Posts tagged general

Late last year my youngest brother Daniel decided to attend the prestigious Le Cordon Blue cooking school. My dad and I helped him move out to Las Vegas over New Years weekend, and he started classes the first week of January. After getting settled in and finishing his Cooking 101 and Wine and Beverage classes, he has decided that it would be nice to record the experiences and share some of the more interesting things he has learned.

So, if you are interested in cooking, I highly recommend you keep an eye on his new weblog.

If you’re reading this article, then it means the DNS entries have successfully propigated through the Interwebs and you are pointed at my new home. For the last two months I’ve been working to move my domain away from TextDrive’s shared hosting service to something that I actually own and maintain. For those of you that might be interested, here are the geeky details:

• Dell PowerEdge 1650 (Dual P3 1.4 GHz w/ 1.5 GB of memory) called stan
• Gentoo Linux
• LiteSpeed
• MySQL 5
• Rails
• Mephisto
• A Mephisto port of the Scribbish theme

There will undoubtedly be some old links that are broken, but the new redirection support in Mephisto will account for at least 90% of them. If you do find an old link that’s broken, please send an email to delynn [at] gmail.com and let me know about them. I’m still in the process of moving my code to a new permanent home, so if you are looking for ActsAsDropdown or Userstamp please be patient. I’ll be posting updates about the future and locations of those projects shortly.

Update: The repository urls have been updated on the project pages. See http://delynnberry.com/2006/10/27/project-repositories for more information on the changes that were made.

It’s a sad thing when it’s been so long since your last post that even NetNewsWire thinks you’ve fallen off the face of the blogosphere.

Well, I just wanted to post something here to let the 5 of you that actually do read this blog know that I am still alive. Believe it or not, I’ve actually been doing a lot of work behind the scenes upgrading my site and server situation, as well as some of my code projects.

With this post I’m actually making one these change active. I recently signed up for a FeedBurner account, so I highly recommend that everyone switch to using their url instead of the generic Typo feed urls. For those wanting to just do a copy and paste via their feed reader the new url is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/delynnberry.

In the coming days I hope to finish with the other updates and get them live. Sorry again for being out of communication for so long.

This morning I opened up my GMail account and was greated by an email notifying me that I was one of the first 10,000 contestants to complete all 24 of the quest’s puzzles, and I was now registered for a chance to participate in the final challenge.

I started the quest on the first day it was available, and have had a really fun time with all the different puzzles. I’ve never had any realistic aspirations of winning the grand prize, but I most certainly did want to be one of the final 10,000. Making the final challenge means that I get to see this thing all the way to the end, and who knows, if I pool all my resources, I will probably have a realistic chance at the grand prize too!

I’ll be sure to update this blog with the details of the final challenge as I get them. Right now, I’m waiting for the email notification letting me know that my replica cryptex has shipped.

I wanted to take a minute to apologize to those of you who might have had problems viewing the website during the past couple of days. Over the weekend I decided to upgrade Typo to the latest working copy in order to get the bug fixes that allow it to correctly run on the 1.1.2 version of Rails.

What I didn’t realize was that as of changeset 1022 the API for the Sidebar superclass had been largely re-factored. The update is a welcome abstraction away from the component method, but I didn’t pick up on the fact that this change was causing Application Errors until early this morning. To solve the problem, I had to change one line in my Scribbish theme’s default.rhtml layout file. The offending line is:

<%= render_component(:controller => “sidebars/sidebar”, :action => “display_plugins”) %>

and needs to be changed to:

<%= render_sidebars %>

Like I said, this change is actually a good one; I just wish I had seen the problem a bit sooner. I turns out that even though I had seen a couple of Application Errors this weekend, they weren’t occurring on a regular enough basis to make me think there was a problem with the code. I believe the reason why I wasn’t seeing the errors all the time was due to either Firefox or lighttpd caching my requests. The clue that finally tipped me off into looking at the problem more closely was actually the fact that my Mint stats were lower than they had been in a long while. ;-)

Sorry again for the problems.

Thanks to a del.icio.us post by Ben I became familiar with an old Typo theme called Scribbish. After seeing it, I quickly downloaded the theme and installed on my weblog.

I don’t really know how I missed this theme from the Typogarden theme contest, but man is it nice! I made a couple of minor changes (like moving the sidebar to the right), but I really like how must faster the whole site feels. I’ll probably be changing a few other things a bit later, but for now I’m happy.

Yesterday Google announced integration between their two killer communication applications: GMail and Google Talk. What’s interesting about the updates was that the main feature they added (the ability to archive your Google Talk logs inside of GMail) was something that my co-workers and I were talking about during the previous day’s lunch!

Since I now know that I have creative control over Google’s developers, I’d like to publicly share my other ideas for Google’s mail and chat clients (I expect these items to be finished by tomorrow morning of course :-).

GMail

1. The number of filters allowed per account needs to be increased. Right now 20 is a good starting point, but I’ve only just started using GMail as my daily email client, and I already have 12. I can imagine needing more than 20 very soon (especially as I start re-subscribing to mailing lists that I had previously ditched thanks to them clogging up my Inbox).
2. A filter should have the ability to recognize multiple senders or recipients, or even better recognize a sender or recipient based on their group membership. It could be that filters already do this, but if they do, I have seen no documentation or example as to how to accomplish this.
3. Allow the search window to display more than 25 items at a time. This feature should mimic the “Maximum Page Size” preference. I went through and re-labeled over 7500 messages that previously had no labels, and it was very painful to do this 25 at a time!

Google Talk

1. Have the client automatically go into away mode when I lock my Windows machine. This is something that Messenger does and is very convenient.
2. When the interface is in “shade” mode allow for the input well to still be available. This will make it easy to send a quick response to a comment without having to expand the entire interface.

I’ll expand this list as I hear or think of other improvements to these applications. Do you have anything you would like to see? If so, let me know, and I’ll add them to the list.

Just wanted to post a quick “Merry Christmas” message to the two of you who read this blog. I also wanted to link to a great short story that Josh posted this morning. He sent this out to friends as a Christmas gift a few years ago. I really enjoyed it then, and I was glad to see he decided to post it for the rest of the world to enjoy.

Hope everyone has a great holiday!

Over the course of this past year I have come to the realization that if I really want to accomplish some of the professional goals I have for myself I need to do a better job expanding my social network and make my name more visible in the social circles that will help me reach my goals. With the new year approaching, I have created a list of items that I need to focus on to ensure that at the end of 2006 I feel like I have improved myself.

The first big item on my list is to get a personal website that will allow me to post my thoughts and comments on life and my industry as well as host my portfolio and personal projects. I have started a weblog several times in the past, but have never kept it up for more than a couple of months. This time, however, I am determined to keep it going. Weblogs are all the rage these days aren’t they? The fact that Josh has a blog should be enough social peer pressure to ensure that I keep it up!

So, in the next couple of days, be on the lookout for some end of the year posts as well as some introductions of projects that I have been working on recently in anticipation of this new personal promotion push.