Archive for January, 2009

Safari : The Cookie Monster

Friday, January 30th, 2009
safari cookie monster

Safari has been causing me much grief recently.  It would seem that I’m not the only one, and so far I’ve been unable to find any suggestions other than deleting all your cookies and and resetting Safari (a solution which doesn’t actually work) .

I seem to constantly get logged out of various web apps when using Safari, including Facebook & Gmail.  With Gmail I usually get an 400 error message or a warning the the header is too long. Sorry to anyone who was hoping to read a solution here. I don’t think anyone has one at the moment.  I really just wanted to post the image and vent a little…

 

 

0
Posted in tech |

GiveDo

Saturday, January 17th, 2009

I’m at startup camp sydney now (#scs on twitter) and we’re making an app called Givedo

First off, I’m kind of amazed that givedo.com was available.

This was born from the idea of ‘Search for the cure’. Using a google custom search we can collect revenue from adsense for search.

In the vein of not being evil, we figured that we’d set up a platform for charities to quickly and easily build their own branded search engine and funnel search ad revenue to them.

So that is givedo!

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Posted in startup |

Upgrading an app from Rails 2.1 to Rails 2.2.2

Thursday, January 15th, 2009

Here is a summary of a few of the problems I encountered while trying to upgrade an app from rails 2.1 to rails 2.2.2

Getting my dev code to run

First, to update the rails code:

 > rake rails:freeze:gems

The first time I tried to run the app I got this error:

vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:445:in `load_missing_constant': uninitialized constant Inflector (NameError)
Accessing the inflector changes, so as described here you need update APP/config/initializers/inflector.rb so it looks like this:
ActiveSupport::Inflector.inflections do |inflect|
  ...
end

In my case, I was also using the ActiveMerchant plugin which needed updating for the same reason

script/plugin install git://github.com/Shopify/active_merchant.git --force

According to gusg.us, HAML needs to be at 2.0.4.   I didn’t see any problems in my testing but I didn’t want to try my luck so I updated HAML too.

sudo gem update haml

update my environment.rb gem requirement

config.gem "haml", :version => "2.0.6"
Then run
rake gems:unpack:dependencies

Production

While deploying to a staging server I got this error:

initializer.rb:514:in `send': undefined method `cache_template_loading=' for ActionView::Base:Class (NoMethodError)

As described here, to fix this, just update your APP/config/environments/production.rb (and staging.rb) file by removing the following:

config.action_view.cache_template_loading

Overall, it wasn’t too painful an upgrade…

I didn’t run rake rails:update. That may have fixed some of these things on it’s own, but my understanding was that that wasn’t needed anymore…

7
Tags: ,
Posted in tech |

Why Do GoDaddy and Other Domain Registrars Suck?

Wednesday, January 14th, 2009

I’m evaluating different domain name options for something I’m working on.  Typically, I register domains names with GoDaddy because they seem to be the cheapest.  Yesterday, I registered the domain wedding-website.ca as a test.  I wanted to compare writing instructions about how to buy a domain name vs. using the API vs. a reseller front-end.

My step by step instructions are now at step 13, and that’s before I get into any DNS alterations.

13 STEPS!?!?   What kind of e-commerce sales funnel is 13 steps?  I’m pretty sure I filled out my details 3 times and created a least 2 accounts. (I’m not sure – I’m still a little dizzy from the whole thing).  I do have about 5 long numbers now which I’m sure I’ll have to re-enter somewhere, at some point…

Many of the steps in the instructions I was tracking included things like ‘completely ignore everything on the page and just press the very tiny button at the bottom (the one hidden under the big button)’.  The 13 steps actually excludes some of the extra steps I had to take because it’s a .ca domain!!  Okay, so intructions through GoDaddy aren’t going to be part of my solution.  Register.com and Dotster.com have slightly cleaner processes (but not by much)

GoDaddy, Register, and some others offer resale program and APIs. The APIs are generally completely undocumented, and you get no indication of what is available (or even what technology is used) before they ask for the steep annual fee.  Register.com has the best API (it’s xml based) I’ve see, but so far it seems to be a big flat convoluted set of URLs.

Now, I’m sure most of these companies are making lots of money, I just wanted to rant about how annoying I find it all to be from my perspective as a consumer.

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Posted in Uncategorized |