Brian Corrales

I’ve just found out that for a limited time, Gospelink.com has a coupon page where you can get a 3 month subscription to Gospelink.com for only $9.99.  That’s about half off the regular monthly price!  You can give it as a Christmas gift subscription to a friend or keep it for yourself.  Here’s the link to the promotion:  http://gospelink.com/gift/employee, intended for friends and family of employees of DeseretBook.  If you want to learn more about Gospelink, here’s a screencast.  Gospelink is the world’s largest database for LDS-content, including the entire DeseretBook Online Library, BYU speeches, Ensign articles, old LDS newspapers like the Times and Seasons, Christian Classics, the Standard Works, other editions of scriptures, including Greek and Hebrew definitions for almost every word in the Bible, and much much more.

As many of you know, I am the owner and chief instructor of Wasatch Martial Arts Academy in Salt Lake City, Utah. Tomorrow I am holding a test for about twenty of my students. A major test like this happens quarterly with smaller testing groups in the middle. Traditionally, each testing candidate will complete a testing application, which I will later file.

As you can imagine, this can become an administrative nightmare.  To decrease the paper, I have developed an online management system for all my rank tests. Students and families create user accounts on my site with their basic information, including their Gup membership Id, which they receive from headquarters. This information is saved so all they have to do is login and submit a test request. A test request is merely them selecting their testing date and hitting submit. Later, I can generate a report of the test and give each studebt a pass/fail and an average score.

I believe I have greatly simplified the testing process and I believe many other Soo Bahk Do instructors may benefit from this management system. My next step is to get the system ready for market. If any instructors have a request or are interested in kearning more, I hope you’ll leave a comment here.

YouTube, without warning, has added an ugly search bar above the embedded video. The problem I have with it is it encourages people off your site and to search YouTube rather than your site. Luckily, there is a quick fix. Add this to the src of the embed tag and the param movie tag:

&showsearch=0
This gets rid of the Search Bar in the embed tags. Kind of annoying, but at least we have a choice.

A lot of fun things have been happening at work lately.  Earlier this year, we launched DeseretBook.com and recently launched Gospelink.com as well.  You may have noticed my previous post where I tested the new DeseretBookTV widget.  We are now browsing through YouTube and finding all of our favorite, LDS-related YouTube.com clips.  LDS and Christians alike will enjoy many of the postings.

Besides the wonderful new technology we are creating, I just received a great coupon for anyone who is planning on buying an LDS-related gift this Christmas season.  It’s 25% any item.  There are also coupons for 50% and 75% off some of DeseretBook’s finer gifts such as the History of the Church Commemorative Edition.  Feel free to print out the coupon and send it to your friends:  http://www.deseretbook.com/friendsandfamily.

UPDATE:  The friends and family coupon has expired, but here’s a new one good through this Friday (December 19th).  It’s not available online so you’ll have to go to any of the stores and spend $50 and pick any book, cd or dvd for half off.  I believe scriptures do not apply.  Here’s the coupon.  You don’t have to print it out, just ask the sales associate about the special offer.

 DeseretBook.com has just released DBtv at http://deseretbook.com/video.  It’s a safer place to watch LDS-related media.  We just created a small widget so you can post our video clips on your website or blog.

Brought to you by DeseretBook.com

Finally, after working for 9 months straight, we are launching DeseretBook.com at work.  Check out the new site at http://deseretbook.com.  Don’t forget to set up an account and play the game.  Write reviews, sign up for email lists, and browse the site to earn passport stamps.  Collect three of a kind and you’ll win a really cool prize. 

I haven’t written a post on here for quite a while.  Things have been pretty crazy with my work at DeseretBook.com.  We’ve launched the new retail site as beta and it should be replacing the old system within the next couple of weeks.  That project has been really long, but very fulfilling.  There’s quite a few updated and new features on the site along with a killer new design.  Feel free to check it out.

Besides that, I’ve been preparing myself for Ko Dan Ja Shim Sa, which is an 8 day test to become a 4th dan in Soo Bahk Do.  I’m also testing for my Sa Bom which denotes a “master-level instructor”.  The dates are set for August 14-22 which is in less than two weeks!

So those two items have made blogging really hard to do lately.  My wife on the other hand has started her own blog about our family.  She’s done a really nice job.  I hope everyone will check it out and make a few comments (she loves comments).  http://familiacorrales.blogspot.com.

This past weekend I was in Portland, Oregon attending Rails Conference 2008.  It was a great event and I learned a lot.  The event lasted from Thursday to Sunday and I was able to attend quite a few tutorials, sessions, and presentations.  There were nearly 2000 rails developers in attendance!   I was impressed with the Conference Center and the catered meals that were provided.  I thought the event was very organized.

What really stood out for me was the presentation on Rails 2.1 which was made available over the weekend.  Rails 2.1 has a lot of great new features including better caching, gem dependencies, and time zone support.  One new addition that really struck my attention was versioned migrations.  A time stamp will now be at the beginning of the migration filename.  Having version control to my migrations will save me a lot of headaches.

Now you can do this:

script/generate migration one
      create  db/migrate/20080402122512_one.rb

The number at the end is a time stamp.  You can then retrack your steps by typing:

rake db:migrate:up VERSION=20080402122512

One other cool addition is the modification to ActiveRecord.  Say you wanted to find all your blog posts.  The command would be Post.find(:all).  With Rails 2.1, we’ll be able to simply write Post.all and Post.first.  Seems pretty intuitive.

I know it’ll probably take a little bit of work to upgrade my applications, but you gotta hand it to the Rails Team.  Version 2.1 is awesome!

A new type of scam is running through the U.S. and people are actually falling for it.  Read below:

Ricki Brown
Control Specialist
Willingboro PDC
Ext. 2045
JURY DUTY SCAM:

This has been verified by the FBI (their link is also included below).

Please pass this on to everyone in your email address book.

It is spreading fast so be prepared should you get this call. Most of us take those summons for jury duty seriously a new and ominous kind of fraud has surfaced.
The caller claims to be a jury coordinator. If you protest that you never received a summons for jury duty, the scammer asks you for your Social Security number and date of birth so he or she can verify the information and cancel the arrest warrant.

Give out any of this information and bingo, your identity was just stolen.
The fraud has been reported so far in 11 states, including New York , Oklahoma , Florida , Illinois , Texas and Colorado .

This (swindle) is particularly insidious because they use intimidation over the phone to try to bully people into giving information by pretending they are with the court system.
The FBI and the Federal Court System have issued nationwide alerts on their web sites, warning consumers about the fraud.

Snopes site: says this is real fraud.

http://www.snopes.com/crime/fraud/juryduty.asp<http://www.snopes.com/crime/fraud/juryduty.asp>;

FBI site: warns about the fraud.

So I just updated a project to RAILS 2.0. There’s been a few stumbles on the way, but the main issue I came across was Sessions. It seems that the RAILS team has decided to move away from file-system sessions to cookie sessions. Cookies seem to be much faster than the old file system. The only draw back is that it forces you to utilize session variables as intended…sparingly. Cookies are generally limited to only 4K. There really isn’t any need for you to ever store more than this in your session anyway. It’s just not considered best-practices.

So if you are upgrading to Rails 2.0 and you get some errors, such as a 500 Error, be sure to check how you are handling sessions. Regardless, you’ll need to add the following code into your environments.rb file (don’t forget to restart your server):

config.action_controller.session = { 
  :session_key => ‘_my_app_session‘, 
  :secret      => ‘hashed_key_of_at_least_30_characters‘ 
}

If you want to read the documentation, here’s the link: http://caboo.se/doc/classes/CGI/Session/CookieStore.html .

For a really good discussion on Sessions and RAILS, go here.