Brian Bruijn

Happy New Year! I have been off from school for the last month and as it turned out I really needed the time off. I haven’t been totally free from school as I have been working a little on my thesis, but I have also managed to get another site off the ground thanks to a Christmas present from my wife. The new site is millionfreephotos.com.

I soft launched the site late last year just to see if I could get proof of concept up and running. Now that I have everything at a workable state, I wanted to let everyone know about it. On Million Free Photos, all of the pictures are taken by me and are free to download. They are licensed under the creative commons so feel free to do with them as you please. There are currently 4 photos listed and I have over a thousand to upload.

As I add photos, I will share them through my twitter account @brianbruijn so follow me if you want the #freephoto scoop.

Here is an example of the latest free download.

Well I did fairly well last year, but it is time for a new year of goals.

Updated Jan 3

• Find unique and special ways to love my wife more.
• Be a great father to my dear little one.
• Lose 50 pounds and keep it off. UPDATE: Started at 235.
• Complete and defend my thesis this year.
• Give a million photos away.
• Finish the redesign of YouGiving.com
• Apply to PhD programs
• Update Fair Village to make it easier to post jobs
• Participate in a 5k.
• Participate in a Triathlon.

Any parent who has been through a divorce and watched the relationship with their child digress to the point of conflict or nonexistence (through no reasonable fault of their own) has experienced firsthand the effects of parental alienation. Before I begin, please understand, there is a lot of controversy regarding the “diagnosis” of parental alienation as a mental condition. Some say that it is an attachment or relationship disorder and others say that it is legal trick to get abusive parents access to their children.

I currently have not made my mind up which side of the fence I am on, but I am learning a lot about what effects approximately 1% of the population. Parental alienation often gets its start in a highly contested custody battle during a divorce. The child will align with one parent and then start to alienate the other. The sad part about this scenario is that a once loving relationship is destroyed in lieu of the child being required to choose sides.

According to a proposed diagnostic criteria, parental alienation is defined as:
“When a child (usually one whose parents are engaged in a high conflict-divorce) allies himself or herself strongly with one parent and rejects a relationship with the other, alienated parent, without legitimate justification. The child resists or refuses contact or parenting time with the alienated parent.”

Many times there is an active campaign by the parent with custody to discredit the alienated parent in the child’s eyes. Those parents make the assumption that because they were unable to get along with their previous spouse, then the previous spouse is not good enough for the child(ren) and does not encourage (and often discourages) a relationship with those alienated. Of course, that is not a decision that the alienating parent is qualified to make even, if he or she feels he or she is protecting the child.

It is important to note that parental alienation is not an official diagnosis in the DSM-IV-TR (the official diagnostic manual used by psychologists and psychiatrists). However, there is a proposed list of symptoms.

Parental Alienation Symptoms
First the child will display these behaviors:
- a persistent rejection or denigration of a parent that reaches the level of a campaign
- weak, frivolous, and absurd rationalizations for the child’s persistent criticism of the rejected parent

Secondly, the child will display at least two of the following attitudes or behaviors:
- lack of ambivalence (mixed feelings or emotions)
- independent-thinker phenomenon
- reflexive support of one parent against another
- absence of guilt over exploitation of the rejected parent
- presence of borrowed scenarios
- spread of the animosity to the extended family of the rejected parent

These symptoms have to persist for at least two months and cannot be diagnosed if the rejected parent has maltreated the child.

(criteria as defined in Parental Alienation DSM-5, and ICD-11 by William Bernet, M.D.)

Needles to say, there is a lot controversy over this proposed diagnosis. When one is dealing with hurt feelings and marital pain, it is easy to dismiss the emotional damage that an alienating parent may be causing the child. To make matters more complicated, the legal system and social services may also be involved.

Currently, there are more questions than answers. How does a legal system protect the child, the rights of the alienated parent, and respect the parent who gains custody of the child(ren)? Is it right to label the child with a diagnosis that can follow them the rest of their lives? Is it right for a loving parent to be denied access to the child(ren) he or she loves so much?

Are you an alienated parent? Do you think you suffered from parental alienation? I would appreciate the opportunity to learn from your experience. Please leave a comment with your contact information. If you post a comment and contact information, I will remove the contact info before I post the comment.

Many who have read my blog or followed me on twitter (@brianbruijn) know that I am starting a graduate level counseling psychology program. For 13 years, I have made a living as a web developer and consultant. Life has brought many changes; marriage, a move to Hawaii and a baby girl are just a few of the big events.

It is not too hard to admit, but my brain has never been wired to think in code. I have always been more of a big picture, “how does this help others,” kind of thinker. I have found over the years that my most fulfilling work has been in the service of others. I am thankful to Dave Ramsey, Tony Bradshaw and my friends at Lampo for helping me to understand the need for service.

One other thing I learned while working at Dave’s is do what you love. This brings me to Tuesday August 23, 2011. This is the day I officially start graduate school. I have been talking about going back to school for years and I have faced challenge after challenge to making it happen. The latest academic hurdle to overcome was the under graduate requirements (finished this previous spring.) I am a testament to the fact that perseverance is alive and well.

With that said, the content on my blog is going to be making a decided change from how-to tutorials to life journal and thought factory articles. You will start seeing more posts about what life is like to be a stay at home dad, graduate student and abolitionist working his way thorough school.

What does this mean for my web sites? I will still be working on them, but they have been relegated to hobby status (meaning: enhance when I can). The good thing is that the sites only have a modest amount of traffic at this time but I am putting things in place to make sure that they can with stand some big spikes just in case.

I appreciate all of the kind words through the years. Feel free to contact me if you run into a problem, I am around, but not as available as I used to be. Cheers to all and seek to do what you love!

I haven't posted in a while and I thought I'd take a moment to share why. I have been working on a project for several months now and have only had a few minutes here and a hour there to get it done. Why so little time? Well, I am currently the primary caregiver for our daughter and while she is wonderful, she requires a lot of time.

Ok, so why the project? I read a book a couple of years ago that has really influenced my outlook on life. The books is "Not for Sale" by David Batstone ( @davebatstone ). Essentially, the book chronicles the lives of modern day abolitionists. That is all fine and great, but how does the project intersect the book? This is how, there is a call to action in the book that has been scratching my heart and so I finally decided to do something to help fight slavery in the world.

That is what this project is all about. It is called Fair Village and it is a Jobs and Social Justice Work website. I worked with someone at one time that said if you help enough people you will never have to worry about money. So, I combined my love for writing web sites, people and the abolition movement into one creation.

Fair Village is a job site that provides jobs in helping organizations (YMCA, IJM, Heifer International, Polaris Project, etc). As jobs are posted and revenue is generated a portion of the profit (2% - to be exact) will be donated to the Polaris Project to help combat modern day slavery. It is a win-win-win situation. Win 1, people can find jobs in organizations dedicated to helping others. Win 2 organization can target candidates who have a heart to serve and help those in need. Win 3, actual money goes to a modern day champion who fights human trafficking.

The whole site is about helping people in every way I can. If your heart strings have been tugged and you want to help, there are several things you can do.

1 Post your organization's jobs to FairVillage.com
2 Follow @fairvillage on twitter.com
3 Tell your friends who need a job to check out the site. Maybe you can help them find a job and help stop human trafficking at the same time!

Well, summer break is now in full swing and I am lot further behind that I thought I would be at this point. My baby girl’s sleep schedule has changed and it has brought a little chaos to the mix. This was not entirely unanticipated, but I wasn’t expecting it so soon.

Since school has let out, I have also had to take my laptop to the shop (Apple Care really paid off this time!). As it turns out, I needed a new logic board, fans, thermal assembly and battery. I have also taken this time to reformat the machine and setup multiple work environments. Well actually, I am setting up the environments as I am typing this blog post. One environment is a Win XP setup with ColdFusion and MSSQL server and the other is going to be Ubuntu as my main Ruby on Rails enviro.

I also picked up a ColdFusion account. I didn’t plan on doing any more consulting work for quite a while. The plan was to do my own projects and finish school. But, I really felt the need to help out the person. He got left high and dry and needed someone. I am not making a lot on the deal, but I enjoy helping out.

Speaking of school, I am excited about going back this fall. For those who don’t know, I got accepted into a MA program for Counseling Psychology. To say that I am excited would be an understatement. This will open up other doors of opportunity as my wife and I make life plans. Also, it will provide another potential revenue stream for the family. Am I thinking too much on a practical level? Perhaps, but we have a baby and she needs to be taken care of.

I am also learning a lot more about VirtutalBox (an Oracle product). I had some older .vdi (virtual disk images) from before the reformat and managed to make them bigger. These are the files that I am using to work from. It is kinda nice.

On a more fun note, I learned that Champions Online is now free to play! Now I am using a Mac, so to get it working I had to run it through Wine using Wineskin. It is not optimum, but it works! “Flying Anvil” lives.

Finally, my wife and I are trying to exercise more. Her schedule has been crazy since moving here. 24/7 on-call for over two years really stinks. She has a new team member who may be able to help, but we will have to see. Everyone who has come out here has left fairly quickly. Maybe, just maybe we will get a chance to enjoy the Islands for a change.

If you are using HAML and want to cycle colors in your code, do the following. NOTE: My example is with an %li but you can use %tr or %div or whatever you loop over.

%li{ :class => cycle('odd', 'even') }

Odd and even are styled in your CSS.

.odd {background: #ffffff;}
.even{background: #c0c0c0;}

If it takes me an evening to figure out how to make something work in my development environment, then more than likely someone else is dealing with the issue as well. This little how-to will help you get your development environment setup to utilize your hosted email account on Site5.

The setup: I am currently using OSX 10.6.7, Ruby 1.8.7 and Rails 3.0.3.

I am also going to assume that you have a Rails3 development environment setup. If you do not, see my tutorials on how to get Rails 3 up and running. Also, this tutorial assumes that you have a solid understanding of the basics of Rails 3 development. With all this said, let’s get started.

The first thing you will need to do is create a file in your config/initializers directory named mail.rb.

Inside this file add the following lines of code.

ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
  :address => "mail.your_domain.com",
   :port => 25,
   :domain => "your_domain.com",
   :user_name => "noreply@your_domain.com",
   :password => "your email password",
   :authentication => :login,
   :enable_starttls_auto => true,
   :openssl_verify_mode => OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_NONE,
}
ActionMailer::Base.default_url_options[:host] = "your_domain.com"


Of course you will want to switch out your_domain for your actual domain information and the username and password will be specific to an email address on your account. I use noreply@domain_name.com as a standard communication email address.

The next thing you need to do is generate your mailer information. From the root of your site type the following:

rails generate mailer site_mailer

This will create the following:

app/mailer/site_mailer.rb
app/views/site_mailer
spec/mailers/site_mailer.spec.rb

In the app/views/site_mailer directory create the following file:

thankyou.html.haml or thankyou.html.erb (if you are not using haml)

You could theoretically name the file anything you want, but let’s be kind to the users of the site and say thank you when they do something that warrants it.

Edit the app/mailers/site_mailer.rb file to look like the following:

class SiteMailer < ActionMailer::Base
default :from => "noreply@your_domain.com"

   def thankyou
    mail(:to => "a_test_email_address_your_access@your_domain.com", :subject => "Test", :from => "noreply@your_domain.com")
   end
end

Notice that def in this case is thankyou, the same file name that we just created. Rails will automatically pick it up for processing. Again you will need to switch your data for the place holder code in the example.

Put some test text into the views/site_mailer/thankyou.html.haml. Actually, to get this example working, I typed “test” into the body of the file.

Next, for this to send an email you will need to call it. So, pick a controller and enter the following snip-it:

SiteMailer.thankyou.deliver

I utilize a test controller that is benign to the site just to get the proof of concept up and running. Run that controller in a browser and see if your email sends. If it does, you have basic email up and running for your site.

Now, you may run into issues when it comes to actually sending the email, so let’s move on to debugging the system so that we can see what is really going on.

You will need to place you debug code into the config/environments/development.rb file. Scroll down till you see the config.action_mailer... line of code and replace it with the following:

Original
config.action_mailer.raise_delivery_errors = false

New
config.action_mailer.raise_delivery_errors = true
config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :smtp
config.action_mailer.perform_deliveries = true

NOTE: You will need to restart the framework to get all of this up and running. So, be on the look out for craziness. If it looks like you sent the email but didn’t recieve a copy in you in-box then most likely it was the following error:

hostname was not match with the server certificate

Without the debug code installed, you would have never known it. There are a few other errors that I ran into, so if you need help don’t hesitate to ask.

My Best Brian

In my last post, I confessed to the world that I am not the best Rails programmer and that I have a lot to learn when it comes organizing and programming projects the right way. Since then, I have read more from the Agile Samurai and now have my first two inception questions ready.

Someone may be thinking, if you confessed last week then why are you just now getting around to another post. That is a good and valid question. I have a lot of responsibilities to take care of just like everyone else. Learning how to do things the right way is what I am doing in what little spare time I have.

So, with BEST80POPROCK in the background and my trusty keyboard in hand, here are my first two inception questions.

Why are we here?
First and foremost, this is a project that I want to donate to the open-source community. I want to utilize the project as a learning tool for my growth as a developer and learn how to program Ruby on Rails using test driven development techniques. The ultimate goal is a CMS framework that developers can use as a launching pad for future projects. I also want to build an app that is easily extended.

The elevator pitch
The CMS is FOR developers WHO could use a basic and extendable framework to begin writing applications. The CMS IS A content management system UNLIKE out of the box solutions which are designed for users to build sites with little programming knowledge OUR PRODUCT is designed with developers in mind as a means to quick start new projects.

There it is, my first steps into learning agile programming practices and developing a site the right way. Stay tuned, more to follow.

My Best Brian

I have been working with Ruby on Rails for about 3 years now and I have a pretty solid understanding of how to make things happen. However, I have a confession to make, I don’t do things the right way. At least, I don’t do things the right way, yet.

I noticed lately that 37signals was looking for more people and @dhh wanted people to provide code samples from an open source project. I have been working on an open source CMS for about 6 months now and have since realized that I wouldn’t want to show the code off to anyone. It is hacked together, it has not been refactored and worst of all, it has no tests to make sure the code works when I add something new. The only thing the code has going for it is that I ported it all over Rails 3 and HAML, but again, it is ugly.

So where does this leave me? Well, first things first, I have been accepted to graduate school and that is going to consume a lot of time. However, that is not an excuse to write ugly code. This means that I have a couple of options. The first is that I can stop coding all together; not an option I want to entertain. Second, I can learn how to do it right. This option seems more plausible.

Here is the hard part, I don’t have anyone to bounce ideas off of and learn from. I could start a community, but I am the only one of me that I know of on the Big Island. The community forums are nice but they are limited in scope.

So here is the game plan. I am going to do what I did to learn Rails. Read. Read Lots! Follow the examples and do things the right way. Here is what I have so far. The Rails 3 Way, Test Prescriptions and The Agile Samurai. If you all know of some more useful books I can pick up, I would be happy to hear about them.

I will start to rewrite the CMS and post it so that others can review it, comment on it and at some point use it. Are there other CMS utilities out there? Sure. But, this would be my offering to the community. I also have a few of products I will be developing, all with quality and revenue as the ultimate goals. They will be staged at my consulting site until they reach a point that I can launch them.

Finally, a big thanks to Scott Belsky for giving me the confidence to believe that I can deliver on these products. I know that Making Ideas Happen says that too many ideas can interfere with getting some done, but I think I have found a manageable amount of work. We will see.