On July 4th of last year, I watched with pride as many veterans of the army and navy paraded through Center street of our City of Provo. For the first time that I can remember, I was so touched that I shed tears of gratitude for the men and women before me who were willing to risk everything for family, for nation, and for freedom. It was an awesome sight!

Given that I have felt such deep gratitude for these soldiers and officers, it is strange to me that I am now publicly among the many who allege the events of 9/11, 2001 were far worse an atrocity than a terrorist attack on America–that it was actually an inside job.

I understand that this is no small accusation, nor is it something I would want to share with the brave military families who have fought for our freedom. And yet the burden of responsibility remains, and a satistactory explanation from the government has not been given.

Though it’s hard, and even painful, to hear or see these things, there is remarkable evidence against the official story. This evidence proliferates the internet and is available to those who want to know the truth. Let me share some examples.

UPDATE: As my understanding of events has become clearer, I have been better able to sort out fact from quack. I have updated the following list of links so as to endorse the facts in the 911 truth movement. In addition, some links have been removed in cases where I have found more poignant evidence.

An old friend of mine, Kevin Yockey, and I were chatting about life, jobs and responsibility. He mused that I hadn’t become a game programmer like we once thought. Instead, I became a web developer. Sometimes I feel the weight of responsibility as an income-earner, and realize it was probably for the better that I travelled this path. Kevin’s wisdom (increasing with the years) shone through with his next remark:

It’s a lot easier when you’re in school and don’t have to worry about making money. But if you can make it doing something you enjoy then you’ve found the perfect line between responsibility and childhood.

Isn’t that the case?

I just created a “blog” at inquiry.newsvine.com where we put our FamilyAnywhere.com press release / announcement. Check it out if you’re interested in how Family Anywhere got started.subsidized stafford loan 2008-2009apyday 2000 loanloan bank rajhi malaysia al personalloan amerization oftexas in 500 fiko loans carequlity 530 home fico loansloans insurers maplight ab orgfico score 500 for commercialloans financing Map

At the beginning of this year, I announced Family Connection, an open source, free, and easy-to-use family website built using Ruby on Rails.

Now it’s available as a hosted, very easy-to-set-up web app called Family Anywhere! It has the same Family News and Address Book features as the original, plus a new Photo Album that lets you browse all of the photos you’ve shared with your family. The hosted version is $9 per month, or less if you buy a year at a time.

For those who would like to just check out how it feels without going through the 2-minute sign-up process, log in to FamilyAnywhere.com/test and use “test” as the sign-in name and “password” as the password.

I’m proud to bring this program out in to the light of day, as it reflects some of my own desire to promote a better, more family-oriented world. I hope you enjoy it as much as our family does!

After James Cox sent me a patch to give TextMate Footnotes a much improved look, and my co-worker hacked something else up to get it to cooperate with our CSS and layout, I realized that there needed to be something done about this mess

In this release of Footnotes, you have a lot more flexibility in how the CSS styles will affect the output. For example, everything has an “id” tag, and several elements have a CSS class. In addition, the default styling is much improved, so you may not even want to change the styles. Note: If you’d like to use your own styles, turn off the automatic styles by adding this config line to the bottom of your environment.rb file: FootnoteFilter.no_style = true

Also, I’ve added some debug info to the footnotes. Now, you can view the params or session details by toggling the appropriate fieldset.

Get it using subversion at svn://syncid.textdriven.com/svn/opensource/textmate_footnotes/trunk, or install it with TextMate if you’re using the plugin installer that comes with the Rails bundle. (You need to be using subversion for this as well, unless you just want to wait until the next release of TextMate).

Update: Pete Yandell caught a bug for me early on–the controller URL leading back to TextMate had a doubled prefix. It’s fixed now. (Thanks, Pete.)

I had a doozy of a bug today: an “Album” model has_many “Track” objects, but calling album.tracks.clear was not deleting or destroying the associated tracks in spite of my having explicitly set :dependent => :destroy on the has_many association.

As it turns out, my object (the album) was being stored in the session, and therefore the associated tracks were also in the session. When I called album.tracks.clear, the foreign keys were nullified instead of the rows destroyed.

The solution: store album ids in the session instead of the whole object, and do an Album.find(session[:album_id]).

Just found this article while browsing popurls: Chris Kilmas writes about Simple JavaScript Debugging on webmonkey.

I like the timed log() and the inspect() functions he provides–something that every web developer has either invented or wished they’d had! (I’m a part of the latter group, so thanks, Chris.)

Along with many Rails developers, I’ve struggled to find a satisfactory database browsing and editing tool, particularly for MySQL. I’ve bounced back and forth between YourSQL and CocoaMySQL–preferring YourSQL’s more intuitive interface at times, and CocoaMySQL’s features at other times.

Recently however, with the development of the ColumnComments plugin, I decided to move on once again in search of the Ultimate Tool. I needed something that would give me the ability to add comments to mysql columns, preferably in a nice and intuitive GUI. I tried Navicat, but couldn’t figure out how to add comments.

Then I stumbled upon the lesser-known MySQL Query Browser written by the MySQL team and was quite surprised. At first, it appears to be a simple (and fast!) query tool, but upon further inspection, it’s quite possible to change table definitions by right-clicking on the tables and even add comments to the columns!

I prefer this tool over the MySQL Admin application as well, because of its lighter footprint and (in my experience) stability.

If you’d like to try it out, go on and dowload yourself a copy.

I just uploaded my latest Textmate bundle changes. Included in this release is a new feature I’ve dubbed “Intelligent Jump” (I suppose I may be over using the “intelligent” monicker, but it seems to fit once again).

This feature lets you move around your Ruby, HTML and XML code with ease. Check out the 1.5 MB screencast.

See my Textmate Bundle page for a full run-down of the bundle. (2 features now, woohoo!)