tony's posterous

How often do you see this?

From University of Maryland's parking web site:

Optimized for IE 6?? HAHA

Testing Exception Notification in development

Exception Notification is a great Rails plugin that sends you emails whenever a user encounters an error in your application.  It's very customizable, allowing you to configure who receives the email and what content to put into the email.  It works without much setup at all.  When you want to test it out in development mode, just add the following line to your application_controller.rb

# Uncomment to test Exception Notification in dev mode
# alias :rescue_action_locally :rescue_action_in_public 

Exception Notification works by using rescue_action_in_public to capture exceptions that occur when the request is not local.  By adding this alias, we can use the same behavior for local requests.

Upcoming Tech Events

Spring and good weather is upon us, and there are some great events coming up in the DC/MD/VA area that I'm looking forward to attending. The first is the Bootstrap Maryland Conference on May 2nd.  The conference aims to teach budding entrepreneurs "the necessary tools for running a lean and successful technology business."  Some great local speakers have signed up.  Learn more at http://bootstrapmaryland.com. The second event I'm looking forward to is RubyNation on June 12 and June 13.  I went to the first one last year and it was good, but this year's speaker lineup is hands down better.  Some of the bigger names in the Ruby community will be there, including David A. Black, Yehuda Katz, Bruce Tate, Chad Fowler, Hal Fulton and Russ Olsen.  I'm especially looking forward to Yehuda's talk on Rails 3.  Learn more at http://rubynation.org.

Useful Shortcuts in Firefox

Here's a couple of useful keyboard shortcuts for Firefox on the Mac: Command+L = go to the address bar Command + K = go to the Google search box I probably should have known that already but just realized it today.  I'm sure you can do the same in Windows Firefox.  In Safari Command+L works but Command+K doesn't seem to do anything.

Time Machine doesn't restore sendmail settings?

I reinstalled Leopard a few months ago and restored my previous system using Time Machine.  Everything has gone smoothly until today when I encountered a strange error when sending email using a Rails application.  The application uses sendmail when it is in development mode.  Here is the error: sendmail: fatal: chdir /private/var/spool/postfix: No such file or directory A quick google search found the solution.  All you have to do is run the following command: 'sudo /etc/postfix/post-install create-missing' and then restart I got the solution from this discussion on the Apple forums: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1452977&tstart=270

Funny Video

This video is classic!

http://bitcast-b.bitgravity.com/websitedown/index.html

Something all computer nerds will appreciate ;)

Little known MySQL tip

I recently came upon this blog post with a great tip on MySQL,
especially if you're a Ruby developer.
http://rubyisawesome.com/2007/7/10/mysql-secrets-g-instead-of

Basically, if you end your SQL statement with a '\G' instead of a
semicolon, you'll get much more readable output (since it's vertical)
similar to YAML.

Compare the two screenshots... what a HUGE difference!