Every hunting season is an adventure where memories are made regardless of the outcome of the hunt. This past week was the epitome of that as I learned that just three hours of hunting can help build the kind of memories that resonate for a lifetime. Sure, sounds sappy but until you've walked in those boots you simply can't appreciate the truth in these words. Saturday I was joined by long time friend and hunting buddy Kevin Kronfeld. Kevin and I are childhood schoolmates who've bonded through our love for the outdoors. This friendship really took shape in college and has grown as we've forged in with our careers, marriages and families from different towns. The short two hour drive between Cedar Rapids and Des Moines has never prevented us from getting together regularly to do what we love...hunt and fish.

So this past weekend has been planned for months. We've had to juggle things based on our personal schedules, the hunting season and Mother Nature always seems to have a say in it. This weekend's hunt, our first with both our oldest kids, was originally planned for last Saturday but 22mph winds, cold morning temps and the chance for rain had us postpone it a day later. Man, am I glad we did. So our goal in all this? Most people foreign to hunting would think it'd be to simply kill our quarry...in this case the wild turkey. Ah, but not so. See, while that would have been a great way to top off this trip the real goal was to introduce our kids to the sport of hunting by putting them, for the first time in their lives, in a situation to observe nature without nature being all that aware of them. The beauty in it all is only enhanced with the time honored tradition of hunting. See, Kevin and I know that by introducing our kids to hunting at an early age it will combat a lot of life's negatives (childhood obesity, obsessions with video games, being too competitive too young in life).

So what was the goal of this hunt? Simple. We wanted to create some memories. And that we did! This video can only give you a short glimpse into the energy and excitement that two six year olds had on their first hunt together with their dads. On this hunt we heard Tom's gobble on the roost, we had a whitetail deer within 15 yards of our blind and we had a Jake mingle with our two hen decoys. While we didn't get to see the long-beards we were after, this video will make it clear it was still a successful hunt!

I'm sure some of you've noticed that this blog has been down just a couple day short of a week.  Long and short of it is the server this runs at had some problems with a Gentoo upgrade which lead to a switch in Linux distribution and in all that mess I did lose some content.  Luckily my database was backed up but I did lose quite a few images, photos, presentations and what-not.  Normally I'd be pretty upset but given how long this has been down I'm just glad to have this thing back online.  Over the coming days I'll be working to get a more appropriate look-and-feel.  Until then please accept my apology while I get things spruced up.

A couple of weeks ago the folks at the DC PHP Conference announced the speakers for the 2008 installment of the conference held at George Washington University and yours truly was selected as one of the speakers. We're talking PHP celebs like Chris Shiflett, Chris Jones, David Sklar, Cal Evans, Eli White, Keith Casey and Ben Ramsey as well as PHP companies like Zend, Digg, Oracle and Ning just to name a few.

Despite the fact the Internet continually provides us new ways to collapse the world and brush elbows with like-minded people I still get a bit perplexed that anybody finds it interesting when I talk about PHP (or anything for that matter). That aside, I do have a talk I'm giving called "Fed up of Framework Hype?". Sound familiar? For those of you that occasionally browse these pages you may recall a prior post on the subject. Given there was a bit of interest in that post I turned it into a talk for this conference. Click "read more" to see the full abstract of the talk and be sure to register for the conference which runs June 2-4!

In working on the Geeklog 2 codebase, much of work forms the basis for stuff I do at work, I finally figured it was time to add handling for CSRF to the codebase in a way that forces it's use without the developer having to explicitly do anything. In my experience security has, sadly, become one of the last things on the mind of PHP developers (kudos to you numerous exceptions out there) so finding a way to help the developers protect their application from CSRF in a way that avoids them from having to explicitly consider and handle it themselves was key. However, to better illustrate my needs let's discuss a few high level requirements, shall we?

1. CSRF solution must apply to any and all forms in the system.
3. CSRF solution must work even in the case where the page served has multiple forms
4. CSRF solution must work for both GET and POST
5. CSRF solution must be applied to all forms without the developer having to make any explicit method calls to CSRF-related functions.

The solution? I've basically adapted what Chris Shifflet proposed in this blog entry from a few years ago. For the lazy, his solution involves including a token in each form and then putting the token value and the time the token was created into the user session. Upon submission of the form, the form value is then checked with the session value and then the time the token was used is compared to some sane time-to-live (TTL) value. Having this solution in mind I then added a few more details to the requirements above:

1. The security token must be autogenerated and inserted into each form
2. Each command (we operate in an MVC model) must have the ability to specify where it expects the token to be (e.g. POST or GET). The default value for this must be in the $_POST (in fact I question if using GET at all makes any sense).
3. The solution must not check for the token in the $_REQUEST
4. The solution must allow each command to set the TTL for the token.
5. Should no TTL be explicitly given, the system must use the default of 3 minutes

(click 'read more' for the solution)

If you are were born-and-raised in Iowa (regardless if you live there now) you need to give this movie clip by Chris Pirillo a listen. As a Iowa bred and born techie I am literally torn on his take on Iowa and technology. The reality is if it weren't for my love for the outdoors, particularly hunting and fishing I very well would have left the state myself so what follows is a bit hypocritical (if I admit it does it make it less of a felony?).

Chris' big point is cultural change needs to happen from within. Specifically Iowa's ability to connect to the world - technologically speaking - must happen more as a grass roots movement. Specifically he cites the ICN's ability to connect rural Iowa and the inability for Iowa to use it and similar means to connect to the outside world. Is he on to something? Maybe...and I should note this all has the similar undertones from Obama's campaign about rural America. While Obama specifically talked about guns and religion what he was really hitting on was the culture of small town America and, because I know how to evaluate news with my own brain as opposed to the digested crap from news outlets like CNN, I can appreciate his comments for the true meaning...not what someone spoonfed me. But I digress...

So the real question is does a technological cultural shift really have to happen from within? Is there not a way to bring Iowa into the technological fold without having to wait for rural Iowa to "give in"? I think having he shift happen from within would work, but it will simply take too long. I think the reality is that it there will need to be change on both sides of that fence. There's a lot of technological know how in Iowa. From simple social activities like #dmtweetups to internationally recognized companies like Rockwell Collins you will learn the brain power is here. The love and thirst for technology is here. But that isn't enough...and I think this is what Chris missed a bit in his video. Change can be ushered in with help from external pressures. As the internet makes telecommuting more acceptable in the corporate world companies should be willing to find great, remote talent in places like Iowa. Sure such jobs would likely involve some travel (and traveling in/out of Iowa sucks....hard), but the ability to work remotely for great technology companies is upon us. This can be helped by having ex-Iowans who've left the state convince technology companies there is talent to be had in Iowa. But that's not enough.

In the end, the money has to come to Iowa before any of this can be feasible. Why is good chunk of the tech VC market in the Bay Area? C'mon, there are a lot of really smart people there...way smarter than me, but they don't have all the "great" ideas. They don't have all the great talent. Maybe it is some great marketing by California's government, area chambers of commerce and universities? Maybe it's because of their sheer population? Who knows, but soon the Internet will flatten the job market allowing people to live where the want because they love the area, not because it has work there. When that because a conscious reality for us all the people holding the money will be looking to find great ideas in markets where voices have been largely ignored. But remember the key! It has to happen from both sides of the fence!

Government has to provide incentives for companies and their investors, graduates from Iowa who leave the state need to be the most vocal advocates of what we have to offer and as citizens of a great state we need to be willing to buck the stereotypes the world has of Iowa and be willing to prove that technology innovation is here.

I know I say it a lot but I love Twitter. Through Twitter, which is now an indispensable part of my life, I learned that one PHP-guru, Cal Evans, is a podcaster. Why don't I already know this...long story but it basically evolves around the fact I get frustrated with podcasts on iTunes because many include video which my photo iPod can't handle. But I digress...

So I've been toying around with the idea of starting an podcast centered around hunting and fishing. Nothing too long, just 5-15 minutes for a quick how-to or to discuss a hot topic. Well, I know nothing about podcasting so I asked Cal and this is what he said. Great advice for someone good behind a keyboard but clueless when it comes to podcasting.

Ok, so ever since my openSUSE 10.2 to 10.3 upgrade I've been manually running "compiz-manager" to get compiz+emerald running. Today I finally got pissed enough to do something about it. First of all, it doesn't help one bit there are like a thousand wiki entries on the openSUSE site all instructing different things. Yes, that is an exaggeration but you get my point.

To simply state my problem, when I would start KDE I'd have no window decorations until I ran "compiz-manager". Most the instructions in the wiki tell you to doink with the file ~/bin/kde-start-compiz. That's simply crap. Doesn't work. Not only doesn't it work but it should have work right out of the box with my upgrade to 10.3. But hey it's Linux...you get what you pay for (which is part of why I'll be going to Mac at home exclusively once I donate enough plasma to afford one).

The fix? Simple...just add a file called compiz-start.sh to your ~/.kde/Autostart with the following:

#!/bin/bash
compiz-manager&
emerald --replace&

After that make it executable and you are done:

#>chmod 700 ~/.kde/Autostart/compiz-start.sh

What? The Mighty Hunter is a general nature lover? Absolutely! While visiting a close friend down in Columbia, Missouri last year I noticed he had a couple of bird houses in his yard. During the course of the weekend I couldn't help but notice all the birds nesting and how nice it was to have near his deck and patio. In casual conversation he began telling me all about Purple Martins. That was it...I was hooked! Why? I can't think of a better bird to have a neighbor. Besides their striking colors of black, blue steel and touches of white these birds can eat up to 2,000 bugs a day. Given a typical Purple Martin house can hold as many as 24 birds you are talking a whopping 48,000 bugs per day at full capacity! It should be noted there were three birds total and all of them went into at least one of the holes but none are actively nesting yet. My guess is these birds are in the market for a new home and are shopping around for the best spot. With any luck these birds will permanently setup shop during the next week or so.

So as to not bore you too much about these birds I'll simply leave you with two things. First a promise that this won't be the last blog entry about Purple Martin's and second this picture showing you two of the birds I caught perched on my birdhouse:

Canon XTi, f/5.6, 300mm, iso 1600

Gun safety should be priority one for anybody that enjoys the tradition of hunting. It is harped on by hunter safety instructors the first few minutes of any hunter education classes. It is top priority in the manual all gun manufacturers I have purchased from and in my circle of hunting partners we never seem to go a season without mentioning the importance of safety. Why? Sure it seem really obvious but sometimes to teach a lesson you simply need to look to real life example. Case in point is this tragic story coming out my neighboring state of Minnesota. There are a lot more questions than answer in this piece and I'm confident the folks investigating the shooting are letting the scene tell the story...something that my close friend Rod Slings, a leader in Iowa's Law Enforcement bureau has in the tag line of all his emails.

The right to bare arms should be annotated with a simple reminder that this right makes you accountable to anything that happens with your gun. As a father of three beautiful girls I still can't comprehend how this father - who's love for the outdoors resulted in the name of his now late son "Hunter". To all of us who enjoy the time-honored tradition of hunting please, please, please be safe and to the family of Hunter Klaseus I send my prayers.