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Get with the (electronic) times
Today I went to submit for reimbursement from my flexible spending plan. Since I scan in all my receipts, assembling the information was quite easy. Our plan allows us to use a "wizard" to prepare the reimbursement. It generated a PDF cover sheet with all the information filled out. I added all my receipts (stored in Paperless), filled it out using PDFPen, added my signature and had one massive PDF. The form said to mail it via USPS or fax it. Since I pay $0.10 per page to send a fax via j2, I printed out the 13 pages, shoved them in my fax machine and sent it (the fax number was toll-free, but I have unlimited calling, so it didn't matter). Now if I had been able to upload the PDF to their web site, I would have saved the paper.
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Dealing with Ruby on Rails Applications
When I first launched my first web site in Ruby on Rails (RoR) to get my store for ReceiptWallet (based on Potion Store) going, I learned a little bit about performance. A basic RoR application is launched each time a user hits a web site; this, of course, is only for development and isn't practical for a production site. I opted to use lighttpd and FastCGI which worked well. However, modifying an part of the application required killing processes and restarting lighttd.
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Standard, but braindead implementation
One of the features of OS X Server's LDAP is the ability to disable an account after X failed logins. While this sounds like a great thing to turn on from a security point of view, the implementation has a lot to be desired. I turned this on several months ago and within 30 minutes had to turn it off. The reasons why it is flawed are quite simple.
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A fix for a broken web site
Today I had to purchase a Priority Mail label off the USPS web site and had a few problems with it. First off, Safari decided to keep eating the sample label. I then switched to FireFox and doing a Save As for the label saved it, but the file didn't end in .pdf, so Preview wouldn't open it even if I forced it to open it. (Yes, Preview should have attempted to decode it.) Once I renamed the file with a .pdf extension, the file opened just fine. Hmmm...what should I do to automate the process?