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.

Tis the season for gift giving and despite being nearly 30 years old, I still have a Christmas wishlist. For those of you that believe I have earned more than a lump of coal for Christmas, here's a wishlist composed of gadgets, entertainment, personal decor, and other raw materials necessary to keep myself and the apartment operational for the next 365 days. Hopefully this will make your shopping adventures less painful and whenever possible, available from the convienence of your computer and no more than a few mouse clicks away. Keep in mind, this is a work in progress so I'll be updating it over the next few weeks.

It's 2am and like the cat in the picture, I'm a little disgruntled. The one thing I've always disliked about Rails on a Mac is the fact that RMagick is so darn hard to get working properly. You can do it from source, but then you have to update it manually. You can try to use MacPorts, but that's a very fragile process. I had it working in Tiger, but to be quite frank, I'm not sure how that happened and it must have been more of an accident than anything else.

In this installment of a blog, I'm going to be covering how I managed to get RMagick up and running using a combination of RubyGems and MacPorts. I'll start by saying, it was a very clumsy process. After having everything installed manually using a great tutorial on Rails Envy, I decided to scrap that in belief there had to be an easier way. When I tried to use  MacPorts and then install the RMagick gem, I kept running into an error about it not being able to find the freetype library. It was indeed on the system (/opt/local/lib/...), but it wasn't where the gem installer was expecting it (/usr/loca/lib/...). Give me a break.

Well, it's been a long time coming, but Leopard has finally hit the streets, or at least made it's way via FedEx priority overnight to my apartment. Of course I tracked it the whole way from Illinois to Pittsburgh, but that's just part of the job when it comes to new products from Apple. I'm in the process now of getting things up and running again, but I plan to update this blog as tinker with Leopard. I'll try to primarily focus on things I like, things I dislike, some of those surprises that I didn't expect.