Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

That’s it. I’m going naked.

Monday, December 28th, 2009

No, not without my clothes. That would be, just … not right.

This website had been in its previous state for a while, probably the last year or so, with little traction. The vast majority of this stagnation being due to my working on implementing a design put together by the always amazing Erika Greco (she designed my wife’s site – Bit By the Beauty Bug). I loved what Erika had done – and I worked on getting it juuuust right for a long time. After months and months of on and of work on implementing this beautiful work I decided – “It’s time to get back to the basics”. There’s no need to get stuck in the cycle of working and re-working ad nauseum (my name is not George Broussard).

So, I’m deciding to strip everything down to the barest of mark-up and style and concentrate on letting this “brand” or “identity” grow organically through either the content or whatever incremental changes I feel are right. Instead of trying to hit a done target, let’s get real and let this grow organically to a point where I feel it’s done enough.

What does this do for me, you might ask? It allows me to write without a nagging voice in the back of my head saying “you can publish this once the new redesign is live”. When new projects I’m working on launch – I’m just going to post something about it instead of worrying that “the portfolio section of the site isn’t done yet … oh the horror!”.

Over time I hope to make some incremental changes to make things less ugly, but only time will tell. I’ll be documenting things as they change for posterity’s sake so I can review how time has treated it, and maybe share its mutation with everyone with hopes any and all feedback would make me better.

So, please bear with me while I hang out here all exposed and vulnerable and stuff. It’s only appropriate to bring in 2010 like Baby New Year.

Posted in Site Work, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Air Edie

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

These photos were taken one afternoon when I went to take the little Chubbster out to the courtyard. I ran into our neighbor Andrew as he was out their with his super-duper high-tech Nikon DSLR. Edie went nuts and the photos above are the result. A huge thanks to Andrew and an equally large thanks to the dog for being such a photogenic weirdo.

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Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Session is Invalid – A Boneheaded Mistake Might be Your Problem

Sunday, October 26th, 2008

Here’s something I lost hours to thanks to my own boneheaded mistake (I think I might have “lack of sleep” to blame for this one – in conjunction with ignorance).

I changed my Rails app to use memcached as the caching store for obvious reasons.  Some sql queries are just too expensive so why keep hitting the damn db over and over again? Here comes memcached to the rescue!  … or not?

I made all the appropriate changes, installed memcache-client, and restarted my local dev environment only to be hit with an ugly

session_id “whole lots of letters and numbers blarghedy blargh” is invalid

With the last file in the stacktrace being mem_cache_store.rb.   “What the hell?  Everything looks good though!”After uninstalling any and every plugin that I didn’t need thinking maybe they were interfering with the cache store – newrelic_rpm,  query_reviewer and of course cache_fu – the problem remained. I reverted to regular built in filesystem caching and another error shows up – something about a cookie being tampered with.

*Ding*

Where the hell is the session id stored?  Of course it’s in a cookie.  After bringing up firebug and deleting the cookie (or conversely probably just restarting the browser) the problem was gone.

My fatal flaws?  I overwrote the config.action_controller.session :secret I had originally in development.rb with a new one in environment.rb and I didn’t restart my browser or delete that session cookie.

Ain’t that a bitch?

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