This last month I spend 30days flying everywhere I could.  All totaled I tooke 24 flights (which includes 2 flights to get to and from Denver, which the closest Airport that JetBlue services.) at a cost of $864 (including tax on international flights, and the southwest tickets)  I visited a dozen cities, in 2 countries.  Now I wasnt the craziest All you can Jetter, but I think I still got a great deal out of the trip (value of the tickets would have been over $4000).

Why?

Why not?  Really I work on the road (easier said then done) but otherwise I got to hang out in some really fun cities, with my scenery changing near daily.  To enjoy a month on the road (rather on the air) you have to love travel.  I do, so it all worked out great.

Favorites

I really liked San Diego, which is seemed like a fun city with plenty to do, and great weather.  I appreciated Washington DC because I

had never been there and I got to see building, monuments, and places I had only known from pictures and video.  Costa Rica was the best.  Visiting Costa Rica makes me want to go back, but it also makes me want to travel the rest of the world. Because travel is awesome! There is so much more then your town, state, or country.  Explore it, Experience it.  At least that’s how I feel about it.

JB

JetBlue, is without a doubt one of the best airlines I have ever flown.  They are a step above the rest.  If you get a chance to fly them, take it.  You’ll enjoy it, and find it harder to fly other airlines after that.

Community

The other great thing about travel is meeting people.  There was a great community around the jetblue deal on twitter, all using the #aycj hashtag.  I meet some awesome people both #aycj-ers and just other travelers.  If you are traveling alone, I do recommend checking out your options in Hostels.  More then just being a cheap place to stay it helps you meet others.  In Costa Rica I spent a lot of  time with the people I met at the Hostel and the really contributed to the trip.  It’s nice have people to do things with, it really made it more fun.

I started up a development project today after upgrading to snow leopard, and none of the codeigniter links worked.  they all said “The URI you submitted has disallowed characters.”  Why?  This hadnt happened before, same project what changed?

Snow leopard upgraded my php dev environment to 5.3 from 5.2.6  And a few things have changed since then.  Namely php bug #47229 “preg_quote should escape “-” (minus) as well” was fixed. (technically in 5.2.8)  CodeIgniter checks uri for allowed characters to prevent some bad things.  But the use preg_quote to convert the allowed list of character to something usable in a regular expression.  Now the minus “-”, or I’d call it a dash (but I know there is a longer character for that)  gets escaped in preg_quote with a backslash “\”.  That cause the expression “a-z 0-9″ to be converted to “a\-z 0\-9″ which will not work in a regex.

How to fix it. (assuming codeigniter 1.7)

1) in codeigiter system/libraries open  URI.php  line 189 you’ll find

if ( ! preg_match("|^[".preg_quote($this->config->item('permitted_uri_chars'))."]+$|i", rawurlencode($str)))

Change that to:

if ( ! preg_match("|^[".($this->config->item('permitted_uri_chars'))."]+$|i", rawurlencode($str)))

Note we removed the preg_quote().  Now in your system/application/config/config.php file  look for line 126 (unless you’ve added a lot to you config will be around there somewhere)

Change the line

$config['permitted_uri_chars'] = 'a-z 0-9~%.:_-';

to:

$config['permitted_uri_chars'] = 'a-z 0-9~%\.\:_\-';

we’re now preparing our allowed character string in the config file and skipping preg_quote.  And that’s it.  Now your uri should work

The last Ignite was so. much. fun.!  So let we’ll do it again.  We’re looking for presenters who are passionate about a topic about would like to talk about it for 5mins.  Yep, just 5mins.  Ignite is fast paced, light, and a lot of fun.  

Ignite NM in Albuquerque was a great success, many thanks to all the great presenters.  Ignite NM dealt a lot with technology heavy subjects.  Technology is great, believe me I’m a geek through and through.  But we are looking to having more variety in topics for the next Ignite NM.

Have an idea you want to talk about?  Want to come, please RSVP?  See more info ignite-nm.com

So IE 7 doesnt like if you have a script tag anywhere in your page except: in the head, as the first elements, or last elements of the body tag.  

OR most of the time if you have your script in a window.onload event, or the jQuery version $.ready().  I’ve seen some people saying this has happened on a number of different scripts, including google maps.  This isnt a big deal, because in most if not all cases their is an easy solution.  But this is still odd, unexpected behavior from IE.  Something that Firefox and Safari have no issues with.

Moral of the story is if you get the error “internet explorer cannot open the internet site”, check your script tags.  remove them one by one, and find why IE is choking on them.

A couple resource for more info:

• http://lifebaker.com
• http://www.richardcastera.com -  This didnt work for me, others have reported it as working for them, so this just might not be a solution in all cases.

A while back I was talking with some friends about how to find things about Los Alamos NM online.  What business are in town, when are they open, where should I go?  What is a good place to stay, eat, or shop?  Where should  I move, what is available?  What is there to do in the small town?  That is how Our Los Alamos was born.  

I’ve lived in Los Alamos, almost all my life.  I join the small town with the different feel.  I cant say that I’ve ever found another place like it.  So part of Our Los Alamos is about giving back to that lifestyle, to show others what it means to me, and help them connect with this area like I have.  

This is the first project that from conception to creation has been solely my doing.  The design, the logo, the brand, and the identity is all original and all very important to to me.  It like the project that is never quite good enough, because you want everyone to enjoy it as much as you have.  

I’ve recently started to let the word out, slowly to begin, about Our Los Alamos.  It is light on content, but more is being added every week.  Please take a look, and give me your feedback.

Ordered biz cards on Tuesday night from a company called overnight prints, paid for extra fast shipping, figuring printed wed/wed night shipped thursday arrive friday, right?  Nope.  I really wanted them by Saturday, they would have done me more good on Saturday.

Called the 24/7 customer service hotline, got a recording and an answering machine. FAIL.  Left a message 3days and they havent called back FAIL AGAIN.

Tweeted at their twitter account, no response.  FAIL SOME MORE.  

Refund my shipping, I wanted them by Saturday, that is the only reason I paid an insane amount on shipping.  

Overnight prints, renamed Over 3 night prints and with an extra lack of customer service!!

Update (8/4/09)  Overnight prints refunded my overnight shipping costs, which were more then the total order cost.  It still took a long time for them to get back to me, but at least they made it right in the end.  I have since ordered from them, and I was much more happy with this last order.  I have to say that I’ve always been happy with the quality of their product.

Yep, my admin interface to wordpress had been broken, and I hadnt had time to try more then just a couple things to fix it.  But I just updated to the latest release of wordpress (2.8) and everything is work wonderfully.  Thanks Wordpress!

I’ve never really hired someone before.  I’ve worked with people, perhaps I’ve even had some input on a job candidate, but I have never hired anyone before.  I’m not exactly hire now, but I am looking to sub contact out some of my web development work on a regular basis.  So I put up a craigslist ad to see what kind of people are out there and available.  In the Santa Fe area I dont think there is a huge selection of developers, but there might be some.  So far I have gotten 3 responses(The ad has been online for about 5hrs)  This should be an interesting adventure.  We’ll see how this turns out.

Twitpic is a great easy way to share photo via Twitter.  A lot of twitter clients including desktop and iPhone/any mobile client support uploading pictures to twitpic.  It has gained the largest market share of any twitter centric photo sharing site (according to TC)  

Why am I talking about Twitpic?  Well I thought it would be cool visualize all the photos being shared on twitter, in realtime.  To that end I’m polling twitter search every 3 secs for the term “twitpic”  and publishing them to a xmpp pubsub server.  I built a super simple web interface that subscribes to that pubsub node, and displays new images as soon as they are received. (Technically there is a 5sec delay to let the image load, which makes the display run smoother.)  That is the largest delay, 5secs.  Once anyone uploads a picture to twitpic there is <10sec delay.  

I also include retweets of twitpics, so yes you will see duplicates, sometimes many on the same page, if that image is very popular, and being commented on / retweeted via twitpic. (look out for Miley Cyrus pictures taking over at times)

Check it out, let me know what you think.  I’m thinking about either adding a feature to reply via twitter to the pictures, or to discuss them via group chat on the web page itself.  Suggestions?

http://twitpic.flarify.com

Hey New Mexico.

Ignite is coming to Santa Fe.   Ignite is a great speaking event, with a bunch of presenters on different topics giving quick presentations.  They each get 20 slides that auto advance after 15 secs.  Come out for the night to Sf Complex, meet some great people, and have some fun.  The event starts at 6:30pm on April 29th. check out ignitesantafe.com for more info.

Hope to see you there.