Design By Blake

For the longest time I've been wanting to start using version control on my projects. I never really had the time to look into the options that are available to me. Recently Ruby On Rails officially switched away from subversion and over to Git. Since I use rails this seemed like a logical place to start.

If I want to try something new or risky I can just make a new branch and start coding

Since Git isn't the easiest thing in the world to learn, I thought that I would turn to the internet for help. There are 2 great Git resources available over at PeepCode.com the Git screen cast and Git Internals PDF. I highly recommend the PDF, it explains the how to's of Git very well and as a bonus comes with 8 mini screencasts for only $9.

What I really like about Git is my ability to experiment. If I want to try something new or risky I can just make a new branch and start coding. If it works I can merge it into my master branch, if it doesn't work I just switch to a different branch and forget about it.

The only downside (that I see) to Git is that it doesn't run natively on windows, which I unfortunately use. However there is a tool MysysGit available through Google Code. It doesn't have all the features of Git but pretty close.

While I'm not saying that Git is the answer for everyone or every project but I have a feeling that it will change the way I develop from here on out.

I have an old Lexar jump drive, 256MB total storage. I bought it for a $40 when it first came out to replace an old 128MB drive. I didn’t think it could get better than 256MB in my pocket.

not one, not two but three, count them, three loads in the washer.

As technology advanced and prices drop I replaced my old Lexar jump drive with a 2 Gigabyte jump drive from Sony for a small fee of $20. Well this drive lasted about 2 months before crapping out. So now I’m back to the old standby, the Lexar with 256MB of storage.

Well I lost the Lexar, I just couldn’t find the thing. I looked all over the house to no avail. Then I remembered it was in my pocket of my jeans which had gone through the two cycles in the dryer. I figured it was fried, but it wasn’t because it never made it to the dryer. It had fallen out in the washer and gone through not one, not two but three, count them, three loads in the washer.

I found it in the bottom of the washer when transferring the wash. Now I should have mentioned that the little light had fallen out. So when I picked it up, a little water exited from the open hole in the plastic. I assumed that all was lost.

I dried it with a paper towel and plugged it in. All data was corrupted, jpegs didn’t display right, PDFs were not readable. I lost everything. I put the drive on the table and forgot to throw it out. The next day, I plugged it in again. Everything was there, in all its glory. It dried overnight and worked great. Now my friends that is a quality product. Lexar I tip my hat to you.

I was checking my Google Analytics account today and noticed a recent spike in page views. As this blog is new and I'm not anyone of terrible importance in the web community I found
this odd.

my article was number one on page one

A lot of traffic is coming from Google and after looking at the keywords searched I found it was for an article I wrote on the SMS_FU plugin for Ruby on Rails.

I did a quick Google search on SMS_FU and found that my article was number one on page one. Rather weird if you ask me and some crappy indexing by Google. One would think that the author of this plugin, Brendan G. Lim would rank higher. I guess I'll never grasp how indexing works.

On occasion, many occasions, web browsers don't treat javascript the same way. Usually the issue is with Internet Explorer not acting like other browsers, so it can be useful to know if your user's browser is IE or not. Here is a little function that can tell you what browser is being used.

I recently got a Nikon D-80. I say got and not purchased because the camera came from a now defunct website, ShopFreePay.com. The site had members try different offers to earn products. I tried Vonage, Gamefly, The New York Times and more. In the end I got the camera for about $250, which included the cost of a case of wine. Not a bad deal.

The Flickr feed will show the last 30 pictures

Since I have a nice new camera, I thought that I should renew my Flickr Pro account. I have also added a Flickr feed to the side bar. I used the PHP Flickr as the code wrapper and integrated it with theFancy Zoom javascript.

The Flickr feed will show the last 30 pictures that have been uploaded. I hope you enjoy them. If you want feel free to view my Flickr account.