Christian Atheist Sermon For the New Year

"Enter you in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leads to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:
Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leads to life, and few there be that find it."
- Jesus, The Bible

I find this to be true, if you read it as Jesus commenting on *this* life as being one of joy or 'destruction'.

How many people destroy their opportunities for happiness through bad choices?

Most people I know are not happy most of the time.

Few people I know are truly happy.

But much of this unhappiness is not due to sin.

When we attempt to reach, or enforce, happiness, by designing a path for others to follow we are designing destruction.

What fulfills one person may not fulfill another.

We are not here to choose the paths others take, and yet due to cultural pressures many people follow our paths hoping to reap the same benefits, leaving their own desires, personalities, and talents to languish.

We should encourage everyone to explore what makes them happy, and to follow their own path.

Because the path to life is narrow. It is just wide enough for you alone. Your path to happiness is something you must find, and cannot be borrowed from someone else.

And that is my Christian (Atheist) sermon for this new year, 2013...

Atheism

Just letting the world know: I am now an atheist. I will expand this post later with reasons why, but I have recanted all my former beliefs I held as a Mormon.

I joined Twitter

http://twitter.com/galtzo

I'm twittered.

From boortz.com comes some sanity:

To All My Valued Employees,

There have been some rumblings around the office about the future of this company, and more specifically, your job. As you know, the economy has changed for the worse and presents many challenges. However, the good news is this: The economy doesn't pose a threat to your job. What does threaten your job however, is the changing political landscape in this country.

However, let me tell you some little tidbits of fact which might help you decide what is in your best interests.

First, while it is easy to spew rhetoric that casts employers against employees, you have to understand that for every business owner there is a back story. This back story is often neglected and overshadowed by what you see and hear. Sure, you see me park my Mercedes outside. You've seen my big home at last years Christmas party. I'm sure; all these flashy icons of luxury conjure up some idealized thoughts about my life.

However, what you don't see is the back story.

I started this company 28 years ago. At that time, I lived in a 300 square foot studio apartment for 3 years. My entire living apartment was converted into an office so I could put forth 100% effort into building a company, which by the way, would eventually employ you.

My diet consisted of Ramen Pride noodles because every dollar I spent went back into this company. I drove a rusty Toyota Corolla with a defective transmission. I didn't have time to date. Often times, I stayed home on weekends, while my friends went out drinking and partying. In fact, I was married to my business -- hard work, discipline, and sacrifice.

Meanwhile, my friends got jobs. They worked 40 hours a week and made a modest $50K a year and spent every dime they earned. They drove flashy cars and lived in expensive homes and wore fancy designer clothes. Instead of hitting the Nordstrom's for the latest hot fashion item, I was trolling through the Goodwill store extracting any clothing item that didn't look like it was birthed in the 70's. My friends refinanced their mortgages and lived a life of luxury. I, however, did not. I put my time, my money, and my life into a business with a vision that eventually, some day, I too, will be able to afford these luxuries my friends supposedly had.

So, while you physically arrive at the office at 9am, mentally check in at about noon, and then leave at 5pm, I don't. There is no "off" button for me. When you leave the office, you are done and you have a weekend all to yourself. I unfortunately do not have the freedom. I eat, and breathe this company every minute of the day. There is no rest. There is no weekend. There is no happy hour. Every day this business is attached to my hip like a 1 year old special-needs child. You, of course, only see the fruits of that garden -- the nice house, the Mercedes, the vacations... You never realize the back story and the sacrifices I've made.

Now, the economy is falling apart and I, the guy that made all the right decisions and saved his money, have to bail-out all the people who didn't. The people that overspent their paychecks suddenly feel entitled to the same luxuries that I earned and sacrificed a decade of my life for.

Yes, business ownership has is benefits but the price I've paid is steep and not without wounds.

Unfortunately, the cost of running this business, and employing you, is starting to eclipse the threshold of marginal benefit and let me tell you why:

I am being taxed to death and the government thinks I don't pay enough. I have state taxes. Federal taxes. Property taxes. Sales and use taxes. Payroll taxes. Workers compensation taxes. Unemployment taxes. Taxes on taxes. I have to hire a tax man to manage all these taxes and then guess what? I have to pay taxes for employing him. Government mandates and regulations and all the accounting that goes with it, now occupy most of my time. On Oct 15th, I wrote a check to the US Treasury for $288,000 for quarterly taxes. You know what my "stimulus" check was? Zero. Nada. Zilch.

The question I have is this: Who is stimulating the economy? Me, the guy who has provided 14 people good paying jobs and serves over 2,200,000 people per year with a flourishing business? Or, the single mother sitting at home pregnant with her fourth child waiting for her next welfare check? Obviously, government feels the latter is the economic stimulus of this country.

The fact is, if I deducted (Read: Stole) 50% of your paycheck you'd quit and you wouldn't work here. I mean, why should you? That's nuts. Who wants to get rewarded only 50% of their hard work? Well, I agree which is why your job is in jeopardy.

Here is what many of you don't understand ... to stimulate the economy you need to stimulate what runs the economy. Had suddenly government mandated to me that I didn't need to pay taxes, guess what? Instead of depositing that $288,000 into the Washington black-hole, I would have spent it, hired more employees, and generated substantial economic growth. My employees would have enjoyed the wealth of that tax cut in the form of promotions and better salaries. But you can forget it now.

When you have a comatose man on the verge of death, you don't defibrillate and shock his thumb thinking that will bring him back to life, do you? Or, do you defibrillate his heart? Business is at the heart of America and always has been. To restart it, you must stimulate it, not kill it. Suddenly, the power brokers in Washington believe the poor of America are the essential drivers of the American economic engine. Nothing could be further from the truth and this is the type of change you can keep.

So where am I going with all this?

It's quite simple.

If any new taxes are levied on me, or my company, my reaction will be swift and simple. I fire you. I fire your co-workers. You can then plead with the government to pay for your mortgage, your SUV, and your child's future. Frankly, it isn't my problem any more.

Then, I will close this company down, move to another country, and retire. You see, I'm done. I'm done with a country that penalizes the productive and gives to the unproductive. My motivation to work and to provide jobs will be destroyed, and with it, will be my citizenship.

If you lose your job, it won't be at the hands of the economy; it will be at the hands of a political hurricane that swept through this country, steamrolled the constitution, and will have changed its landscape forever. If that happens, you can find me sitting on a beach, retired, and with no employees to worry about....

Signed,

Your boss

CSV Pirate

I needed a way to handily create CSVs anytime I want to because I have clients that ask for reports of data all the time. So I wrote a plugin and then turned it into a gem!

The source is written in Piratey Ruby.

So check my source =)

http://github.com/pboling/csv_pirate

Sanitize Email: Never worry about sending email in development again

SanitizeEmail
=============

This plugin fills a gaping hole I have found in every one of the Rails projects I've worked on.

SanitizeEmail allows you to play with your application's email abilities without worrying that emails will get sent to actual live addresses.

This is the problem I have with site after site:

1) I have a production site with live data.
2) I dump the live data and securely transfer it to another machine (rync -e ssh), and import it using scripts that I will soon open source
3) On this separate machine (staging, or development) I run tests, and test various features.
4) I usually want the emails to get sent from these non-production evnironments so I can verify what they look like when sent,
but I don't ever want to risk them getting sent to addresses that are not mine.

So I wrote this plugin! :P

It is an "install it and forget it" type plugin that requires very little setup. It includes some very innocuous monkey patching of ActiveRecord::Base to work its magic.


Install
=======

./script/plugin install git://github.com/pboling/sanitize_email.git

Setup
=====

It only requires a few lines of configuration:

Rails 1.x:
Add to bottom of environment.rb

Rails 2.x:
Use an initializer, stick it in any initializer file, or create a new one for sanitize_email

Add this bit and customize for your app:

    #Settings for sanitize_email plugin:
    #Overrides the recipients of all outgoing mail in local environments
    ActionMailer::Base.sanitized_recipients = "developer@example.com"

    #Overrides the BCC of all outgoing mail in local environments, 
    # but only if a BCC is specified on the message
    ActionMailer::Base.sanitized_bcc = "developer@example.com"
    #Or you can override bcc's with a nil value thereby ignoring the bcc in mail sent from the local_enviroments
    #ActionMailer::Base.sanitized_bcc = "developer@example.com"

    #Overrides the CC of all outgoing mail in local environments, 
    # but only if a CC is specified on the message
    ActionMailer::Base.sanitized_cc = "developer@example.com"
    #Or you can override cc's with a nil value thereby ignoring the cc in mail sent from the local_enviroments
    #ActionMailer::Base.sanitized_cc = nil

    #These are the environments whose outgoing email BCC, CC and 
    # recipients fields will be overridden!  All environments not listed will be treated as normal.
    ActionMailer::Base.local_environments = %w( development test )

But wait there's more:

Let's say you have a method in your model that you can call to test the signup email.
You want to be able to test sending it to any user at any time... but you don't want
the user to ACTUALLY get the email. A dilemna, yes? Not anymore!

All your mailers get a force_sanitize clas method which takes precedence over the environment override.

When force_sanitize is nil it will not be used by sanitize_email to detrmine if it should override the recipients, bcc, and cc


Example
=======

So here's how you can use force_sanitize to override the override.

Even if you set:
ActionMailer::Base.local_environments = %w( development )

And are in the development environment, you can override the override anywhere in your code.

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  def test_signup_email_me_only
    UserMailer.force_sanitize = true
    UserMailer.deliver_signup_notification(self)
    UserMailer.force_sanitize = nil
  end

  def test_signup_email_user_only
    UserMailer.force_sanitize = false
    UserMailer.deliver_signup_notification(self)
    UserMailer.force_sanitize = nil
  end

  #this third method would conditionally use the overridden recipients based on current Rails environment
  def test_signup_email_environment
    UserMailer.deliver_signup_notification(self)
  end
 
end

Load the console with ruby script/console and regardless of what environment you are in:

User.find(4).test_signup_email_me_only

and the email will have it's recipients, bcc, and cc overridden to be whatever you set the sanitized values to be.
Then if you want to send it to the actual user, instead of yourself

User.find(4).test_signup_email_user_only

That's it! Enjoy!

Copyright (c) 2008 Peter H. Boling of 9thBit LLC
Released under the MIT license

BrowserWar (or how to fight IE*)

A BrowserWar is coming soon to an interweb near you!

The source is available on Github, or there's my fork of it.

Matt Long, of Sagebit, and I wrote it over the past few days. It will kick crappy browsers right in the face!!!

Fork and tweak to your heart’s content! Please send pull requests if you find any bugs or new features.

It is the first open source project Sagebit has released on our new website.


Soon we'll release a Ruby on Rails plugin that gives you a neat helper method to set up a browser war in your view templates to fight IE, or whatever other browser you have a vendetta against.

Example usage (edit bottom of browserWar.js, or can be called within a

tag in HTML files):

browserwar.setup();
browserwar.klass('', 'browser_warning', true);
browserwar.message('You are using ' + browserwar.browser_display_name + " " + BrowserDetect.version + '. To get the best experience from this site we suggest you upgrade your browser.');
browserwar.position('90px','0px','200');
browserwar.linkcolors('blue','red','purple')
browserwar.style('200px','20px','8px ridge #CE8DAD','#fff','#000');
browserwar.fight('Explorer', 6);
browserwar.fight('iCab');
browserwar.run();

Sweet! IE will lose the war!