We are back from Thanksgiving. There were a lot of people there this year. Like 27 or 29 or something. Wow. The family is getting really big!

We had lots of fun, and lots of food. It was a good break from work and we know we all need that once in a while.

The drive to Twain Harte was nice. Only took about 4½ hours each way. On the way back there was a bit of snow on the road. We only slid across the road once, it was fun.

Well, now we are back.

I finally did the rewrite of Barspin.com.

Barspin is a BMX web site for bay area BMX riders. I created it many, many years ago with my friend Ryan. For the past year and a half nobody has posted anything on it. Pretty much, it was a dead site. Well... except for all the spam. Spammers were hitting the site twice a day with junk posts.

A few weeks ago I pulled the plug on it. I was so sick of cleaning up spam and removing faked accounts that I just didn't want to deal with it anymore. Well, Ryan didn't like that too much and wanted to have at least the photo gallery up.

So last week I thought to myself, "what a great project to get some more Ruby on Rails experience." So I re-wrote the site in Ruby on Rails. I wanted to keep it very simple, but I still wanted to have some nice features to it.

The plan: Photo gallery and live chat. So I created a simple layout for a two pane interface. One side is the photo gallery, the other is the chat. Very simple.

I did the chat first because it was the easiest to do. I had already wrote a live chat in PHP for another customer. I just had to take the parts needed to make it go and set it up in Ruby. Easy as pie. The chat uses Flash Player 8 or better to connect to a socket server. The socket server just mirrors whatever is sent to it. Then the Flash app relays the data using JavaScript. You know, a JavaScript / Flash gateway. Since I can't connect to sockets using JavaScript I needed to use Flash.

Why not just use AJAX? Because AJAX polls the server every few seconds to update the chat display. I would need to have some type of queue to hold the messages then pass them to JavaScript for display. That means a database of something. Also, there is a lag between input and output. With a socket, everything is real time, and I don't need storage. It goes in, it goes out, and all is good.

OK, so the chat is out of the way, now on to the Photo Gallery. This part was much harder because I didn't know anything about how Ruby handles files and such. I finally figured out how to get a directory listing with DIR and just find the .jpeg files. Then I figured out how to sort them. Then display them...although that wasn't that hard.

Then I ran into another hard part. I wanted to use Lightbox to display the full size photos. And on top of that, I wanted to only show 9 photos at a time with a pager. Lightbox doesn't really work that way. I'm using DHTML to build the photo list. So I had to figure out how Lightbox worked. Digging into the code I figured out that I can remove the children from the body tag for the LightBox parts. Then reinitialize the Lightbox script to build the new effect. Easy. So when the page is advanced forward or backwards, the script removes the old lightbox magic, then builds new Lightbox magic.

I still have more work to do on it. I have to create a way for other people to add photos to the gallery and, per Ryan's request, add photo albums.

It's all good in the hood.

I've been very busy lately. It's a good thing... I have three different projects I'm working on right now. That makes my days interesting. But the good thing is that two of the projects I'm doing in Ruby on Rails. One of the projects is a slow, long, big project that I'm doing for ORS. The other is a contract job.

I really like the Ruby programming language. It's very simple in design, but very powerful at the same time. Everything being an object sure creates some interesting code. I'm looking forward to getting everything migrated over to the Rails platform.

In other news, last week the guys came over for a bit of fun. We did a bit of wheeling out on a new trail near the fort. It's a cool trail because it's new. We found a whole bunch of mine shafts out there. Some of them are very deep. one has boards on the sides to keep the dirt from caving in. I don't even know how deep they are due to not being able to lean over and look down them. We were going to go back out there with straps and rope to check them out more, but never did. Anyway, it's something to check out later for sure.

I pushed my buggy back into the middle of the garage to start work on it again. Sunday I cut out and placed the cowl near where it needs to be. I still have some cutting to do on it. The hood bolts onto it and fits the chassis very nicely. I'll have to cut out slots in the hood for the shocks, but it's going to be sweet. I'm hoping to get some of the body work done by christmas. Then I'll start on the engine and drive train. If my projects pan out, I'll be able to buy the links for the suspension. That will be nice.

Well, I guess I need to get back to work now.

Finally fixed the up-travel on the rear shocks and also finally welded in the rear shock cross member. Now no more jiggly rattley down the road.

Winter is finally here. Today it's raining, and it's raining really good too. I just checked the garage and it's nice and dry out there. With the propane heater, it's can be toasty warm also. This weekend I'm going to be out there working on stuff.

My Samurai needs a Anti-wrap bar and new rear shock mounts. That's what I'm going to do on Saturday. That should fix that all up for winter wheeling. Then I have a few things to do on Jane's car. It's making a few noises, so I'm going to check it out.

Then when that's all done, the garage will be all cleared out for my buggy project. I need to get back to work on that thing. This winter I'm going to spend most of my weekends out in the garage fixing it up and getting it running. Even if I don't get the suspension for it, there is a lot of other things I can do. My objective is to work on it at least once a week until it's done.

Another version of Omniweb was just released today. They finally fixed the AJAX support. I guess it was a case error in the XHR keyword. Anyway, now I can use Omniweb again.

I was just getting used to FireFox though. I love the Add-Ons like FireBug. Makes developing web sites a whole lot easier. They need to build something like that for Webkit and make it compatible with Omniweb.

One thing that Webkit/Safari has that Omniweb does not have is the Tidy validator plugin. Too bad it doesn't work with Omniweb. I like seeing the green check mark when my pages are valid HTML and CSS.

But, Omniweb does have it's charms. Site preferences are most excellent. Being able to set the font size and security settings on a per-site basis is just a necessity. And being Cocoa, I get access to the dictionary lookup function.

Anyway, I'll play with Omniweb until it starts bugging me and then I'll go back to Firefox.

MS has finally released MSIE 7.0. This is a major bug fix for their busted web browser. It fixes PNG's, the CSS Box Model, and a bunch of other things. Finally I don't have to write hacks to fix MSIE's broken rendering.

I highly recommend that everyone still refusing to use FireFox, please upgrade to MSIE 7. I will stop all support for MSIE6 and below and focus on Standards Compliant HTML code.

Saturday I got out in the shop and fixed up my rig for the Sunday Bronco Canyon run. I put new blinkers on my front, attached the mirrors to my half doors, and put my buggy seats in my Samruai.

Sunday morning we headed out to Bronco Canyon. It was really fun and kinda challenging. There was a ton of rocks to get though and picking your lines was very important.

There was about 20 rigs on this run. Mostly mild trail rigs. About 15 of them made it through the canyon. The others either broke or didn't even attempt it. There was two guys that made it over the waterfall... or maybe it was just one. The last waterfall was crazy. I didn't even attempt it because I didn't want to spend all day trying to get out of it. If I was in a smaller group, I probably would have tried.

There is another run this weekend, but I'm not sure if I'm going to go. Too much to do around the house.

Oh and winter is coming. It's about 48° outside and it's about 65° inside. I guess I'll have to start thinking about turning the heat on.

I just went to the iTerm web page to see if there has been any activity lately. To my surprise, there is. They have just released a Pre-release of .9. I just downloaded it to check it out.

I was starting to think that it was a dead project and that the tabbed terminal would just fade away.

I started yesterday to make some new bumpers for my Samurai. Actually, I was going to do a new front bumper and ended up doing both the front and rear. And, not only that, but I ended up doing the rear first.

This is really my first bender project, so after bending up a bunch of tube, it just ended up that I had messed up enough times that a rear bumper materialized.

I think that the rear turned out nice though. Pretty much just what I was thinking. I knew it wouldn't be like an expert style bumper, because I don't even have all the right tools. But even though the tubing was all bent wrong and the spacers were all different sizes, it still came out nice.

I'm still not done with them, but I will be in a few more days of after work welding.