I'm Darren, I'm a Ruby on Rails developer and web guru, I live in Parksville/Qualicum Beach and this is my website

Can’t figure out what to call your sweet new web company? Here’s a cool application that helps you pick out cool web 2.0 company names that you can add to a domain availability checker to see if anyone has beat you to the punch… errrupt! I used it for a recent app I’m developing!

Here’s how to setup your mobile phone if you don’t have a iPhone to send an SMS text to your phone from iCal Event Alarms using Rogers wireless Canada.

First you need to activate this subscription service with Rogers, it’s free so no worries. So here we go:

Text "subscribe" to 0000000000 (that's 10 ceros FYI).

You should get a text back saying you’ve successfully subscribed to the service! Now you can send emails to your phone and it will get switched from email to SMS using Rogers service. The address to send the emails to is this:

10digitnumber@pcs.rogers.com aka 2507779999@pcs.rogers.com

Now iCal. First go to your address card and click edit. Enter your email number as above into the emails field as “other” and hit edit to save. Set up a regular event just as normal and use the “Email” option as the alarm. Choose your Rogers number email address and choose the date.

Here’s some more mobile phone carriers email or web to sms addresss.

That’s it that’s all.

This post was inspired by the F&$*! that stole my iPhone while I was traveling in South America.

I just made 3 icons in Illustrator for a current client and thought, what the heck, I might as well share them? Here they are: I think I’ll include the AI file as well, just so you all can see how ghetto a Rails coder creates layers and such in Illustrator. ;)

graphika-icons.zip

I recently maxxxxed out my memory limit on my regular dreamhost account at work causing 500 errors all over the place. This is now forcing me to start learning how to cache, and trace my apps for memory and performance. I also switched to PS with 300mb burstable to around 700mb. That should help out for now. Anyway, back to finding out which requests are drinking redbull… I installed the ruby-prof gem to find out. I ran a request with the param key added to the end of the url and wham! Errors? WTF? I copied the code right out of “Advanced Rails Recipes” correctly, and checked it 10 times? So what’s the error? “can’t convert Fixnum into String”? Well it seems that the printer class is trying to convert a number to a string:

response.body << printer.print("", 0)

Just change that to this and that:

response.body << printer.print("", '0')

Then it worked out fine! Hope that helps someone out cause I spent about 2 hours searching for the problem.

I picked up an iPhone the first day they came out in Canada and I’m pretty stoked on it! I used to take my computer home from work everyday just to go on the net and check mail, but now I just use my phone. It’s fast and really has some cool apps like the wordpress app that i’m using right now to do this post. If you don’t have an iPhone well I would get one forsure. The GPS with Google Maps is also pretty impressive.