rollsteady

Switching to flickr

// April 9th, 2009 // No Comments » // Blog

With my new blog theme I decided to finally take the plunge and start moving my photos over to flickr. For awhile now on both this blog, and on the family blog at muchhutch.com I have been using a semi-hack I set up for Christine and I that uses blogger.com to allow us to post pictures from our iPhones and display them on the blogs’ sidebar. Basically these “mobile blogs” were obfuscated locations that we could grab a feed from and then using the KB Advanced RSS widget I’d take the contents of the Atom feed and display the last picture plus subject. I can still do this with the flickr feed and I can still email the photos from my iPhone, but the added benefit is that it works nicely with this new feed plus I can more easily use any camera. I’ll be making the switch on muchhutch.com for my feed soon, and then work on convincing Christine to do the same.

New blog theme

// April 9th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Blog

Since Thursdays are normally my work-from-home days, and since I am on PTO this week, I decided to “work” on my blog and installed and customized a new theme. This blog finally is looking how I want it to. It has the general grungy-green appearance I longed for, the lifestream stuff going on, and can now handle all the media stuff I post. The best part was that instead of hacking it all together myself and spending a week on it, I spent only a couple of hours (mostly image editing) since it is a Woo Theme.

Ruby on Rails HTTP Basic Auth with LDAP

// December 8th, 2008 // 8 Comments » // Blog

My friend Fred has a nifty tip over on his Binary Fever blog about Ruby on Rails LDAP authentication using HTTP Basic Auth. I took what he had done and made a few minor improvements:

# mygeneric_controller.rb
LDAPBASE = ‘, ou=active, ou=employees, ou=people, o=host.com’
before_filter :authenticate

protected

def authenticate
  authenticate_or_request_with_http_basic('LDAP Login') do |username, password|
   ldap = Net::LDAP.new :host => ‘ldap.host.com’, :base => LDAPBASE
   ldap.auth ‘uid=’ + username + LDAPBASE, password
   if ldap.bind
    @point_person = PointPerson.find_by_username(username)
    if !@point_person.nil?
     return true
    end
   else
    return false
   end
  end
 end

Elliot Masie’s Learning 2008

// November 6th, 2008 // No Comments » // Blog

Last week I attended Elliot Masie’s Learning 2008 in Orlando, FL. Part of this that I didn’t mention in my previous post was the great team dinner at Charley’s Steakhouse, one of the top steak houses in the nation. I of course ordered a bone-in ribeye and it was phenominal. The 6 week aging, daily cutting, and 30 hour seasoning created a tender steak that despite being rare, had no blood running out and yet remaind juicy and tender.

Bone-in Rib Eye

Road Trip to Tampa – Sharks v. Lightning

// November 2nd, 2008 // No Comments » // Blog

The day before the Learning 2008 conference I attended in Orlando, I actually flew into Tampa with my coworker John Matuk to see the Sharks play the Tampa Bay Lightning.

It was a great game with the Sharks winning 3-0. It was cool to see the Tampa fans welcome back Dan Boyle. It also was plain to see that the Tank is a much better hockey venue and San Jose has much better and louder fans!

Learning 2008

// October 30th, 2008 // No Comments » // Blog

Just got back from Elliot Masie’s Learning 2008 in Orlando, FL. It is a conference designed by and for learning implementers. It was a real learning experience (obvious – no pun intended).

Some of the highlights for me were the Q&A session with Kevin Kelly of Wired Magazine fame, chatting with Elliot Masie in a small group format when he briefly attended our wrap-up lunch, being a “changer” on our NASCAR pit crew (and getting 8th place overall at the conference), and a great session on Performance Support.

Corporate training is a field that has a ton of potential to be unleashed through the use of technology and it was great to see so many different organizations doing so many new and unique things.

My new project

// October 21st, 2008 // No Comments » // Blog

A couple weeks ago I started a new blog, SurviveABear.com for investing news specifically dealing with the current bear market that we have entered. My aim with the site is to be a one-stop-shop with insight for long term investors, like myself, that aren’t planning on retiring within 5 years.

A new look

// October 17th, 2008 // No Comments » // Blog

I spent some time the last couple of days updating the theme to this blog. I decided to start completely from scratch in an attempt to achieve exactly what I am aiming for. At this point, it is still very much a work in progress, but the idea is to have this blog represent an actual timeline of my networked online presence.

The overall look and feel is somewhat inspired by comments from Jason @ 37signals regarding The Price is Right:

There’s really so much to learn from The Price is Right. Simplicity, experience, clarity, intuition, big type, fun, colors, tone, personality, democracy, audience participation, a little bit of chaos, humility, dings (you win) and buzzers (you lose), educating the consumer, etc. it’s quite a formula. Instead of reading that business book next week just watch the Price is Right instead. You’ll learn more and have a better time too.

Right now I have Twitter working inline. I’m finishing up getting links from del.icio.us in there too. From there, who knows. It’d be a lot simpler to just grab the sidebar widgets, but I wanted something different aesthetically.

Woz

// August 1st, 2008 // No Comments » // Blog

So Steve Wozniak is speaking at my group’s Technical Leaders Lecture Series event in about 15 minutes. I got the backstage pass action going on and a seat saved in the second row (first row reserved for Cisco VPs). This should be fun and interesting.

Update: This was such a great event. He really was a great speaker and hearing about his life was captivating. He spoke for about an hour, but could have easily gone two. He had some really poignant comments about engineering should be to make things better for everyone, not just to make things. He had a short meet and greet session afterward for pictures and autographs so I did the obvious geek thing and had him autograph my iPhone. He told me he really likes the design of the first generation phone better because of the weight of the metal case and the the overall look of the design.

Neater “other” field

// August 1st, 2008 // No Comments » // Blog

Do you think drop down select lists that have “Other” are made ugly with the necessary test field to capture the “Other” forced to sit right next to lit like this:

Well here is a slick alternative that makes use of Script.aculo.us:
Demo

Here’s the Javascript:

   function swapthem() {
	Effect.toggle('test1','blind')
   	Effect.toggle('test2','blind')
   }

   function pop() {

     len = document.f1.s1.length
     i = 0
     chosen = "none"

     for (i = 0; i < len; i++) {
       if (document.f1.s1[i].selected) {
         chosen = document.f1.s1[i].value
       }
     }
     if (chosen == "other") {
	  swapthem()
	 }
   }

And the HTML:

	<form name="f1"action="">
	  <div id="test1">
		<select name="s1" onChange = pop()>
		<option value="home" selected="selected">
                  Home
                </option>
		<option value="work">Work</option>
		<option value="mobile">Mobile</option>
		<option value="other">Other</option>
		</select>
	  </div>
	  <div id="test2" style='display:none;'>
		<input type="text" name="t1">
                <a href="javascript:swapthem()">
                   list
                </a>
   	  </div>
	</form>