I received the dreaded email from Pandora.com this past week detailing how they will soon be beginning to limit users to 40 hours of streaming music per month. If you want more than that, only $0.99 for the rest of the month. Or, you can have uncapped, high quality, uninterrupted music with no ads for a mere $36 per year. As a bonus, they’ll throw in a desktop application, so you don’t even need to have a browser open to enjoy the music.

40 hours a month sounds like a lot of music, and it is. However, I always have Pandora on in the background while I’m at work and much of the time whilst at home cooking, browsing the interwebs, or working on my bike. Apparently that puts me in the 10% bracket of users that normally exceed this 40 hour cap.

When Pandora introduced audio ads intermixed with your songs a few months ago, it began to frustrate me (likely because they were all the same commercial, from the US Govt about traveling to Canada). I said to myself I would gladly pay a small amount per month to listen to Pandora ad free, and others probably would as well. At the time, I didn’t know about Pandora One.

Now that they are forcing my hand, I have gladly signed up for the Pandora One service and it has so far been wonderful. High quality streaming music with desktop applications running on my Mac at work, and on my Vista Laptop and Ubuntu Desktop at home!

If you are having difficulty installing the Pandora One application on linux, see this post about properly setting up the Adobe Air installer.

Overall, I think more companies should follow the model that Pandora has decided to take. You will likely fail if you try and force all of your users to switch over to subscription only, but many of your users would prefer to pay a small premium to utilize your service without the advertisements (with some bonuses to boot!). Sometimes ads just don’t pay the bills for your heaviest users, and this is a fantastic way to solve that problem.

As many in the Rails community, our team has begin using the latest and greatest version of Ruby on Rails (2.3). We’ve been using v2.3 to develop our new Rails apps and everything is great. Great, that is, until we try to deploy to our application server.

You see, Our team runs multiple applications on the same server: apps.domain.com/app_1 apps.domain.com/app_2 etc..
We launch mongrel with something like:

  mongrel_rails start --prefix /app_1

This has always worked for us, but when we tried to deploy an application with Rails 2.3 we ran into a problem. A big one. Buried down in Mongrel’s code, the following code lies:

  ActionController::AbstractRequest.relative_url_root = ops[:prefix] if ops[:prefix]

This code hooks into Rails, telling it to add the subdirectory that you’re deploying to (app_1, app_2, etc) to the paths that Rails generates for you (root_url and the like). The problem is ActionController::AbstractRequest has been removed from Rails 2.3.

Seeing as the last update to Mongrel was over a year ago, we’re not very optimistic of the Mongrel team getting a fix for this out anytime soon. We also, can’t simply patch our version of mongrel, because it is also used by Rails apps around from before v2.3. Instead, we decided to temporarily hack around the problem.

I present abstract_request.rb

module ActionController
  class AbstractRequest
    def relative_url_root=(path)
      ActionController::Base.relative_url_root = path
    end
    def relative_url_root
      ActionController::Base.relative_url_root
    end
  end
end

Placing this little guy the lib/action_controller/ directory of your rails app will gracefully allow Mongrel to still make its call to AbstractRequest, hopefully refraining from breaking anything else.
So if you’re like us and are deploying multiple rails apps to subdirectories, or even if you just want to deploy a single rails app to a subdirectory, you’re likely going to run into this problem.

Things are slowly coming to an end with my study abroad program. I’ve got 2 short weeks of internship left, and just 3 weeks of classes including exam week. It is striking at how quickly the entire experience has passed. I suppose that happens when you’re taking in new cultures, seeing new cities, and making new friends.
At my internship, they have a procedure involving hyperperfusion, used to increase blood pressure to the far extremities (toes / feet) of the legs and stimulate arterial growth. Involved in this procedure, is a tube that connects the femoral artery to a pump external of the body. This tube is sewed to the artery and passes through a wound in the skin. I was tasked with making some design modifications for this tube to be used in a cardiac application, in which it would be connected to the subclavian artery for the extent of a cardiac bypass surgery. On Monday, I will construct a prototype for this assembly, which will hopefully be shipped off to the surgeon for approval, bringing the design cycle to a near complete finish.
In classes, I gave a presentation in International Business this week with Alicia, on Woolworths Limited (no connection to the US Woolworths company) and had a research paper due in Sociology today. That concludes the major projects for my classes. I have a journal portfolio for my internship to complete and then just exams to study for.
CAPA is putting on a Thanksgiving dinner for us students on Thanksgiving Day (local time, for simplicity). We will get a proper Thanksgiving meal catered by the Billy Blue School of Culinary Arts. Turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and gravy will all be featured. There is a battle between Pumpkin and Pecan pie at the moment, I’m rooting for Pecan and may bake my own if Pumpkin wins out!
I bought plane tickets this evening for a trip with Stephanie to New Zealand from December 5th – 10th. We’re flying to Christchurch, on the Southern Island, and will be looking to partake in some lovely hikes and tours of the glaciers and mountainous surroundings. Perhaps a Lord of The Rings tour is in order (how cool would a tour of Hobbiton be?!) but may be pricey. Luckily the exchange rate is pretty good for us at the moment (~0.61USD:1AUD) giving us cheap flights and the NZ$ is pretty weak against the dollar at the moment as well (0.55USD:1NZD).
My parents are coming to visit me! They will arrive in Sydney on December 7th, while I’m in New Zealand. I’ll be meeting up with them, taking them around Sydney and then we’ll be off to explore another city or two. I’m rooting for Melbourne and then somewhere a little North for SCUBA diving. They’ll be in town until the 20th, and I depart for home on the 21st, just in time to recuperate for Christmas, then moving to back Minneapolis and into my new apartment with my new roommate, Jeff.

I register for next semesters classes in an hour. I’m looking to graduate in either 2 or 3 more semesters, depending on some small factors. I can do 2 semesters, but I’m weighing the pros and cons of a December vs Spring graduation and the ability to take additional technical electives that would help me in my major.

I suppose that is all I have for now. Cheers.

Life just won’t stand still for me, no matter how hard I wish it to.

I just got back from a 3 day / 2 night liveaboard dive trip through Prodive Cairns. It was absolutely thrilling! We did 4 dives the first day, 4 dives the second day, and 3 dives the last day. That includes 2 night dives the first two days.
While we were on the way out to the Great Barrier Reef I opted to join the Advanced Open Water training class that was going on during the trip. I joined several other students (ages ranging from 20 to 50) and did 5 training dives: Night dive, Deep dive, Underwater Navigation, Naturalist, and Underwater Photography. I would much have liked to do the Peak Buoyancy Control dive, but unfortunately they didn’t have all of the right equipment on board for that.

The diving was phenomenal, with perfect 26°C water somehow I was the only one to not wear a wetsuit the entire time. The visibility was good for most of the dives, and luckily this part of the Reef is largely thriving. I didn’t see any sort of bleached or dead coral while I was there, aside from what looked like natural life cycle deterioration.

For all of my dives, I buddied up with Nikolas, one of the other Advanced Open Water students. We had a good time together, and it was a good partnership, us both holding roughly the same number of dives and having near equivalent skill levels under the water. Together we saw huge schools of fish, a handful of sea turtles, a few small rays, and some whitetip and great reef sharks, along with experiencing diving at night for the first time. There were, of course, a few hiccups along the way. On one of the later dives, we got disoriented with our position from the current and surges we were swimming with, and set course back to the boat. After a long swim, we were running low on air and decided to surface to get our bearings, and probably snorkel it back. Good thing we did! We had actually swam under the boat, missing the anchor lines, and swam a good 200m past it! We weren’t the only ones, though; a few others surfaced around the same spot that we had once we got back to the boat. I also lost my buddie, for the first time. We were swimming amongst many coral heads, and we found a small swim through. I opted to go through while he opted to go over and when I came out on the other side, he was no where to be found! I frantically went back over the ridge, around several of the other boomies, all the while looking for his bubbles. I looked at my watch, okay… 1 minute then you surface. I swam, I looked, I panicked. 90 seconds later, I do one last 360 and there he his. Waving at me, looking at me and saying “Hey, I’m over here dummy!”. We finished off the dive, it was a little shorter than planned, I burned through air a little faster while looking for him. When we got back to the boat he said he could see me the whole time, but I swam away from him when I tried to find him. Apparently in my “panic”, I didn’t do a full 360 turn when I looked for him before swimming off. Lesson Reinforced: keep calm, relaxed, and focused.
During another dive, we were swimming through some surges and we got knocked into eachother. Completely accidentally, a small movement of Nikolas’ hand yanked the regulator straight out of my mouth. Very calmly, I looked at him in the face to say, “hey! I was using that…” and patiently waited for him to return my regulator to me, since he could see it better than I could (it went being me). Luckily, he returned it to me before I ran out of breath (of course, I always had my backup about 3″ from my mouth), and we leisurely continued our time amongst the fishies.

It was a great experience, I took some decent photos along the way, and I’m glad that I did my Advanced Certification, getting some extra experience with underwater navigation.
Photos From My Dives

A short film, starring Peter Leonhardt (Mom, don’t watch this!).

This weekend began with a bit of a mini freak out. You see, I was supposed to leave for Port Stephens on a train leaving from Central Station at 2:20, with the other seven people going up for the weekend. When I got home from my internship around 12:45, nobody was here. They had a test that lasted until 12:30, and I remember hearing somebody say they were coming back afterwords because they didn’t want to bring their luggage to class with them. So I figured that they would be around shortly. 1:15, 1:30, 1:45 come around and there is no sign of anybody yet. At this point, I am beginning to worry and think of all sorts of reasons that they might be delayed. Or had I misheard and we were taking a different train, or was nobody coming back to Georgia House?

Unfortunately, I knew very little of our actual travel plans besides we were taking a train, a bus, and ending up at a hostel in Port Stephens. This prohibited me from going to the station on hopping on the train myself. After all, what if I was the only person that had got on the train? I’d end up in Newcastle, but have no idea what bus I was supposed to take, nor where to take it! Perhaps there was a mix up with there class and we’ll be taking the 4:30 train instead, I thought. By the time 2:15 came around, it was obvious I wouldn’t be making the train. Of course, I am the only member of the group to not have a cell phone, and therefore completely hopeless to try and get a hold of.

I started looking online for how to get from Newcastle to Port Stephens, which bus, where the hostel was located and which train to hop on. Shortly after collecting this information, I headed out for the 5:15pm train leaving from Central, giving me about a 10 minute window to get off the train and catch the last bus from Newcastle to Port Stephens. So I bought my ticket at central and found my train, snuggled into a seat with all of my luggage, ready to embark on the 3 hour journey all by my lonesome.

The ride itself was very nice. It was quiet and not too crowded. I spent most of the time working on papers for the class associated with my internship (PELA) and ended up hammering out 2500 words (five 400-600 word papers) in about an hour. I enjoyed a nice sunset taking place behind the mountains as we were traveling over a lake, and soaked in the beauty of Australia, thinking about the weekend ahead. After getting to Newcastle, I found the last bus out of town and prepared for another hour worth of travel. Luckily, the bus driver knew my hostel by name and was able to drop me at a stop about a block away. After searching for 15-20 minutes, I finally found my friends, sitting in front of the television waiting for me.

One of the members of Team Bissel (our group name, apparently), Jackie Bissel, is interning at WakeUp!, a hostel in Sydney. Her boss is friends of the owners of the hostel at which we were staying. The owners were so kind and offered to drop us off at anywhere in the Port Stephens area that we wanted to go.
On Saturday, we headed up to Nelson Bay to go Kayaking. Our tour was at one, but we decided to head up to the beach a bit early and soak in some sun and take a quick dip before that. After taking a walk down the beach, one of the people that works at CAPA (Zara) met us at the beach, as she was in town for the weekend visiting her Grandma. We hung out with Zara and walked around the marina until our scheduled tour began. We had a wonderful time out on the water, paddling for about an hour and fifteen minutes into the bay. We stopped at a beach, had some biscuits (cookies) and some soda to refresh. There is where we spotted a dolphin a little ways off shore. The way back was a bit quicker and easier, with a slight current in our favor. We saw two more dolphins just behind our kayaks as we were turning into the marina. A successful kayaking trip, indeed.

We then headed to Zara’s grandmas house for an Aussie barbecue! We had chicken kebabs, prawns, and burgers, while drinking lost of wine and having an overall wonderful time.

Sunday we headed out to “the largest sand dunes in the southern hemisphere” at Marubri beach. There were caught a giant 4 wheeler bus that drove us up to the top of the dunes where we proceeded to go dune boarding for the next couple hours. It is a bit like snow boarding, only when you fall you get sand absolutely everywhere (though you don’t freeze). We caught some good wipeouts on video, and I’ll post that when I can. I’m still sore from my numerous face-plants and other falls. Sunday night we had another big feast, grilled chicken, bangers (sausages), and corn on the cob. We also all had about a bottle of wine. Then we met some Aussies who were also staying at the hostel and we started playing card games with them and drinking the night away. We found out that they were up there on holiday and are actually from around Sydney. So hopefully we’ll be able to meet up sometime in the city for drinks.

Coming up on the agenda, on Tuesday I have my midterm exam in International Business, along with some PELA assignments due. Thursday I have a 1000-word sociology paper due. However, after that I can start thinking about absolutely nothing but my Spring Break, which yes, is less than a week away! We (Team Bissel) leave on Saturday for Arlie Beach and Whitsundays, where we’ll be living aboard a world champion sail boat for 2 days and 2 nights, camping on the beaches of Whitsundays. After which we take a bus up to Cairns where I’ll be doing a 3 day / 2 night live-aboard dive trip out to the Great Barrier Reef, enjoying 11 spectacular dives ( and my first two night dives). A day of whitewater rafting, then its back to Sydney early Monday morning, where I’ll be supposedly 1/2 way done with my classes and internship. Yikes.

I’ve been far too busy enjoying myself Down Under these last few weeks to have time to update here. Lets see, where to begin…

Last weekend began on Friday night with a Georgia House (where I’m living) sponsored Sydney Harbour Cruise. We were privileged to ride aboard an all Aboriginal boat, with an Aboriginal crew. Their other boat is the first Aboriginal boat to completely circumnavigate Australia. They treated us to a fantastic time full of music, food, beer, and spectacular sites. We cruised around the inner harbours and made our way under the Sydney Bridge, past the Sydney Opera House, and eventually to Clark Island. This is a protected island, requiring special permissions to dock there. Once there, we were given a tour and told about the history of the island and the people that lived there, while watching a stunning sunset over Sydney’s CBD.

You can look at this photo album from the cruise.

The next day I took a trip to the Power House Museum near Darling Harbour. They have a wide range of exhibits ranging from influences of modern fashion, to a 100 years of Rugby League, Robotics, and Space Travel. I definitely enjoyed my time there, so much I spent nearly 6 hours there! They are having a Star Wars exhibit come early December, so I may just find myself back there before too long. After the museum we took a trip over to Max Brenner’s for the worlds best hot chocolate.

This past weekend involved a trip to the Hunter Vally Vineyards, about two hours north of Sydney. We arrived at the Hunter Valley YHA, the first hostel I’ve stayed at in my life, around 11:30am. After quickly checking in and dumping our stuff in our rooms, we headed out to the bus for our wine tasting tour.
Our first stop was the Dayton’s family vineyard. They run a fairly large operation, though they don’t export internationally, they do their own bottling and do some bottling for smaller neighboring vineyards. While there, we tried a sample of chardonnays, rieslings, ports and chocolate liquors. My favorites here were the Unwooded Chardonnay and the Traminer Riesling. The 12 year-old port was also the best port I’ve ever had, though not as good as these two wines. After the sampling, they took us on a quick tour of their bottling facilities, and the area where their wine club members get to do their sampling.
Our next stop was at a very small vineyard called Tinklers. Featured here was an adorable black lab, along with some wines. My top picks here were the Verdelho, a light sweet white, and the Volcanic Ash, a very light fruity wine with a hint of sweet. They also had quite a selection of fresh jams like apricot pumpkin.
After lunch, we stopped at a pretty well known vineyard, Rosemount. Rosemount is one of the larger wine producers in the Hunter Valley and is known in the international markets of the US and UK. The wines here were absolutely fantastic, with my favorites being their Traminer Riesling (I just realized as writing this that I already bought a Traminer Riesling!), and their very popular “O” (which is best served Over ice). Their 2007 stock of “O” sold out in 3 months, and they are expecting similar for their next harvest, hoping to eventually start exporting it to the US.
The last place that we stopped was the Hanging Tree vineyard, which by far had the most stunning views. Vineyards surrounded by small lakes all set in front of a breathtaking mountainous background. Unfortunately, none of the wines really struck me at this place, though they were mostly dry reds and as you can probably tell by now I tend to prefer fruity and sweet whites. They did have a very nice Cabernet with a hint of cinnamon, and a peppery merlot which I enjoyed small amounts of, but couldn’t have more than a glass of.

After our wonderful wine tasting, we headed back to the hostel. After hanging out pool side (freezing!), we got to make our own pizzas and have them cooked in a wood pizza oven! My pizza turned out amazingly, and everybody had a good time throwing together their own. After dinner we walked about 300m down the road to the local micro brewery and pub, Potters. It was karaoke night and it was packed! I think all of Hunter Valley showed up Saturday night.

Sunday morning started with a trip to the “Smelly Cheese Shop” where I acquired the most amazing Feta cheese I’ve ever had. It is Cow Feta with sundried tomatoes and garlic. It is absolutely delicious and I am addicted. I had to buy a jar, which I’ll hopefully be able to make last a little while. We ended up walking home (we got a ride there) and along the way had to walk past a roadkill Kangaroo. They really are akin to deer in the Midwest, as a hazard to motorists. The walk took an hour and a half, it was extremely scenic and I quite enjoyed it. It was nice to be able to walk and be out of the city, away from the noise, the people, the cars.
We went back to Potters Brewery for a 2pm brewery tour. This is by far the smallest operation I’ve ever seen. They had one 600L brew kettle, and a cooler that the group of us (15 on the tour?) barely fit into around the machinery and kegs they were storing. They did have some very nice selections however, my favorite being the Hunter Kölsch, a German style ale. After the tour we headed back to the hostel and relaxed until the bus came to whisk us back to the city from a weekend away that felt far too short.

It’s finally here: ActsAsCSVable!

Important Update! on June 25th, 2009
ActsAsCSVable is now on GitHub.com and all development has moved to git.
http://github.com/pjleonhardt/ActsAsCSVable/tree/master
Git Repository: git://github.com/pjleonhardt/ActsAsCSVable.git

History
I developed a plugin while working as a Rails Developer, CSVExportable, which was originally based off of some code from Bryan Helmkamp.

CSVExportable was good, but it was an evolutionary design. As such, it was hodgepodged together with no since of organization. I decided to rewrite the plugin from scratch, and design it a little bit better this time around (since I knew where I would end up this time around). It also needed a name change, since it does both CSV exporting and importing. I’ve seen a few Rails plugins that will do CSV exporting, but I haven’t found one that does both, or even importing. Importing is definitely tricky, but I think that if you follow a few guidelines, it can be useful in the right situations.

Installation
Subversion: Trunk | Stable v1.0 | Development Application
Project Management: Redmine

Usage

   #in your model
    acts_as_csv_exportable :fancy_naming, [{:first => "first_name"}, {:last => "last_name"}, {:email => "email_address"}, {:address => "mailing_address"}]
    acts_as_csv_exportable :detailed, [:first_name, :last_name, :email_address, :mailing_address, :formatted_date]
    acts_as_csv_exportable :default, [:id, :first_name, :last_name]

    acts_as_csv_importable :default, [:id, :first_name, :last_name]
    acts_as_csv_importable :new_projects, [:name, :details, :\owner_username]

    def formatted_date
      self.date.strftime("%Y/%M/%D")
    end

    def owner_username=(username)
      self.owner = Users.find_by_username(username)
    end

  # your contrller
  def index
    @people = Person.find(:all)

    respond_to do |wants|
      wants.csv { render :text => @people.to_csv(:columns => [:first_name, :last_name, :date_of_birth]) }
      # or
      wants.csv { render :text => @people.to_csv(:template => :fancy) }
      # or
      wants.csv { render :text => @peope.to_csv } #renders the :default template
    end
  end

  #/people/import
  def import
    file = params[:csv_uplodad]
    template = params[:upload_template]
    projects = Project.from_csv(file, template)

    if projects.all?(&:valid?)
      projects.each(&:save)
    else
      # Options options options...
      # 1) Save valid rows, and re-export invalid rows
      # 2) Save nothing, and tell user which rows were invalid
      # 3) Save nothing and tell them rows are invalid
      # 4) Up to you!
    end
  end

I only ask that if you use the plugin, let me know! I love to keep track of how its being used. The more response, the more likely I am to improve it and write more plugins! Leave a message below, or send me an email. I’d love to hear your thoughts for improvement, as well.

Today’s entry has tons of links, be sure to check out all of the pictures that they lead to!

This past weekend entailed a trip to the glorious Blue Moutains of New South Wales (NSW). Luckily, it decided to pour all of saturday morning as we made our way through Sydney. We stopped at Sydney Olympic park, a planned stop, for a new bus because the brakes on the one we departed on were sketchy at best. Instead of walking around, enjoying the jumping water fountains, the stadium, etc, we huddled inside of a Gloria Jean’s coffee house, trying to stay warm.
After hopping on our new bus, we made our way to a National Wildlife Refuge, where we were able to pet koala, feed emu, and box kangaroo (picture coming)! I also got to see dingoes, wallabies, Inland Taipans (most poisonous snake in the world), and other Australian centric creatures.
Finally we climbed our way up to the top of the Blue Mountains, where we saw a spectacular array of fog, reminiscent of a recent trip up to Waimea Canyon, on Kauai, Hawaii. We decided to break for lunch, which was a welcome chance to warm up with some hot soup, along with fish and chips. Afterward, the weather decided to play nice and let us enjoy some of the stunning views of the Three Sisters, and another look out.

That night, we went to Sidebar, a bar/club located beneath WakeUp!, rated #1 hostel in the world, and also to Landsdowne Hotel on Broadway to soak up the local bar scene.

Monday afternoon and evening, a small group of us went on a walking tour of part of Sydney, walking from our house here in Redfern through Hyde Park, all the way up to the Harbour and the Sydney Opera House. After touching the opera house, and milling around a bit, we headed towards our original destination, the Sydney Harbour Bridge. We were on a mission to walk across the bridge today to see spectacular views of the Harbour and the Central Business District (CBD). Going across the bridge, I managed to snag a few good shots of the Opera House and Circular Quay (pronounced: key). We ended up grabbing some dinner at a Japanese place near the bottom of the northern pylons, after which we walked down to the waterfront to getting some views of the Harbour at night. There, it is where I took my favorite picture.

Be sure to follow my pictures on Flickr. (There are a lot of similar looking pictures as I just upload my whole camera. It would take too much time to sort through 100+ pictures every time I upload!)