Trey Connell

I started working today on integrating Tracks and Basecamp for the heck of it. So far it’s coming together pretty well. You can check out the latest where I forked Tracks on github.com. The project integration is done, and to-do lists are up next. Shouldn’t take much longer. I’m not sure exactly how useful it will be at this point – but hey – I’m adding options for folks using Tracks. And it’s fun!

Mislav posted some really good tips for using Git.

http://mislav.uniqpath.com/2010/07/git-tips/

I’m sitting at the Lake of the Ozarks in a condo that we rented with some friends. My daughter is with her grandmother. My wife is out shopping. My buddy is playing Red Dead Redemption on his PS3. And what am I doing? I’m CODING.

I swear I’m incapable of letting my brain just check out and do nothing. I can’t help but think about all the items on my plate and what work is going to be like when I return next week. Sometimes I wonder if vacation is even worth it.

This game looks really bad-ass. Everyone loves to use the sniper rifle no matter what game you’re playing. Ghost Warrior looks like it’s going to be nothing but sniper rifle action the entire time!

My daughter just turned 18 months old yesterday. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that losing your temper and raising your voice in an effort to force her to obey is akin to kicking a boulder as hard as you can – without shoes on. Like that boulder, my daughter just doesn’t care.

In the months leading up to Addison’s birth, I thought many times about the types of discipline we would use and how I wanted to be one of those “I’m your Father not your friend” parents. I thought the stern, raised voice and mean looks were valid disciplinary actions and an effective means of modifying your child’s behavior. Boy, was I ever wrong.

After about 15 months, I realized I was getting nowhere. My daughter still got into the same things I’d tried to keep her out of since she could crawl. She still went right off to the next off-limits area as soon as I yelled at her. It’s like “big bear daddy” didn’t phase her at all.

One day about 3 months ago I decided to go the exact opposite.  If she did something bad, I would simply shake my head no at her and move her away from whatever she was doing (or whatever it was away from her). After a couple of weeks I noticed her looking at me first before grabbing things like my iPhone or the cat’s tail. She was beginning to realize that what she was doing was wrong, and she was checking with me to see if anything had changed since the last time. Simultaneously, I started being over-the-top congratulatory for anything she did well. Throw your garbage in the trash can? Woohoo!!! Put your dirty socks in the laundry basket? Jumping around and shouts of happiness! Leave Daddy’s iPhone where it is when you point at it and I shake my head? Hugs and kisses all around!

And you know what? It works. I mean, it really works. She now behaves better than ever, and while she’s not perfect (and no child is) she is respectful of Daddy and wants to please me more than she wants to grab the iPhone.

This is just a bit of new Dad information I thought I might share with any of you who, like me, think yelling and being a big bad wolf is the best way to get your child’s attention.

I long ago decided to use JQuery over other javascript frameworks like Prototype. JQuery just seems to fit with the way I think about solutions and how to attack challenges. I also think the community is amazing, with many new tools and tutorials and exciting APIs springing up everywhere.

One such tool is from Flowplayer and is called, simply, JQuery Tools. In short, JQuery Tools is an implementation that provides easy to implement:

• Tabs
• Tooltips
• Expose′ Behavior
• Scrollable Areas
• Flash Embeds

The demos and code examples on the site are easy to follow and fun to play with. If you’re looking for a nice library for common UI effects and elements, take a look at JQuery Tools from Flowplayer.

We were recently working on a rake task to generate an XML Sitemap of a site’s content for submission to the search engines. Because we are trying to remain as RESTful as possible, I wanted to take advantage of the helpers given to me automatically. For example, to generate the URL for an article, I simply have to do article_url(my_article). This would result in something like /articles/my-article-headline-is-cheesy.

I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how to make Rake aware of my routing and the RESTful helpers that I SHOULD be able to use to dry up my code and ensure very little manual maintenance when and if we decided to change our routing in the future. There had to be a way!

It turns out there indeed exists a way to make this happen.  You simply have to place “include ActionController::UrlWriter” at the top of your rake task.  Ultimately url_for is called when you do something like article_url(my_article), and url_for requires a host which it won’t have.  So change your code to read article_url(a, :host => “www.mysite.com”). Voila – route helpers inside your rake task.

I’m really excited this morning because the latest DLC for Borderlands is finally out. It’s called “The Secret Armory of General Knox” and costs 800 Microsoft Points. Along with the new story, you’ll also be able to break through the previous Level cap of 50. I’ve been told you can now level up to 61, but I haven’t confirmed that yet.

I downloaded and played through “The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned” – a previous DLC for Borderlands – and it was fantastic. Great, new story. Lots of new, bad-ass enemies. And well worth the money. I just hope this DLC is going to be as good. I have it downloading right now (it’s 1.66 Gigabytes) so I plan on finding out tonight!

I’ve purposely held off on making any comments or observations about the Apple iPad, but now I feel almost compelled to put a few simple notes down “on paper”.

The iPad is big enough to be a netbook but without all the features on the netbook that I currently own. And I paid $300 for my netbook.

It looks like a really big iPhone except I can’t make calls from it. Even if I could make calls I wouldn’t because no one wants to hold a netbook-sized device to their ear unless it has some sort of boom box cover graphic on it. Even then it’s dicey.

I suppose what it’s really most like is a gigantic iTouch. And I never even considered purchasing one of those – even for the briefest of moments.

So I guess, in general, I just don’t get it. I’m not sure who Apple is targeting with thie iPad. Now…give me an iPad that runs Snow Leopard, and one would be sitting on my desk right now.

Some of my friends on Xbox Live are outright achievement whores. I never have tried to boost my gamerscore outside of the normal games I was going to play anyway.  Then I happened to run across this post on gamesradar.com. They list the top 10 games of 2009 when it comes to obtaining easy achievement points. Be prepared – your pride is going to suffer a bit if you go after some of these games (Who can live with Hannah Montana showing on your completed games list??? Some things in life are just not worth it.)

I rented Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard. Now this game had ratings that ranged from a 5 to a 6 out of 10 which is pretty damn bad for a video game. For that reason, I never even considered playing it when it came out. I decided to suffer through it anyway since the author says they gained nearly 800 points on their first playthrough.

It turns out that Eat Lead is sorely underrated – at least in my opinion. The gameplay and mechanics are indeed a bit off, and that mainly revolves around the cover system. But once you get the hang of things and realize you can’t just spray and pray in every room you enter, the game’s story takes over and gives you some genuinely intriguing plot lines and pretty funny one-liners.

I finished the game in about 8 hours and gained 815 achievement points. And I actually had FUN doing it. So if you’re looking for a decent shooter that’s unlike the other clones out there, then pick up Eat Lead. Go into it with an open mind and some patience, and I think you’ll find it’s a lot of fun.

Anyone notice there are a TON of great video games out right now? I’m currently playing Dragon Age and Borderlands (second play-through), but there are so many other great games to play that I wouldn’t even begin to have enough time to play them all.  Here are some games I’m jonesing for:

1. Mass Effect 2
2. Bioshock 2
3. Assassin’s Creed 2
4. Darksiders
5. Army of Two: The 40th Day
6. New Super Mario Brother
7. Bayonneta

I guess I’ll be patient and wait for them to come in one-at-a-time from my Gamefly.com, but I’m fighting the urge to go to Target and just load up one of those little red baskets.

I wanted to implement a simple captcha for for article comments on a site. And by simple, I mean both in aesthetics and in functionality. After looking around, I found this post that described how you could implement a plugin called Simple Captcha in 10 minutes or less.

The plugin requires RMagick and ImageMagick which takes a little while to install.  So if you don’t have those, then the title of the post probably won’t hold true for you.  After you have everything installed, it takes one line of code in your view and one line of code in your controller to implement the captcha.

Just what I was looking for!