After doing so, I noticed that the context menu on my desktop was way screwed up. All the text had shifted over to the right and was unreadable.

See? WTF? The “MagicRotation” spam branding is pushing the text to the side. Luckily the solution was already on the web. Thank you megacorp search engine starting with a “G”

Turns out if you are running TortoiseGit and/or TortoiseSVN then you need to turn off the icons by adding some registry keys. These are safe additions but as always, backup your registry before attempting to mess with it.

Just add a DWORD entry at either “HKCU\Software\Tort​oiseSVN\ ShowContextMenuIcons” or “HKCU\Software\Tort​oiseGit\ ShowContextMenuIcons” depending on the programs you are using. It should have a hex or decimal value, doesn’t matter which, of “0″ (zero).

After that, just wait a few seconds and your context menu should be readable again, but without the icons for those programs. A small, and IMHO welcome, compromise that I can live with

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Chris Coyier over at CSS Tricks uses the following code in his .htaccess file to block visitors.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} !^71\.225\.113\.171
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} !^71\.185\.239\.212
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} !^69\.253\.223\.254
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/comingsoon\.html$
RewriteRule .* /comingsoon.html [R=302,L]


What he’s doing there is checking for specific IP addresses that are allowed to see the website but everyone else is sent to the “comingsoon.html” webpage. This is great for people who have specific IP addresses but if you’re behind a proxy like I am at work then everyone else with you behind that proxy can still see the site.

I find it much easier to redirect everyone but check for a custom cookie that I can set using the Webdeveloper Firefox extension. That way I can check to make sure that the redirect to the maintenance page is actually working. Here’s the relevant code that I use (taken from a RoR tutorial of old)

RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/maintenance.html -f
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !maintenance.html
RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} !^.*access_cookie=1.*$
RewriteRule ^.*$ /maintenance.html [L]


where the text “access_cookie” (sans quotes) would be whatever cookie name you want to use. I just create a “session cookie” set to a value of “1″ (or whatever you want to make it) and check for it’s existence.

That gets around the problem of DHCP granted or spoofed IP addresses. Sure a cookie is easy to add but if you make the name and/or value sufficiently difficult to guess, no one is getting in.

Now just add your cookie.

Note in the image that I have set it to be a “session cookie”. This helps when you forget to delete the cookie. Just close your tab (FF) or browser (IE), reopen it and the cookie will be gone.

Oh yeah. The other thing that my .htaccess code does is, on the first line, check for the existence of the “maintenance.html” file. I don’t want to have to add and remove this code everytime I want to take the site down. It’s much easier to just have this code permanently in my .htaccess file and then upload the file that people will see when the site is down. I then delete it when the site is ready to be reopened. This is all performed using a custom Capistrano command that I run when I’m ready to deploy a new version.

this is a sample of a line that would cause log_buddy to barf.  it just so happens to also be the line that causes the error. 

c:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/log_buddy-0.0.5/lib/log_buddy.rb:98:in `read_line'

the original line looked like this…

file, line_number = frame.split(/:/, 2)

the fix is to replace that line with

file, line_number = frame.reverse.split(/:/, 3)[1..2].map(&:reverse).reverse

yeah.  ugly, and maybe could be written better but it works for me.

now if only I could get log_buddy to output good inspections of objects I toss to it… like “current_user”.  I’m prolly using it wrong right now, but this isn’t helpful…

current_user = '#<User:0x47143d8>'

just saying. 

UPDATE: I monkeypatched log_buddy to fix this functionality. I created a “RAILS_ROOT/lib/log_buddy_extensions.rb” file with the following code.

class LogBuddy

  private

  # Return the calling line
  def self.read_line(frame)
    file, line_number = frame.reverse.split(/:/, 3)[1..2].map(&:reverse).reverse
    line_number = line_number.to_i
    lines = File.readlines(file)
    lines[line_number - 1]
  end

end

and I figured out that the “current_user” line above shouldn’t be …

d { current_user }

it should be

d { current_user.inspect }

that outputs what I want …

current_user.inspect = '#<User id: 1, login: "matte", email: "matte@localhost", crypted_password: "...", salt: "...", created_at: "2007-08-30 18:23:32", updated_at: "2008-07-08 18:57:45", remember_token: "...", remember_token_expires_at: "2008-07-22 18:57:45", name: "...", password_reset_code: nil, company_id: 2, active: true>'

XSendFile on
XSendFileAllowAbove on

The website needs to know you want to use the module. Duh.

While researching our drive today I was looking around the new turn-by-turn street view added to Google directions. take a look at what the gas prices were the day these pics were taken. gah!

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