Oh Good Lord in heaven, forgive me: I've started a new blog.Many of you know I've long had a passion for churches and the software they use. I have plans to challenge the notion of what good church software should be doing. I have ideas for making better tools to aid management, shepherding and engagement. I want desperately to sit down and just start hacking on a new product, but the older and wiser part of me (I did just turn 30 this year, you know) understands that I should have a plan, or at least, you know, a clue about what I'm going to do. I hope to make the blog a place where I publicly share my ideas and opinions and get my assumptions tested a bit. I don't pretend to know everything about making great church software, but I like to think I am in a unique position, being both a long-time, committed volunteer in a strong church, a decent engineer, and a geek who can communicate (maybe :-). So, lacking further ado, I present to you: <a href=“http://Church.

Introducing jqtal, my tiny jQuery plugin that provides a different way of doing client side HTML templating. jqtal is different because it is a part of and lives alongside the HTML itself. An example might help: The plugin uses HTML5 data- attributes to embed data necessary for content insertion. Whereas in a normal template language, you might have something like:<input name="first_name" value="{{ person.first_name }}"/>...in jqtal, you do this instead:<input name="first_name" data-val="first_name"/>Now isn't that pretty!!!?I'll leave explanation of all the syntax to the fairly extensive README. Go check it out.Of course, there's nothing new under the sun, and indeed this idea is stolen shamelessly from Zope's TAL (Template Attribute Language) that I used back in the day. In fact, it was one of the few things I actually liked about Zope.I hope you enjoy it too!

Hey friends, I wanted to let you know I will be giving a presentation on Backbone.js at the next TulsaWebDevs meet-up. For any of you using more than the tiniest amount of JavaScript in your web-based applications, Backbone.js may be something to consider. Backbone brings structure and organization to the client-side that we've long had in MVC frameworks on the server. Here are some benefits:Stores data in specialized data "models" instead of directly on the DOM."Views" give you good separation of presentation from the data layer."Controllers" map url hash fragments to discreet actions.Very lightweight, less than 10kb.Doesn't assume much about your UI or your backend data store.I'll be walking through a sample app and demonstrating use with Rails as a backend (or you can be easily use the server framework of your choice). I'll also give an overview of Underscore.js, a related product of the guys at DocumentCloud, used within Backbone.You do not have to be a JavaScript whiz kid to need something like Backbone. If your last bit of JavaScript reminded you of a dish from Spaghetti Warehouse, then Backbone may be for you!TulsaWebDevs next meeting will be on Monday, May 9th at the Tulsa Collaboratorium at 6pm. Hope to see you there!Update: The meeting was awesome last night -- our largest meeting to date -- 14 people! Surprisingly, I think most people enjoyed my presentation and incoherent rambling.You can view the source code for Crk and my Backbone.js slides.

Red Dirt Ruby Conference in nearby Oklahoma City was even better this year than last year, and that’s saying a lot. The format of RDRC is unlike any other conference I’ve attended. The key difference: each speaker (excepting keynote speakers) only talks for 18 minutes and that’s it. Speakers are grouped, four at a time, into a theme. This year’s themes (for day one, which is all I was able to attend) were Ruby Implementations, Rails 3 Extensions, Rails Redux, and JavaScript. So in all, I saw 16 presentations in a single day, plus keynotes!

I won’t bother explaining to my regular readers what these two things are. If you need this, then you know… ;-) I know that both SASS and Compass can be setup to “watch” a directory and auto-compile when files are changed, but it seemed a waste to me to have another thing I have to remember to launch. This hack piggybacks on Jammit’s include_stylesheets helper method and compiles and .scss files in the public/stylesheets directory if they’ve changed since last time.

Just got done watching this excellent discussion of Ruby hashes, associative arrays, testing, and Ruby culture.Link. James is an excellent force of enlightenment and encouragement in our little community, and I'm proud that he's also an Okie. Go watch this video.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

I created a free micro instance on Amazon EC2 a few weeks ago. Today I remembered it and thought I would tinker around a little, only to find out that when I logged into AWS console, I had to "re-activate" my account using a phone number. Hmmm, that's weird. I distinctly remember doing that two weeks ago. So I jumped through the hoops and got logged in again to discover that my instance was gone, my security group was gone, and my elastic ip was gone. Gone. No trace whatsoever.

If you're running a Linux desktop in an otherwise Windows environment, winexe may be something you'll enjoy.Winexe allows you to execute commands from a Linux machine on a remote Windows machine, as if you're sitting at the Windows command prompt. Think of the possibilities! Recently, I found a way to get it to compile on my beloved Ubuntu Maverick (it broke when I dist-upgraded for some reason), and I thought I'd share. Winexe doesn't have a Debian package that I'm aware of, and getting documentation on how to make it compile is spotty at best. The official SF page might be the obvious destination to find out how to get it, but alas, it no workie. Fortunately, the peeps at Zenoss got your back. Here's the scoop: (The patch is necessary to fix a tiny typo in winexe/service.c – if it doesn't apply properly, chances are good the typo has been fixed since this blog post.) Once you've compiled, now for some fun! Never again must you VNC into a Windows box just to restart a service! I even have a script that remotely executes a "git pull" and then restarts all the relevant Windows services. Poor man's deploy FTW!!1

Today, my small patch to Rails was applied by the core team. This is only my second contribution to Rails, so I’m fairly stoked about it being accepted. This will allow you to pass a block to the default_scope method in ActiveRecord. It doesn’t sound like much, but opens up some wonderful possibilities. First, a review of what default_scope does: The first call to Person.all applies the default scope and adds a where clause that returns only non-deleted folks.