Archive

Ahu and I went on the 2nd Annual Chicago Luxury Home Tour on September 17th. The Tour is sort of like a mass open house for new luxury homes. A number of builders in the Chicago area open up various homes to the general public. The homes are typically over 5,000 square feet in size and priced over $1 million. The Tour is, for many people, the only way to see first-hand inside the homes of the very wealthy. For those who are very wealthy, it is a chance to see the craftsmanship of these builders and to help determine which builder would be the right builder for their new dream home.

ForkBender.com now has a new search box! The Narrative CMS now has search capabilities and ForkBender.com is the beta test site. When you type in a word like "powerlifting" or "golf" in the search box at the top of the right-hand column and press ENTER or click "Search", a search results page will appear. This functionality will be changing (read: improving) a lot in the next few weeks. Let me know if you run into any issues.

I like writing on the train, as mentioned in this previous post. However, it's nice to take a break and do other things sometimes. Here's a list of the other ways I pass time on the train.

This article was sent to me by email. It's quite interesting when you consider the way things are today versus the way things used to be.

Just returned from a long weekend in Door County, Wisconsin, with Ahu, parents, and Randy and Tiffany. More soon...

I think I have finally worked out the comments functionality in the Narrative CMS. As originally posted here, I have, in past months, had a lot of problems with comment spam. Unscrupulous marketers send out spambots which crawl my website, leaving advertisement comments on every page that accepts comments. To end this, I implemented a captcha system which defeats spambots by requiring a security code before submitting comments. The security code is displayed as an image on the page and all the user has to do to submit a comment is to type in the code in the image. Easy for people to do, hard for spambots to do. This solved the comment spam problem. However, in recent months I migrated Narrative to a on-demand build model. This means that the content on this website is static and is only refreshed when content is added, deleted, or changed. When a comment is submitted, it is displayed on the page with the article that the comment is about. This is a kind of indirect change to the content. So I needed a mechanism for Narrative to accept comments, save them into the database, and then automatically rebuild the originating article page. Additionally, certain other pages - such as the home page - need to be rebuilt also to show that comments are now present. Without getting into the technical challenges, the end solution is a combination of AJAX and server-side modules working together. Now when you post a comment, your comment is saved and the page is rebuilt and refreshed in your browser instantly. Let me know what you think.

I finally found something coffee-ish I like to drink at Starbuck's. As some know, I don't drink any type of coffee. Have always hated it. The only foods I like which are coffee-flavored are the Jamocha Shake at Arby's and Jamocha ice cream from Baskin-Robbins. I had always avoided Starbucks because I always avoid coffee. This weekend, though, my wife suggested I try a frappuccino and to much delight, I found it's just a Jamocha Shake. Ha! I know someone at Starbucks Galactic Headquarters is freaking out being compared to a Jamocha Shake at that lowborn Arby's super-franchise wannabe, but that's what it tastes like to me. The frappuccino is slightly more coffee-tasting but not so much more so that I don't like it. It was really a tasty pick-me-up. Avoid the whipped cream topping, however - the Grande frappuccino is 260 calories already. In full disclosure, I actually had a Tall "Mint Mocha Chip" frappuccino. To be fair, a medium Arby's Jamocha Shake as 500 calories so a frappuccino is of marginally better nutritive value.