A blog about what I find interesting.

I added a new plugin to my repository on github today.

http://github.com/KellyMahan/ArEncrypt

I just kept running into this same issue every time I needed password encryption. And I didn’t know of any other plugins that accomplished the same thing with such simplicity.

Just install the plugin and in your active record class

encrypt :encrypted_attribute_name

It’s just that simple. On every before save the attribute you named will be encrypted. If the value isn’t changed before a save the the encryption is skipped.

Well it’s been a great 2 years. My little girl is growing up fast. We’ve started potty training in earnest and she is starting to get it a bit.  She is still quiet around people she doesn’t know well, but at home she will carry on full conversations with us, and we can understand parts here and there. She picks up on new words very fast now, and will repeat them back to us pretty clearly. She still loves music and dancing, especially the Disney musicians.

If you want to see more you can find pictures here flickr.com/photos/kmahan_com and videos here www.youtube.com/user/kmahancom or you can even visit Ashley’s own website AshleyMahan.com

Nexus One

If you haven’t heard yet, the google phone is now out. The Nexus One looks like a true iphone killer. It has a better screen, faster processor, more memory, and the most import of all, it runs on android.

I’ll be saving up for one, but in the mean time you can buy it now through t-mobile or on googles new phone store.

google.com/phone

Check it out and let me know if you buy one.

I picked up the wrox book on android development from Amazon. Don’t really like Java, but I love the android phones. Give me some ideas on a good app to develope.

I’ve got a lot more Google Wave invites. Same as before, post a comment about how you found my site and I’ll send you an invite. 15 will go to the first that post, and 15 will go to those that have me as a contact in any other social site (flickr, facebook, twitter, etc..).

I just updated my daughters website with a nice picture theme for wordpress. It will auto update with wp-o-matic from a specific set where I put flickr photos.

First few people to register and post a comment about how you know about my blog gets it.

Upadate: Ok making it more difficult now, You must have me as a contact in at least 2 other sources. Twitter, Facebook, IM, RL(Real Life) etc..

I added some new functionality to the memcachedb_q plugin to allow for repeatable calls.

q = MemcachedbQ.new(:email)
q.add_runner(:mail, :get_emails, :repeats=>30, :repeat_name=>”email”)

This repeats the Mail.get_emails call every 30 seconds. Using the repeat name makes sure that there is only 1 repeating call with the same name. The repeats work by adding a new item to the queue with a future run date just before the existing one fires off and is removed. The future date is based on the :run_time value plus the repeat value in seconds. If a run_time value is not provided the first repeat sets it’s on run_time value based off Time.now.

Also if you add a runner with a run time date in the past, it will only add a runner in the future for the next time it would have matched :run_time + repeat*x. That way if the scheduler ever dies or is shut down, it won’t have a huge list of runners to go through before it catches up to real time.

Yesterday I decided to de-fork my memcachedb-client library from the memcache-client project. The directions that they needed to go were getting too far apart to continue to incorporate changes. It turns out github doesn’t have a way to defork a project. But it still is an easy process.

First thing to do is make sure you have the latest pull from your fork. Then log into github and rename your project. I just add -old to the end. Next create a new project with the original name and then copy the permissions from the old repository if there are any. Do a standard push from your source ( there was no need for me to change anything before hand ) and your repository is now fork free.

It seems like it would be very easy for github to accomplish this on their end, so I’m not sure why they don’t do this. I bet using the github api a gem could be made that would do this for you, that is if someone wanted to spend the time to do this *hint*.

I haven’t used the G1 for more than a few minutes, but it seems to do just as much as the iphone, maybe even more. So when they announced the MyTouch on t-mobile I knew that it would be the next phone I should get. For a while I was considering getting the iphone, but I never had anything good come from using At&t. So far this seems like the first phone that may actually put a dent in the iphones armor.

Here’s the different color options available, and there is also a lot of accessories already made to further customize the MyTouch look.

The pre-order started at 12am Eastern on the 8th. We only had one issue that delayed our order, but customer service was helping us within 2 minutes of giving them a call. 5 years of service with t-mobile and we’ve had nothing but the best support.