A Peaceful Pet is a new concept in the art of animal love. Owner, Sandy Stutz, is a visual artist, National Certified Master Groomer, and a meditation teacher. She brings all of this under one roof. A unique concept in business, a grooming salon for cats and small dogs combined with a boutique, also featuring a gallery of original, environmentally friendly artwork related to animals. Please join me as well as the artists, Deborah Bright and STUTZ, during our reception and grand opening. Refreshments will be served.

A very nice lady from Arizona found me through FaceBook and decided to hire me to do a pet portrait to give her parents as a Christmas present. She was very excited when she saw the finished piece. She said that she appreciated how I captured the hungry, menacing look in his eyes. Edgar was found as a stray and he resembles a bobcat. Edgar makes a beautiful model for a pet portrait.

I had a great time this weekend at DrupalCamp Austin, 2009. DrupalCamp was a "Barcamp" styled meetup with a strong emphases on Drupal. At the camp I was introduced to Drush. Drush is the Drupal Shell and provides tools for managing your Drupal projects with shell scripts. I can see great use for Drush at the office to help quickly create new Drupal sites in a standardized fashion. It can also be used to run maintenance scripts.

Other topics included Panels 3, Drupal SEO, and JQuery UI being added to Drupal 7 core. The improvements to Panels in Panels 3 are significant. The prevailing wisdom at the conference was that Panels 3 will replace blocks for most cases.

During the keynote talk, they performed a basic DISC personality assessment on everyone at the camp. The test performed was way over simplified (two questions) and the results over generalized. It was interesting seeing how people reacted to the test. One result that was curious is while about 75% of the attendees consider themselves to be introverts, the conference had their happy hour at a karaoke bar. That did not seem well thought out. Then again, several of us stayed their until 2 in the morning.

Overall, the camp was fun. I met a lot of good people. And I hope to go to another camp soon.

I have updated my cafepress site with my original watercolor paintings, which make beautiful holiday gifts as the images on holiday cards, t-shirts, tote bags, coffee mugs, magnets and buttons. The "Reaching for Mistletoe" painting is one of the most popular images for this holiday season.

This week I improved the Amazon wishlist support in PriceChirp. One of the cool features of PriceChirp from the beginning has been how easy it is to import an Amazon wishlist into PriceChirp. The only problem with this feature is it was an all or nothing proposition. Now, we have the ability to view our wishlists in PriceChirp and select which items we wish to import. The old feature of importing everything is still thee, but now we have options.

To see this feature in action, log into your PriceChirp account and do a wishlist search. This is done by searching for the email address associated to your Amazon wishlist. Once your wishlists are displayed, you can select "view wishlist" to get a listing of your items. From this page you can easily select which item to import into your personalized tracker.

Have fun!

PriceChirp is growing. This week I added support to allow people to track prices and be alerted of changes for all the international Amazon sites. This includes Amazon US, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the UK. Just select the location of Amazon you are interested in searching, and use PriceChirp like normal. It was designed to make it easy to manage products from multiple sites at once. I'm hoping this design decision will pay off if in the future I add more vendors to PriceChirp.

Today I upgraded from Drupal 5.20 to 6.14. I've been dreading the upgrade to the Drupal 6.x series for almost 9 months because I had no idea how hard it would be or what I would lose in the migration.

The instructions on the Drupal site are fine, but they didn't prepare me for what would be different.

• Back everything up
• Deselect all non-core modules
• Select a core template
• Move the old Drupal version out of the way
• Install the new version of Drupal
• Copy your /files and /sites directory from the old installation to the new installation
• Copy other misc files like your robots.txt to the new installation
• Fix the /sites/default/settings.php
• Run the update script -- Pray

If all has gone well, you have an upgraded core. Now for the tedious part. Start upgrading each module one at a time, running your update script between each one.

After upgrading every module that had a Drupal 6.x version, here is what I lost:

I created a module I am also using both in rails and for some batch processing outside of rails. In order to ensure my data was formatted the same with both environments, I needed to figure out how to get access to the active_view helper number_to_currency outside of rails. Here is how I did it:

require 'rubygems'
require 'action_view'
 
def number_to_currency(number, options = {})
  ActionView::Base.new.number_to_currency(number, options)
end

Found an issue with open-uri because today Amazon's API is wonky. The same issue will occur when accessing any remote data via open-uri (like a RSS feed) if the data source is going to slow. The relevant part of my ruby code looks like:

  begin
    doc = Nokogiri(open(api_url))
  rescue
    print "Connection failed: #{$!}\n"
    next
  end

For some reason, the rescue does not catch a timeout error.

/usr/lib64/ruby/1.8/timeout.rb:54:in `rbuf_fill': execution expired (Timeout::Error)

Explicitly catching the timeout error fixes the code.

  begin
    doc = Nokogiri(open(api_url))
  rescue Timeout::Error
    print "Timeout::Error: #{$!}\n"
    next
  rescue
    print "Connection failed: #{$!}\n"
    next
  end

Good to know, as you never know when your remote data provider will be slow.

Gravatar is the globally recognized avatar run by the folks who run Wordpress.com.

Your Gravatar is an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things like comment or post on a blog. This is done by associating an image to the users email address. Adding Gravatar to PriceChirp seemed like a fun thing to do.

The API is very simple, so adding it to a Ruby on Rails site is easy.

First, add a few lines to your application-helper.rb:

  def gravatar_url_for(email, options = {})
    url_for({
      :gravatar_id => Digest::MD5.hexdigest(email),
      :host => 'www.gravatar.com',
      :protocol => 'http://',
      :only_path => false,
      :skip_relative_url_root => true,
      :controller => '/avatar'
    }.merge(options)
    )
  end

You may also need to add: