from the desk of michael nutt

 I went down to Houston this weekend to see my brother graduate.  It was hot.  I've only been to Houston a couple of times since he started school, and it seems like only recently that I was helping him move into his freshman dorm.  Surveying his new apartment, I began thinking of all the trade-offs that one makes living in New York—cramped apartments, dirty streets, and alternating cold/hot weather.  I still think they're worth it.

I've spent a few evenings hunting down a particularly annoying bug in my latest rails app.

ActionController::InvalidAuthenticityToken (ActionController::InvalidAuthenticityToken):     /vendor/rails/actionpack/lib/action_controller/ request_forgery_protection.rb:73:in `verify_authenticity_token' ...

I was trying to get a script.aculo.us sortable list working, and I spent tons of time debugging with Firefox + Firebug to try and figure out why the authenticity token wasn't getting passed.

Firefox 3 includes tons of great new features and it requires a new Firebug, so every couple of days I'm getting the latest alpha release of Firebug.  For some reason I was sure my rails app was broken, rather than Firebug.  As a matter of fact, it turns out my rails app was working just fine and Firebug was lying to me and resubmitting the request when I tried to use it to check out the response. (score: Rails CSRF protection 1, my sanity 0)

I fixed it by either turning on Firebug's new debugging mode, or turning on its network monitoring.  I can't really tell which because I can't seem to figure out which one actually solves the problem. 

These nifty development tools are great, but sometimes there is no substitute for inspecting outgoing TCP packets.

For the first time, my blog now has an RSS feed.  Welcome to 1999!

In some ways I don't like being spread broadly around the web, in the sense that all of the content I use is hosted all over the place at a number of sites.

I'm not even a prolific creator of content.  I don't take as many photos these days, I don't record video, and I rarely find time to write new blog entries.  What I do have: blog entries on nuttnet (which is really LimeSpot), tweets on twitter, photos on flickr, old entries on livejournal, a single video on youtube, stuff behind the facebook walled garden, and other content that I can't even remember posting.

Read More »

I suppose it's a bit late, but I'm down in Austin at South By Southwest this year.  Come say hi at our party tonight.

And that's what I get for neglecting my own theme while building other peoples'.  The cobbler's children have no shoes.

Confession: I used to use Windows as my main operating system, and for a long time I used Internet Explorer as my browser.  As a 14-year-old, I always saved my money to buy as much memory as I could, because at any given time I'd have 20 or 30 browser windows open.  When I discovered Firefox and tabbed browsing, I dropped down to 5 or 10 browser windows, but they had 10-20 tabs each.  My room was also cluttered as a kid.

Now I use Mac OS with only a single Firefox window, but I still have entirely too many tabs open.  This mostly results from links appearing outside the browser, such as links in instant message windows and emails.  I usually open these links once, look at the page, then forget about them.  It would be really nice if I could specify one of Firefox's tabs as a "junk tab", to be reused for all external links.

I can't think of a clean way to fit the feature into Firefox's user interface, but I'm looking forward to the new bookmark management system. 

I just shut down the Athlon64 server sitting in my living room.  Suddenly the room goes quiet. I could hear crickets chirping if such things could survive in New York.  The quiet is disconcerting; I begin to wonder if the steady hum of the fans is all that has kept me sane for the last year and a half as I sit alone in my old apartment.

Today I was invited at the last minute to a challenge of epic proportions.

I'm not usually one to participate in eating competitions, but macaroni and cheese is one of my favorite foods ever (yes, I'm still four years old) and I gave in to old-fashioned peer pressure. Secretly I was planning on only eating half and taking the rest home, but one thing led to another and I ended up finishing the "Mongo" size. So did Nathan, and he finished first.

We were rewarded with nothing but pride, though the waitress did give me a free water for finishing.

I've nearly secured an apartment.  It's in the East Village, and it's quite nice.  It's cozy (read: small) but also cozy in that it just feels nice.  The bedroom has no windows so that's going to be weird, but I think I'm just going to sleep with the door open.  I have one final thing to do tomorrow morning and it's mine.

Of course, as with anything in New York there's a chance that it'll slip through my fingers and I'll have to go back to looking through craigslist and calling brokers.  I think New York requires a certain fortitude that is most heavily tested during relocation.

At least I'm not buying a house.