http://selfamusementpark.com/blog I have nothing interesting to say. Don't believe me? Read this: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 07:48:10 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en {gallery xmas_cards/74.jpeg--class=photoright} Last year I started a new tradition and posted my Dad's first "obscure" Christmas card from 1973; this year's reposted card appears just in time, because technical difficulties knocked this site off the air for the last couple of weeks. Here's Dad's 1974 card - it's one of his ... http://selfamusementpark.com/blog/2009/12/23/a-christmas-tradition-from-1974/ I just updated a project to Rails 2.3.3 for the cool new "touch" feature, and saw here that I needed to update to Mocha 0.9.7. I did that, but found that my tests were failing - I got lots of NoMethodError: undefined method `stub' for #<SomeTest:0x7f2c1d921f80> errors. In my project, I'd ... http://selfamusementpark.com/blog/2009/07/30/rails233mochaconfusion/ I often work in coffeeshops and other places that provide free wireless networks. Since anyone could sniff traffic sent over these networks, I've set up my own virtual private network at home so that my traffic will be encrypted before it leaves my laptop, then decrypted on a server at ... http://selfamusementpark.com/blog/2009/03/07/automatic-wireless-goodness/ I'm not happy about Facebook's greedy terms of service, so rather than hand them content that they're going to keep and monetize forever, I'm posting my "25 things you didn't know about me" here... I ignore chain-letter-like things, which is why it's taken me so long to give in and make ... http://selfamusementpark.com/blog/2009/02/18/my-25-things/ Today on Martin Luther King Day, I participated in Day On, yet another great Portland tech community event: local geeks gathered at CubeSpace to volunteer to help non-profits with technical issues. A couple of dozen folks showed up to offer help, and though only a few folks came by to ... http://selfamusementpark.com/blog/2009/01/19/my-day-on/ {gallery xmas_cards/73.jpeg--class=photoright} Christmas was a big holiday for my Dad: each year, he'd send out custom Christmas cards with obscure messages. He'd look forward to the phone calls that would result -- people asking for hints, or badgering him for the new low of that year's wordplay. He'd usually chide ... http://selfamusementpark.com/blog/2008/12/16/a-christmas-tradition-from-1973/ I'm writing this in a coffee shop, and when I'm using a public wireless network, I like to secure my network traffic using a virtual private network (VPN) that I set up on my server at home. Without this, anyone else close by could spy on what I'm doing (including ... http://selfamusementpark.com/blog/2008/11/17/fixing-a-little-vpn-annoyance/ I've been tinkering with developing software for the Android phone platform (and loving my G1 phone that runs it)... the Android folks at Google hired Ascender to create a new font family for the phone, the only family that the phone comes with. Here's a sample from Ascender's press release. It ... http://selfamusementpark.com/blog/2008/11/15/android-fonts/ "I find I'm so excited, I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it is the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across ... http://selfamusementpark.com/blog/2008/11/04/hope/ I'm working on a couple of Android projects; one has an Android IDL file (.aidl) for a service, and for some reason, the development environment didn't automatically generate the corresponding .java file from it. I wasn't able to figure out what caused this, and recreating the .aidl file didn't fool ... http://selfamusementpark.com/blog/2008/09/30/android-aidl-regeneration/