recursion

Jenny and I went cross-country skiing today at lovely Theodore Wirth park. Minneapolis finally got some proper snow last week so we decided to take advantage of it. I brought my camera to take some pictures while we were skiing.

We were taking the kind of self-photos couples get good at improvising when no one else is around -- you know, get close together, arm out straight, hope you're both in the picture -- when a man skiing up the hill asked us if we'd like him to take our photo.

It was Mayor Rybak! Hah! That guy's everywhere. Plus, he took a pretty decent shot.

Photo by RT Rybak

This is a month overdue, but as of December 11th, I have a new job as a Ruby on Rails developer at Slantwise Design. After five years at Ancept I thought it was time for some new challenges.

I'm still a Ruby Nuby, so it's been an interesting month. Rails's documentation is as challengingly sparse as it's made out to be. Fortunately, I'm getting better and I've got the collective brains of the Ruby Users of Minnesota at my disposal.

Ned Batchelder: Stopping spambots with hashes and honeypots.

Very nice write up of some effective (for now) techniques to stop the two main types of spam bots.

Hashes prevent replay attacks, and honeypots pevent form-filling bots.

Fun aside: Ned is the guy with instructions on how to make a cube out of six business cards. I did this a couple years ago and it was pretty cool.