Brian Corrales

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

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.

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.

If you are experiencing an unusual ruby error after installing RMagick, before digging too deep, try not only rebooting your web server, but Windows itself.  That fixes a ton of possible errors that could result from a RMagick installation. The error I had was RMagick.so not found.

OK, it’s not a firewall issue like I thought.  I haven’t been able to log into skype all day.  I’ve looked at my firewall configurations, nothing.  Apparently, Skype is down for the day.  I also didn’t realize they came out with a new version.  I’m probably really behind, but the download is down as well.

I’ve been working on this for a long time.  I get this error when trying to work a sql statement like so:

@names = CommonGivenName.find(:all, :conditions => [ “common_given_names.name LIKE                                   #{params[:descendant][:given_name]}%’”])

I keep getting this error:  malformed format string.  I couldn’t figure out the problem, but apparently, Rails doesn’t like the % sign.  After adding a second one, the query ran just fine.  If anyone has any ideas on this, I’d be interested in learning.  I just know it works this way.

Alright, so my next post is technology based. I’ll get to some martial arts stuff soon I promise. Jimmy showed me this youtube video on these guys did a superb job at explaining the joys of Ruby on Rails development. Imagine setting up a database schema and throughout development you add a table here, or a column there. Your code and db schema evolve throughout the process. Then BAM, you need to revert your application code to a previous version. I’ve found it quite difficult to revert my db schema back to the same version. Well, Ruby on Rails has a nice module called migrations. Migrations are 100% Ruby code which can create your db schema for you. As you add tables, modify a column, or whatever you need to during the db schema lifecycle, migrations keep a record of every change you make and an easy way to revert at any time. Once migrations are set up, reverting is as easy as typing “rake db: migrate VERSION=10″.

Enjoy the film: