Kevin McPhillips

I have been working on an intro to git presentation I will be doing at Online soon. My current work has me committing to SVN and I had forgotten how painful that can be, especially compared to something as elegant as git.

My original intention was to post the slides here, but I think they may actually belong to my company. So I'll do the next best thing, or probably an even better thing.

This talk by Scott Chacon of Github is exceptional and it is what my talk will be heavily based on.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDR433b0HJY

It is with great consternation that I made the decision to leave Canada Drugs. I am very fortunate to have had the opportunity to work there with a pretty amazing team of great people and some very talented Ruby developers. Leaving was one of the most difficult decisions I have had to make.

But as good things end, other good things begin. I have accepted a position as a consultant at Online Business Systems. I am still a programmer, but it takes my career in a few new directions. Consulting is the obvious one, but I will be working with an ever changing set of technologies, which is simultaneously thrilling and terrifying. So far the company is wonderful and all the people have been friendly and welcoming. Possibly most notable of all is that the office is downtown! As we all know: walking > driving

I'll have to make some updates to this site, change my resume and update my titles, but in due time.

I have been working on a gem for random but memorable password generation. It uses dictionary words and a list of proper names and mixes those up with numbers and/or special characters, depending on the options you pass in. It is inherently less secure than a full random password, but the idea is that if you give the user a password they can remember then hopefully they won't use "password" or their username or stick the password to the side of their monitor.

Usage is pretty simple.

MemorablePassword.generate
=> "chuck9paste"

You can specify upper case if you'd like, as well as special characters. You can put a fixed length or a min length, but those will of course reduce the number of possible permutations and combinations.

The best part is that it filters out profanity so I had to commit a text file containing all the most vulgar and insulting words I could come up with.

The whole API and source is available from GitHub. It is on rubygems.org, currently at version 0.0.3 but I am still working on it.

https://github.com/kimos/memorable_password

This weekend I launched another site for a local Winnipeg musician. Andrew Littleford is a trumpet player and music educator and his shiny new site can be found here:

http://andrewlittleford.com/

The source is available for the curious on GitHub. It is written in Rails 3 with a full and customized CMS back end. It features image uploads and resizing and a flash/HTML media player. I also used jQuery draggable for sorting which was a pleasantly easy library to implement.

I've been working hard on andrewlittleford.com and have it in a beta stage. Sorting out all the details and making it shine is really what takes the most time.

But in the mean time I've gotten my act together and finally built a working RSS feed for my site. So the first post in my RSS feed is how my RSS feed is working. How pleasantly meta.