This summer I took off again to Greece for 4 weeks to go visit family, clear my head, and go sailing. This was quite a change of pace, and while sailing a traditionally rigged schooner is not exactly time out, the amount of time I had to simply lounge, sit in the sun, think was a dramatic change …
My newfound love for surfing this year has sent me dashing to Tofino at every opportunity and eyeing the surf reports for days that make an after work session worth the drive. I've become passionately involved in this new, wonderful, activity, and this weekend I found a new place to do it:
It to…
I've been reflecting on the last year and it's really struck me just how incredible it's been. a bit over a year ago I promised myself I was going to identify what was important to me and actively peruse it, and once I started it took on a life of it's own.
I put my TV in the closet, turned my comp…
I finally got around to updating my trip photos page - The photos are as usual also on flickr so if you've seen those, there is nothing new here. I've had a couple really great backcountry trips this winter even with the warm weather (el nino? mango express? whatever, I just know it's warm!), ch…
For anyone who's using Google Chrome on OSX, it's worth checking out the daily builds of Chromium. Be warned, these are daily developer builds but it seems pretty stable so far and is a lot more polished than the 'beta' that is available.
There is a little utility you can download that will keep …
This weekend I setup a new site, Outdoor Vanisle, as a place for the outdoor community on vancouver island to group and communicate. There are message forums and will eventually be places for people to post photos, trip reports, and a more organized resources section for the various activities and s…
Since I take my camera pretty much anywhere I can, I've got a lot of pictures of various trips and adventures in the last few years. I do have lots of pictures from before 2007, but they are on film and I'm not feeling up to the task of swimming through the mountain of negatives quite yet.
I've go…
I've been skiing since I was a kid, but the last few years have picked up snowboarding. My favourite style of riding is trees and powder, which snowboarding is ideal for... So this year I've decided to take it off the resorts back to where snowboarding originated from, and where the real epic powder…
I've been using Vim for a long time and never bothered checking out the tab stuff because I assumed that it worked like tabs normally work... Turns out in Vim, tabs are actually very useful, but poorly named. They are more view ports or varying layouts than tabs in the conventional sense - and are v…
It's Movember again, time to grow a moustache and raise money and awareness for prostate cancer! I'll post some pictures at the end of the month with what is sure to be a creepy moustache.
There is a donation page setup for those who want to help the cause.
The money raised goes directly to Prosta…
I've been using Vim for awhile as my primary editor and when I was first starting I did a lot of poking around to see what other peoples setups looked like, so I figured I'd contribute a quick article back to the innernets with my setup.
Only one of the plugins I have installed is actually Rails spe…
I enabled FileVault on my laptop today, and not really thinking about it selected the 'Secure Erase old home directory' option. While this is a good idea if you have really sensitive documents, I don't, and the time (not to mention abuse of the hard drive) is not worth it for me. Sadly there is no o…
Ever need to find out what a color on your screen is in hex or rgb? Anyone doing any kind of design work has probably run into this before, and there are things out there you can install to do this... But I just discovered that OS X has a tool for this built in, and it's really quite good!
It's cal…
When you have a high traffic app that is going to be repeatedly making the same requests that won't change a lot from the database, It's obviously a good idea to store these results in memory instead of hitting the database every time you need the data.
Rails provides some nice built in caching mec…
Last weekend some friends and I packed into our cars and headed inland with our bikes in search of some good riding, and boy did we ever find it. We arrived at Tyaughton lake in the Spruce Lake park around midnight and setup a pretty quick camp for the night. In the morning we packed up and headed o…
I recently noticed an interesting Viviti site that utilizes the built in jQuery and some simple JavaScript to make all the pages load via AJAX, and thought I'd quickly do a write up for anyone else using Viviti who would like to do the same thing.
Since the main content area of Viviti is inside a div…
This week was a fun week of code spelunking.
Turns out, ActionController::Session::MemCacheStore runs through all the servers and checks to see if they are alive when the session store is first setup from your environment.rb. This causes it to connect to the Memcache server(s) and if you use a web …
There is a known bug in Rails 2.3 that is worth being aware of, count no longer works on anything using named_scope. There are some patches and a fix available in the ticket there and it looks like it will be resolved in the next version... but for now, beware!
also, I'm not sure when but somewhere …
In 2005 we had a chance to change the way our electoral system works. It failed because when most people arrived to vote they didn't know what they were voting on. Even then, it was supported by 58% of the voters - but 60% or higher is required for it to pass. On may the 12th we get another chance a…
Last night was the first meeting of the newly created Mid Island Web Workers Group at the Longwood Brewpub in Nanaimo. There were a lot of familiar faces as well as a bunch of new people, it was fun to meet some new people from the area. If anyone who reads this is living in the area, you should com…