Attachment_fu is a great plugin by Rick Olsen (a.k.a. techno-weenie). I use this plugin for one of the sites I maintain. I recently ran into a situation where I needed to regenerate the thumbnails for all the uploaded images. Attachment_fu provides no built-in support for this, so I had to get creative. A quick search on Google revealed a post by Michael D. Ivey that seemed like a reasonable thing to do, but was not sufficient by itself. So in this blog, I plan to cover the steps I took to automate the regeneration of thumbnails when you are using attachment_fu.

You ever have an old car that you refuse to relinquish because it continues to get 10 miles to the gallon and you've had so many memories with it? Sure, you've seen the commercials for those fancy cars that are more environment friendly, safer to drive, and have a built-in GPS, but you still refuse to surrender old "Eleanor" for some new technology. Until recently, I've been on that same bus only my car was Subversion. I've been using Subversion for the past two years as my Source Code Management (SCM) system of choice. Just recently, I spent over three hours dealing with a corrupt Subversion repository. This single event was the straw that broke the camel's back, in fact, it didn't just break the back, it smashed the camel into a little pancake. Therefore, I decided to 'Git' rid of Subversion and give Git a shot at the title.

As many of you may remember from my last upgrade, things usually don't go all that well for me, especially when I'm gambling with technology. A friend of mine at work has been encouraging me to upgrade to the latest flavor of Ubuntu, but given my past history, I've shyed away from the early adopter philosophy when it comes to Ubuntu server upgrades. Now that it has been over a month since the release of Hardy Heron 8.04 LTS, I decided to cross my fingers and dive head first into an upgrade on a Friday night.

I had a tough decision to make tonight. Should I relax and play Lost Odyssey on the XBox360 or share an excerpt of a continuing saga as it relates to the quality of Taco Bell's service. I choose the latter in this case and decided it was time to rant for a moment, so let me get right into it. Since high school, I've been a regular customer of Taco Bells all over the map. I should actually buy stock in the company, that's how much I eat there. Unfortunately, my local Taco Bell has been letting me down quite frequently lately. So be forewarned, don't count on getting good service at the Taco Bell located at 5205 Baum Boulevard, Pittsburgh, PA 15224.

Welcome to another edition of me talking about some website that's been kicking my butt for months on end. If you remember back in this blog, I was beginning to build a revamped version of my family's restaurant website. From what I can gather, and my timestamps seem to be telling the truth on this one, I broke ground on the new site approximately January 29, 2008. Had anyone been around me at the time, I'm sure they would have swiftly commented under their breath "Well, so much for his weekends for the next year". Luckily for me, that wasn't the case this time.

Until this week, I hadn't experimented much with the Google Maps API. Sure I was a heavy user of the web interface and the map integration built into the iPhone, but didn't tinker with the nitty gritty details yet. I decided that since I'm working on an updated version of the website for my parent's restaurant I may as well try something new. With much of the site well underway, one of the missing sections was the contact page. My thinking was that I could create your run of the mill contact page and then for people that aren't familiar with the area, well, let them enter their address and allow Google Maps to do the rest. Easier said than done as usual.

My apologies for not blogging in quite some time, ever since the new year I've been quite busy with several other projects. Most notably, leveraging Craigslist to get rid of some excess furniture, preparing for our upcoming Colorado ski trip, enjoying the sweet victory of the New York Giants winning the Super Bowl, and working on the design for a new version of a website for a restaurant. But fear not, I'm still alive and rocking some new Rails code with the help of my faithful Textmate and ever so creative Photoshop software.

When designing a web site, most of the work goes into making a well-designed and usable frontend interface. What doesn't get nearly as much love is the backend administrative interface. Like security, it typically comes as an after thought if at all. However, with this website, I needed a reasonably functional administration section that would allow me to manipulate data in the models and a somewhat presentable interface that wasn't so arcane that it was unusable. While I did write some custom code to manage certain aspects of the site, developing an entire administration section from scratch was about as palatable as a dish of warmed up horse droppings. Say hello to my new best friend, ActiveScaffold.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, Rails recently introduced RequestForgeryProtection. I wanted to take full advantage of this functionality to help protect against CSRF-based attacks. I realize it's not a perfect method, but every layer helps. One of the observations I made when reviewing some of my code is that I had a number of actions within my controllers that did not validate the type of HTTP method supplied. Therefore, actions like deleting a blog or media file would work regardless of the HTTP method provided by the user as long as the user was logged in. Not a huge problem, right? Well, not quite.

Over the weekend, Rails 2.0 was released to the masses. Packed with a flurry of changes, I decided to take the plunge. After grabbing a Coke, turning on some music, and firing up TextMate, it was time to rock and roll. One of the new features included in the release was  RequestForgeryProtection, one that I wanted to take full advantage of to help protect against CSRF-based attacks. Considering I've been keeping current with each release cycle of Rails, I was hoping that the upgrade from 1.2.6 to 2.0 would be a piece of cake. Well, long story short, it wasn't. Not suprising I'm sure, but it was another late night of code wrangling that ended up putting me to bed around 5:20am on a Saturday morning.