A week or two ago, after reading a very helpful blog post by Lisa Bettany (I LOVE her photography; check her website out), I managed to get back into the swing of things; I think it had a lot to do with reading Lisa’s blog, particularly because a while ago she went through a similar issue, where she felt that none of the photos she took were any good (the different being she’s a professional and I’m not ). I got the opportunity to photograph some of my late grandfather’s World War II medals, which let me put some of my practical skills to the test. I made myself a back-lit softbox with a flash behind the medal and a shoot-through umbrella above. Doing some minor post-shot colour tweaks, I got some great looking shots which, I think, do the medals justice.

This past weekend, I got the opportunity to have take some photos of a get-together with a couple high school friends, and the camera came out again. Although a number of my photos didn’t turn out, I was very happy with the results of some others.

Finally on Sunday, I went through my back yard and the back lane, taking photos of the trees in bloom and an old truck in a neighbour’s back yard. Although the photos I had originally intended on taking didn’t turn out nearly as well as I had hoped, other ones worked out nicely.

So, in attempt to get back into the photography (and blogging!) groove, I’ve decided to put up another 45 photos from the past weeks. As always, your comments and constructive criticisms are welcome and encouraged.

[View with PicLens]

Semi-static pages are used everywhere on websites. They’re those pages like an “About” page, which has content on it that doesn’t really change that often. Typically, a controller would have to house these actions (/about, /faq, /contact, etc.), and  the routes specified manually. Railscasts came up with an ingenious idea to create a controller which was routed to /static/*, so that semi-static pages could be created on-the-fly and modified easily. It also allows for modifications to change without committing to a repository and going through the process of deploying all over again.

For those needing a quick Rails primer before going on, here’s the quick and dirty of what you need to know to understand this:

• Rails is a MVC-based web application framework that runs on Ruby. In short, Ruby code is written to create webpages on-the-fly.
• Every request in Rails is first put through the routes file in config/routes.rb. This file tells Rails which Controller and Action is run.

Okay, let’s get started. Let’s create our static pages scaffold (which includes model, views, and the controller). Obviously, there are sections of this that you would want to require authentication for (editing and deleting, for example), but that’s outside the scope of this tutorial.

script/generate scaffold pages title:string permalink:string content:text;
rake db:migrate

Now we need to modify our controller slightly. More specifically, our show action. Right now, it will respond to showing an element only when the ID is displayed. We want to modify it to handle a permalink as well (/about and /contact look better than /pages/135, don’t you think?). Here is your modified show action:

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def show
  if params[:permalink]
    @page = Page.find_by_permalink(params[:permalink])
  else
    @page = Page.find(params[:id])
  end
end

Before we go any further, we need to create two custom methods in our model. These will format the permalink to remove any unwanted characters for the custom route name (replacing all unacceptable characters with an underscore) and for the URL (replacing all unacceptable characters with a forward slash to allow for nesting of pages). It’s also important to note here that previous validation should be done to ensure that the permalink does not have leading or tailing non-alphanumeric characters, but I removed that for simplicity’s sake.

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class Page < ActiveRecord::Base
  def route_name
    p = self.permalink.gsub(/([^A-Za-z0-9])+/, '_').downcase # Change non-alphanumeric characters to an underscore
    "static_#{p}"
  end
 
  def uri
    self.permalink.gsub(/([^A-Za-z0-9])+/, '/').downcase # Change non-alphanumeric characters to a forward slash
  end
end

At this point, we can create and modify our pages as we would regularly expect from a new controller. All of our pages are accessible via /pages/1, /pages/2 etc. We now need to make our controller act as our catch-all (so that all requests that do not match any of the other controllers get routed to our Pages controller), and we also need to provide permalink support. Finally, we will dynamically generate customized, name routes for all of our semi-static pages. All of that gets accomplished with a few short lines of code. Add the following code to the top of your config/routes.rb file, starting at line 2 (inside the ActionController::Routing::Routes.draw section):

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def map.static_page_actions
  pages = Page.find(:all)
  pages.each do |page|
    self.send("static_#{page.route_name}", "#{page.uri}", :controller => "Pages", :action => "show", :permalink => page.permalink)
  end
end

Finally, we need to call this method close to the bottom of the code, right before our default catch-all routes.

map.static_page_actions
map.connect ':controller/:action/:id'
map.connect ':controller/:action/:id.:format'

What this method does is retrieve all of the static pages in the database, then creates a customized, named route for each page, telling Rails what each URI should look like, and where to direct the request to.

Hopefully this helps some people out with their dynamic page creation. I’m pretty sure there’s a pitfall or two here, but I think it could be taken care of by doing some simple route housecleaning in the Pages CRUD controller. The perk of this option is that it allows the routes to be named, and hopefully that is of some benefit for others.

1. Remove Instant Personalization [link]

Instant personalization gives your information to 3rd party websites such as Docs.com, Pandora, and Yelp. Uncheck this box to prevent these sites from accessing your information.

2. Remove Unused (and sketchy) Applications [link]

Chances are you’ve added some application at some point, and although you deleted it off your profile, it probably still has access to your profile. Remove any unwanted applications by going to the link above and deleting those apps which shouldn’t be there. You might be surprised how many pages can see your information!

3. Remove Your Public Profile [link]

Data mining will largely rely on your public profile as a starting point for gathering your information. Remove that ability by going to the link above. Change your Facebook Search Results to Friends and Networks, and then Uncheck the option to have a public profile.

4. Lock Down Your Contact Information [link]

On this page, you can find all of the contact methods that are available to you. Unless you really want anybody to contact you, it is best to set almost all of these to “Friends” and nothing else. The only exceptions are the option to add you as a friend, and to send you messages. Both are worthwhile to leave open to everybody unless you happen to get spam from them.

5. Lock Down Your Profile Information [link]

Finally, there’s your actual profile information that should be locked down. Setting all of these to “Only Friends” is the best course of action.

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If you haven’t done so, lock down your information soon. I can guarantee that the automated data mining services are working full-tilt in case Facebook reverts its privacy settings. It’s time to take control of your profile settings.

Lately I wanted to backup some of my text messages from my iPhone 3GS onto my desktop, but couldn’t figure out how to do that. After some quick research and some poking around, I was able to figure out how to view them quickly and easily.

Disclaimer

I am not responsible if you screw something up on your computer. It’s not my problem if something breaks. Do this at your own risk (which should be pretty low, unless you’re one of those people that shouldn’t be allowed near a computer).

What you’ll need

• SQLite Database Browser (available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/sqlitebrowser/files/)

Let’s Get Started

In a nutshell, the SMS system on the iPhone is just a carefully hidden SQLite database. All we have to do is find the file and open it up in the SQLite Browser.

1. First, we need to locate the file that contains the SMS messages, which will be either:
   • 3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28.mdbackup
   • 3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28.mddata

   This will be in one of the following locations:

   • Windows Vista/7: C:\Users\[Your User Name]\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\[iPhone ID]\
   • Windows XP or lower: C:\Documents and Settings\[Your User Name\Application Data\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\[iPhone ID]\
   • Mac OS X: User > Library > Application Support > MobileSync > Backup >[iPhone ID]
2. Copy this file to a new location to protect the file in case you accidentally screw something up (your Desktop, for example).
3. Open up the new copy of the file in SQlite Browser, then select the “Browse Data” tab. Finally, select the “message” table from the “Table:” dropdown box

And that’s all it takes! From here, you can export this as a CSV via File -> Export -> Table as CSV so you can import it into Excel, or manipulate it however else you wish. If I get the time, I’m going to write a quick tool to nicely export the messages to PDF so that they look good instead of being in a table. But, it’s a nice fix for wanting to go through them on a computer, or do fulltext searches with the content.

Every once in a while, I stumble upon a great artist. I mean, really great. Yes, there are talented artists out there, many of which are mainstream in today’s society. That isn’t what makes this artist great, however. Yes, he’s talented. Very talented, as I hope you’ll find out when you listen to some of his music. What makes this artist great is that he distributes all of his music for free.

Yes. Free.

If you are even remotely interested in electronic music, you’ll love Professor Kliq (Mike Else). Making music since 1996, he has been making music for almost fifteen years, experimenting with many different forms of electronic music, taking both grassroots and modern styles into his experimentation. He has put out six albums, one EP, and one set of remixes. Do yourself a favor and give this a listen; if you appreciated electronic music half as much as I do, you’ll love this.

Secondly, if you love music, chances are you’ve heard of SXSW, or South By Southwest. SXSW Conferences & Festivals offer the unique convergence of original music, independent films, and emerging technologies. Even if you don’t attend the events, many artists give out a free MP3 of their music to be distributed by SXSW on their website. The latest batch of 2010 entries was recently put up on BitTorrent, boasting a grand total of 1083 songs, and 5.43GB of disk space across two torrents. If you want the opportunity to be exposed to some amazing new music by independent artists who are freely (and legally!) giving away their music for you to listen to, check out the link below for more information.

http://sites.google.com/site/sxswtorrent/

Next Monday, I have an interesting post for all of you with iPhones. One thing I really like about the iPhone is that I don’t have to delete text messages. I have a quick and free way for you to back up all of your text messages to read later on. There’s a lot of paid services out there to do it, but you don’t have to pay anyone for this quick-and-easy trick!

[View with PicLens]

1. Buy a new car

With the potential of a great new job headed my way (possibly more on that later), I should have some disposable income in the near future. To celebrate this, I think it’s time to get a new car; my current car, although it holds 5 people, is hardly what you consider sporty, is developing a bad case of rust, guzzles gas like nobody’s business, and isn’t fun to drive at all. I plan on buying a 2003 Hyundai Tiburon with a 5-speed manual transmission. They come in around $9000 before taxes, so on a financing plan I’ll be able to buy that no problem.

2. Build a customized car trunk sound system enclosure

I’d love to put my DIY skills to the test and create a proper molded sound system enclosure for my new car. It’s a lot of work, but it’ll be a lot of fun. This will also be very useful to work on some woodworking skills and some custom fabrication work.

3. Start my development website

For about two years, I ran a security-based site, but eventually shut it down because my interests simply did not coincide with my interests and life aspirations. As such, I’ve decided to start a development-based website. I can do the security-aspect within the programming and development, but I can also get into graphics design. It fits into my interests much more at this point in time, and I think it will be more beneficial to the internet as well.

4. Develop Thimbleberry

I have a new site in the works with a friend. That’s about all I’ll tell you for now. Either way, should be a fun time.

5. Start actively contributing to the open source community

The open source community is amazing. Those of you that have heard of a little operating system called Linux may know that it’s open source. That’s right: it’s free to use, free to modify, and free to redistribute. There are tons of open source projects available online, and I’d like to start contributing to one or start a new one that people will actually use. I’ve been using open source software for a long time, and it’s about time that I gave back to the community that has helped me out in so many ways.

Well, it may be feeble, but it’s a start at getting back in the writing groove. Soon I’ll start doing a bit more technology writing again, and will hopefully do some stuff on interface design. Thanks for sticking with me through my creative drought, and we will hopefully see you Monday.

Anyway, this batch of photos is from my first photo shoot, which I did at Level 3 Studios with a bunch of friends. This was a great first experience in a photo shoot scenario, but also very daunting and intimidating. I’d love to do it again, but I might need some more ideas before I go into that.

Because I was rushed, I never had the chance to do any major photo manipulation with these, and I think a fair number of these will look better after some simple changes, such as a grey scale or sepia tone added to them. I’d love to do that to a selection of them and upload them later.

As per usual, I really appreciate your comments. Post a comment below; I read all of them, I promise!

[View with PicLens]

As per usual, I really appreciate your comments. Post a comment below; I read all of them, I promise!

[View with PicLens]

I also did a bit of shooting last night in my room with my macro lens of a plant I have. I love some of the colors that came out of the shots, and I included two at the end of the gallery.

Hope you enjoy, and feel free as always to comment below.

[View with PicLens]