times. I wrote my own scaffold generator, so I just make the table and run a few commands and we have an entire MVC (Model-View-Controller) CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) backend. And not a completely ugly one either. I wrote my own so I could have very complex forms and such. It now takes me minutes to do what used to take hours in PHP.

Hopefully we’ll relaunch No-Homers on that platform in the next few weeks. Only thing really holding me back is the interface for the admin. I suck at interfaces. The frontend is looking good though, thanks to Template Monster. So if anybody has any grand ideas for a backend interface, don’t be shy.

08.16.06

Cock Knockery

Posted in Alerts at 9:22 am by Soabirw

Not sure how new this is, but I’m guessing it is fairly new since my mom gets literally thousands of e-mails a day and every scam/virus imaginable. She got a new one today that really freaked her out. She started getting several order confirmation e-mails from sites ranging from Amazon.com to ZipZoomFly.com (like Newegg). She called me up and at first I really thought her card was stolen. But things just weren’t adding up. Like why would a thief send confirmation e-mails to her? It would make sense if they got into her already made logins at these sites, but she doesn’t have any. She has never even heard of most of them. The FedEx tracking numbers are also invalid, so couldn’t see where they were supposedly being shipped to. And the real sloppy part was even though they are all from different stores, the order confirmation numbers were the same. She checked all of her banks and the charges weren’t in there, but she will be keeping an eye on it for the next few days.

So it sounds like their purpose is to scare the shit out of you so you are too blind-sided to be careful about the nasty little attachment. Wanting to figure out what the Hell is going on will override any precautions you would normally take. Which worked for her, that’s the first thing she did. Luckily she was on her Mac Mini and not her Windows laptop.

So let your relatives know. You’ll be on the phone with them one way or another anyway. ;)