Blount 2011 “Year in Review Letter”

Everyone seems to do a great job of sending out yearly letters around the holidays, so here’s our attempt. We collected some of our favorite photos from this year (mostly just the summer and fall) and made this video: http://animoto.com/play/PXP02w37vyZ60ddGU7vxxg Go ahead and watch it. Back already? It’s the end of December already and Poppy is almost 4 (01/24) and Oliver is almost 2 (02/02). Last year at this time, we went to Kansas City for Christmas with Alan’s family and after a long drive on Christmas eve, made it back to Louisville for Christmas with Anita’s.
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Adobe Connect Issue and Fix: Lingering FMSCore.exe processes

We’ve setup Connect to expire the FMSCore processes after 2 hours, but if someone is still connected to a recording, it will keep the old zombie FMSCore process until that person disconnects. It often happens that doesn’t work – and there’s seemingly no garbage collection in place to clean up old FMSCore. So we created a simple AutoIt script which can be compiled to an EXE which works, but it has some dependancies…
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I’m just Git’ting it

Everyone and their mom have been using Git and GitHub for a while, but I’m just breaking down and using it… I have been slow to adopt because SVN worked for me fine (until I had to merge branches) and I don’t like to pay for storage space. But I continue to be impressed by it’s functionality and ease of use, so I’m going to move our work repositories over (needing a Large account probably) but I think it will be worth it.
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Ollie and Anita are fine, but stuck in the hospital still

Oliver has been feeling a bit sick for a couple of days, and it was acute yesterday early afternoon – he was doing the “I’m in pain” cry for a half an hour straight and was inconsolable. Very unusual for him. So we made an appointment to see the Pediatrician and by the time we got in there (~3 hours later) he seemed pretty normal, though really tired still because he is sick and doing all the extra crying, but sleeping and eating ok again.
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CakePHP beforeSave() gotcha: need to set $this->__exists to true if setting a primary key

I added an update to CakePHP Book: beforeSave() Also, if you add a primary key which would turn an “insert” into an “update” within beforeSave() you’ll need to set $this->__exists = true;… the call to $this->exists(); happens in model.php before the callback to beforeSave(). if (!isset($this-&gt;data[$this-&gt;name]['id']) && isset($this-&gt;data[$this-&gt;name]['unique_field'])) { $found = $this-&gt;find("first",array( "recursive" =&gt; -1, "fields" =&gt; array("id"), "conditions" =&gt; array("unique_field" =&gt; $this-&gt;data[$this-&gt;name]['unique_field']))); if (!empty($found) && isset($found[$this-&gt;name]['id'])) { $this-&gt;id = $this-&gt;data[$this-&gt;name]['id'] = $found[$this-&gt;name]['id']; <strong>$this-&gt;__exists = true;</strong> } } return parent::beforeSave(); }
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Google Profiles now with content

Alan’s Google Profile, now updated with Buzz activity, searchable, and pulling content from various feeds, including flickr, facebook, twitter, etc… If you don’t see this as “competition” for Facebook (et. al.) then you’re not seeing the same thing I am. I personally love it, esp. the publicly searchable aspects and the integration into the gmail interface but I might stop using it if other people don’t or if it can’t work two-way with facebook….
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Oliver is born, go and tell it on the mountain

Most of you have heard from the grapevine or facebook (this generation’s grapevine) that our son, Oliver Jackson Blount, was born on 2010-02-02 @ 14:35 EST. He was 9 pounds 15 ounces and 23 inches (they measured twice to be sure). We had a home birth with 2 midwives and an apprentice, a doula, Anita’s mom (former NICU nurse) and sister Virginia (new nurse) in attendance… of yeah, and me. The decision to have a home birth was one we took very seriously and subsequently are very happy with; it being unusual is often the topic of conversation… but I can summarize with the following: We had a normal and healthy fetus inside a normal and healthy mom, everything looking like it would progress as “low risk” we choose to stay at home with the support of professionals vs.
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Google Apps removes support for IE6

http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/01/modern-browsers-for-modern-applications.html Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. We’re also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites. As a result you may find that from March 1 key functionality within these products — as well as new Docs and Sites features — won’t work properly in older browsers.
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MySQL Master/Slave Replication Monitoring PHP Script

I’m a bit proud of myself on this one… I setup a simple, but clean and configurable, MySQL Master/Slave Replication Monitoring PHP Script: http://code.google.com/p/php-mysql-master-slave-replication-monitor/ (docs) It’s Open Source and free, I welcome comments, suggestions, and questions. I think this will be quite useful for anyone who is setting up a pair of MySQL servers as master/slave and want to be sure their replication works as it should.
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Our Trip to California

We are home again, from a trip to San Francisco and Sonoma, California. (map) The trip was for April’s wedding (Anita’s sister) to Billie one of our best friends from our three years in Columbus, OH. We started out by going to Salt Point State Park and camping. We were able to hike to the beautiful (but cold) cliff-lined-coast and watch seals and waves alike. On our way back from camping we visited Fort Ross, the oldest establishment on the west coast, and old Russian trading post.
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