Happy Father’s Day!

Today’s progress simplified the URL for the verification screen and also introduced a new way of generating the verification input fields—hopefully to help thwart scripts.

Rather than code Rails tonight I spent a little time trying out Prototype, the JavaScript library. I have been using DOJO at work, and prior to that I had written my own animations package. My initial feeling about Prototype is that it’s simple and quick, but maybe too simple. DOJO is really quite an interesting system which lends itself to many different ways of hooking up events and queues, calculating the dimensions of objects, effects, etc. I don’t really care about the built-in widgets because I usually style my own.

Didn’t get too far tonight! I just made sure the login controller can properly flash errors back to the user interface on login. Whee!

I was out almost all day long so I didn’t really get a chance to do much of anything meaningful today. But I did put in the controller for the login sequence. I still want to finish the verification portion first.

Wow. I’m not perfect.

I found a little error on the main Sequence Mediaworks site in the HTML which was causing a link to not be terminated. But that’s fixed.

I also dug out the little Fujitsu. The battery was completely drained and when it booted it needed some serious Windows XP updates. But it’s back up to normal, even up to Firefox 2.0. The more important thing is that it has IE 7 fully updated and it’s a 1024×768 screen resolution. So I figure if the web sites render fine on this then they’ll be OK on the Mac—the Macbook will be used to test things later. The Macbook is running WinXP too, but it’s not the same.

The one good thing I’m thankful for is that the entire development of this site is on the server: complete remote development. The only things I run locally are web browsers, SSH/SCP clients, and Photoshop.

Resolved the problem where users were only partially being created. The registry table was OK but the users and tags were not. Ugh. I totally miss having transactions! I need to find a way to enable them.

The password generator also now includes dashes in the password to make it easier to read.

Created a new e-mail address to receive system e-mail notifications. Moved the views for the admin email to the shared directory; cleaned up admin mail model. Confirmed that new user creation now sends notification with time stamp.

The good news: the e-mail system appears to be working and it is being generated from a central place. The bad news: the people.sequencemediaworks.com site can’t start up. I guess tomorrow I need to debug this!

[Update: minutes later]
Oh, my bad. I had an uninitialized hash which was causing model load failure. Now everything is working perfectly, including sending out the password to the proper e-mail address. But, the value object returned in the user creation process appears to be empty. Hm.