You can read more in the press release.

Early registration opened today and you can get a conference pass for 50% off.

In the last year, though, Google has been losing ground on content farms. These are sites that duplicate the useful information on other sites, then wrap them with ads and horrible design. Stack Overflow is a frequent victim because the content is extremely useful and also made publicly available. Unfortunately, content farms duplicating this content are even more annoying because their copies aren’t up to date.

Usually, it isn’t much of a problem because the farms rank low in results, but over the last many months, they have outsmarted Google and ended up on page 1, sometimes even outranking the canonical page on Stack Overflow. After I accidentally clicked on those results a few too many times, I decided to create a browser extension that completely removes these farms from Google results so I never see them again. As of today, this extension is available for Safari, Chrome and Firefox. Get it here.

Major enhancements include:

• Automatic creation of regular expressions specific to CSS and Javascript for use in <style> and <script> tags, as well as external files marked with appropriate content types. This avoids false matches, in particular for Javascript when a private server’s entire URL space is mapped to a subdirectory on the public server.
• Support for remapping URLs in style attributes.
• A new flag allows a URL mapping to be ignored for styles.
• Fixed a bug that silently discarded HTML comments when ProxyHTMLExtended was on. IE conditional comments look like HTML comments, and so were lost prior to this fix.
• HTML comments are scanned for URL matches, again to fix up resources referenced inside an IE conditional comment.
• URLs are always mapped in the order they are defined. Global mappings (outside of a <Location> directive) are always applied first.
• Fixed the HTML 4.01 DOCTYPEs so that they always emit a complete URI.
• ProxyHTMLExtended is more fine-grained and can be enabled for just styles or scripts, as well as both (the old behavior when set to “on”).

The development of this module was funded by the Council of Better Business Bureaus in late 2008. Some internal discussion held up the release of the code until now, but I’m pleased it is being made available to the Apache community. Note that because my work on this module took place two years ago, I can offer only very limited support for it.

The source code is available on GitHub.

This app has been tumbling around in my head for almost a year. Our kids really like looking at the lights people put on their houses and in their yards, but they don’t always have the longest attention span, especially at night when they are tired. While it’s fine to aimlessly drive around and look at lights, I thought it would be far better, and more fun for mom and dad, if we had an idea of where to go to see really great lights. What better than an app on your phone to point the way?

When I started researching it, I found out that it’s become surprisingly common for people to go all-in with computer controlled animation and music on a low-power FM station. You may remember the guy from 2005, but there are loads more examples if you search YouTube for “christmas lights”.

An app with as many of those huge light displays plus a way to catalog the more reasonable things people usually do would be great, and everyone I pitched the idea to agreed.

When I started working on it late this past summer, there were zero apps on the store that did anything remotely like it. This year there, there are three. I think we have the best interface and feature balance, and as far as I can tell we have the largest database by far: almost 1200 locations as I write this, with few user submissions since the app has only been on sale for a day.

I’m hoping that Apple’s editors agree and they choose to feature the app in the annual Christmas apps section.

As always, if you buy the app and like it, please leave a review, or at least a rating!

That isn’t true on Rails 3, though, so over the last few days I’ve taken the time to reevaluate the plug-in and figure out how to do the same work in Rails 3. The result is the new sql-logging gem. The source is hosted on GitHub and the gem itself is available, like any other, on rubygems.org.

Externally, little has changed. sudo gem install sql-logging (or put it in your Gemfile and bundle install), then restart your application., You’ll see additional information in your console: a count of rows returned by each SQL statement, a rough count of bytes in the response, a backtrace that shows you exactly what triggered the execution, and a top 10 list of the most time-consuming queries in each request.

I moved configuration out of the ActionController::Base class and into SqlLogging::Statistics, but the names are (mostly) the same. Check the README for details.

One interesting statistic from the first couple weeks of sales is that iPad users are the large majority of daily users. It’s hard (impossible?) to say if this is because there is less competition in the iPad part of the App Store or if people prefer to use a web-centric app like Web Roulette on an iPad.

Here in America, we’ve become rather used to the idea that fresh fruits and vegetables are available whenever we want them. What we don’t always realize is that this convenience comes at the cost of flavor and price. Plants grow according to a schedule, and while we can force things somewhat (hothouse tomatoes, for example), if you want peaches in the dead of winter, they aren’t coming from the northern hemisphere.

Shipping produce from South America is a long trip to an American market, though, so food has to be bred to survive the journey and someone (the consumer) has to cover the costs of that travel.

There are even disadvantages to strawberries grown and sold in season. Strawberries are so fragile, growers have had to breed them exclusively for shipment, resulting in a berry that has only a pale shadow of true strawberry flavor left.

I created In Season to help my own family, and hopefully others, with this problem. Food tastes better when it’s grown according to its natural schedule, and even more so if you can find a local farmer supplying produce to your market. It will take less effort to grow it and supply will be higher, so you will pay less. Locally-grown produce also means less fuel is burned bringing that food to market, further bringing prices down and reducing your carbon footprint at the same time.

The economics of the App Store being what they are, version 1.0 is a toe in the water. If it is well received and I can justify further development, I have some great ideas to make it an extremely useful and educational app.

If you are interested in those books I mention above, they are terrific reads: How to Pick a Peach: The Search for Flavor from Farm to Table, by Russ Parsons and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver.