The current economic climate in the U.S. is causing downsizing of customer options in leiu of price increases. Recently, Subway nuked the small drink size option. Panera no longer allows a half sandwich order. It’s a defacto price increase. Store hours are among the casualties, too.

I wander into my local RadioShack for a simple RCA to S-Video adapter (or SVHS). After looking around, I ask the lady and she finds one for me. It looks unimpressive enough. I ponder a cable to plugin to it, since the original one being replaced was male to female and this was female to female. She starts to grab one of those expensive monster cable sets, but I waive her off.

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Recently I discovered gnump3d. It supports downsampling, which is a feature I especially need. However, the example reencoding command for handling MP3s doesn’t seem to work. Instead, I am using a different variant.

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What a perfect marriage. I never liked CrapUSA. It seems TigerDirect has bought them out, and now I am getting weekly spam about the CrapUSA store re-openings. I honestly don’t care. I unsubscribed — supposedly — after receiving the second email about them, but today I have yet another. Supposedly I am unsubscribed, again.

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After hours of Googling and an ill timed browser reload while typing this the first time, I finally happened upon RoR ticket 10454 which details the problem I am having with inferred routes and STI models. I modified it to supposedly support any level of model nesting. Seems to work now. I inserted it into my environment.rb presently.

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Since I deployed DokuWiki last fall, I’ve found it to be an excellent tool for managing documentation. It enhances the quality of the final documentation product whilest not getting in the way of writing it. I rather enjoy it.

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If you were following the excellent has_many :through blog, you may find you can’t use with_scope in the methods defined on your association. Instead, just send :with_scope along.

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I was flipping through craigslist today and came cross a job posting for Web Freaks worthy of a ticket to planet clue. Let’s take a trip down the rabbit hole.

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Today I received my third email from someone claiming to be a Daniel Suarte, writing about filing open IT positions. However, I’ve never heard of this person before and I have no company or positions to fill. Clearly, this lamer is a spammer. He’s posting from a gmail account Daniel.Suarte@gmail.com. The email was not sent via gmail.

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Nothing fancy. It works.

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I’ve been investigating a switch from gnucash to Moneydance. There’s no way to export data directly from gnucash. Fortunately, someone wrote a Java app that will parse the XML and produce a basic QIF export with your accounts and transactions.

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I download a prerelease of the latest Engines earlier in the summer with piston. My tests were failing in strange and magical ways. I spent quite a bit of time trying different things, then finally resorted to a fresh Rails app that I slowly populated with relevant files. Quickly I discovered the problem was my Engines plugin. I really thought I had the full release, but clearly not.

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Usually I love mootools, really. Usually. I found CSS Guy’s form field hints posting inspiring, so I modified it to work with mootools. The result is something simple and easy.

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I find myself having to validate an email address in a couple of different models. I’ve had to refine the pattern a couple of times, but don’t always remember to do it in every place, which is silly anyway. Since I don’t feel the need to delve into a new validation, like a validates_email_address or whatever, the following lets me simply reuse an existing validation in multiple places.

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Oh, I have such love for plugins that copy files around in production. I especially love it when the Rails app doesn’t have permission to write to the filesystem — why would it in production? — and Mongrel simply goes away. Running Mongrel without backgrounding it with start-stop-daemon reveals the trickery in action.

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