Television advertising works. There I said it. I was just minding my own business about three weeks ago flipping through the television looking for something interesting to watch during one of my afternoons off and stopped on a commercial for the new Ancestry.com.

Before I had my first child back in 2002 I got a really strong instinct to want to know more about my family background. I was obsessive about it. I joined Rootsweb/Ancestry.com, looked through old boxes that belonged to me and my husband for family documents and photos, and even did some grave surfing at the cemetaries in Madison county, the home of most of my husband's ancestors. I worked on our collective family histories for about 6 months and managed to scrape together about 400 people in a tree that branched out about 5 generations - back to the early 1800's. In 2002 Ancestry.com didn't have an enormous collection of census data digitized so you were mostly relying on personal memories or loosely strung together shreds of information from those still living. And then enters my first child which pretty much ended my quest for family information.

But having a lot more free time now that my kids are not so dependant on me, I bit completely. I used the trusty "Forgot your password" link and within minutes I was back in to my ancestry.com account. Now since 2002 Ancestry has gone through massive renovations and all of the data I had entered was not lost but it was no longer connected to my user account. I was able to search for some of my original entries and within a couple of hours was able to resurrect most of my original branches and got to work searching through the new data that was made available with the new upgrades.

I have had some enormous successes! Through my research on the site I found a distant relative I didn't even know I had because he too had been researching the Burr side of my family history and had the line traced back to the 1600's - yes the Burr's came over as the earliest settlers and my direct ancestry is derived from the Benjamin Burr who was believed to come to America in one of the 11 ships in Winthrop's fleet in 1630. It is thought he landed in Massachusetts but removed to Connecticut and was one of the settlers of Hartford, CT. In about 1830, Roswell Burr, the G-G-G-G-Grandson of Benjamin removed to Painesville, OH with his family and the family line remained in Painesville until around 1920 when my Grandfather came to the Atlanta area and settled there - and this is how my Burr line came to Georgia.

If you are still reading this you might like to see the 14 generation line I have been able to put together in the last few weeks. There I am all the way at the bottom.

1. Benjamin Burr (1602-1681)
m. Anne (unknown)
   2. Samuel Burr (1643-1684)
   m. Mary Baysey (1639-1682)
     3. John Burr (1670-1741)
     m. Sarah (unknown)
       4. John Burr (1690-1741)
       m. Mary Root (1694-1770)
         5. John Burr (1726-1788)
         m. Tabitha Loomis (1730-1828)
           6. Jehiel Burr (1757-1814)
           m. Mabel (1768-unknown)
             7. Roswell Burr (1780-1857)
             m. Nancy West (1792-1850)
               8. Jonathan Burr (1812-1884)
               m. Lucinda Wheeler (1821-1898)
                 9. Seymour Dan Burr (1843-1896)
                 m. Elizabeth Wood (1843-1874)
                   10. John Ira Burr (1868-1941)
                   m. Minnie French (1870-1945)
                     11. Daniel S Burr (1892-1948)
                     m. Florence Vesy (1899-1971)
                       12. William D Burr (1915-1991)
                       m. Frances Cascio (1920-2000)
                           13. Michael Thomas Burr (1946-2006)
                           m. Anita Allen (1949 - Living)
                              14. Stephanie Burr (1971 - Living)

The resources that helped document this line thus far rely heavily on Charles Burr Todd's book "A general history of the Burr Family" published first in 1878 then updated with corrections in 1902. This book, which other sources validate, document the line from Benjamin Burr through the 7th Generation of Roswell Burr. Census Records document from the 8th Generation with Jonathan Burr through the 12th Generation with William D Burr, and of course live people can document from early 1900's through the present. The only gap in the documentation occur between the 7th and 8th generation branch. Ancestry does not have census records prior to 1850 so there is no definitive proof that Jonathan Burr is the son of Roswell Burr. My distant relative that I met through Ancestry.com lives in Ohio and visited the graves of Jonathan Burr. His grave and his direct family and brother are buried in a group and are clustered together with a group of graves for Roswell Burr and his wife. He has rationalized there must be a relation between Jonathan and Roswell and because of the age differences it appears it must have been a father/son relationship but there is no proof of this. There is documentation that Roswell had atleast 4 sons whose names are Halsey, Roswell, Erastus and David. There is a census from 1850 showing though that there 6 males other than Roswell in the household which might explain that there were two other sons - Jonathan and Daniel.

We are still searching for proof of the connection between Roswell and Jonathan.

Sometimes, you need to exclude certain files or folders from your Subversion repository. This is usually just as simple as not adding the files via svn add. But, those files and folders still show up when you run svn status as non-tracked files. This may be fine for most people, but what if you want to mark those files as excluded and never see them again (at least via Subversion commands)? That's where the svn:ignore property comes in handy.

Let's say you'd like to exclude all files in the log folder.

svn propedit svn:ignore log/

Then just add * as the entry to ignore all files in that folder. You can also set file patterns to ignore all types of files and folders.

NOTE: If you get the following error:

svn: None of the environment variables SVN_EDITOR, VISUAL or EDITOR is set, and no 'editor-cmd' run-time configuration option was found

You need to set your SVN_EDITOR. For a one-time workaround, you can run one of the following commands to set your default svn editor:

If you want to permanently set your svn editor, you can add an entry to your ~/.bash_profile file (on Mac only).

As a bonus, you can see all of the excluded files by running svn status --no-ignore.

I started wondering a few days ago, "Why don't we have an iPhone version of the Plexus site?" So I did some research and found that enabling a Ruby on Rails site for the iPhone was easier than I thought. I found a great tutorial outlining how to create a custom mime-type and create iPhone-specific pages.

I took advantage of a few tools to make my job a bit easier. iUI is a collection of javascript and css files that enable ajax, sliding page loads, and presentation to more closely resemble a native iPhone application. iPhoney is a Mac desktop application that emulates what your site might look like on a real iPhone.

But, with all the best laid plans, a few snags arose.

Plexus takes advantage of page caching to speed up load times. This presented a problem because I didn't want to cache the iPhone views, only the HTML views. The caches_page method in Rails will take a hash with a Proc to prevent pages from being cached under certain conditions. This is the example they give in the documentation:

The application will not cache any action that is being requested in json format. This approach didn't quite work because I created a custom mime type called iphone. After some hacking and failing, I finally came up with the following solution for not caching pages for the iPhone:

Definitely not the prettiest way to detect the iPhone format, but the only one I found that would work reliably. It checks the HTTP_USER_AGENT for Mobile Safari (that way, you can catch the iPhone and the iPod Touch).

Another problem I ran into was trying to keep the iPhone from loading the cached HTML views. This problem was a lot easier to fix. I just had to add the following RewriteRules to the site's conf file (keep in mind that we use a moved cache directory - public/cache):

If the http user agent is Mobile Safari, then it won't direct the request to the cached page.

The final hurdle was to make sure that people couldn't access the iPhone version of the site if they didn't have an iPhone or iPod Touch. Again, it was as simple as adding another RewriteRule.

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If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you can access the optimized version of this site at http://iphone.plexusweb.com.

Feeling a little daring in the new year? If so, I've got just the thing for you. Visit www.livestrong.com/dares/ and accept the challenge to save money, lose weight, get more sleep or spend more time with your family as part of LIVESTRONG's "Dare To" campaign. You can accept one or more suggested dares, create your own dare or dare a friend to participate.

For the record, I accepted a dare to complete a triathlon. Anyone care to join me?

LIVESTRONG.COM was created be the definitive daily health, fitness and lifestyle destination for everyone looking to lead a healthy and balanced lifestyle. As part of the Lance Armstrong Foundation (LAF), LIVESTRONG.COM promotes health and wellness through a variety of online resources such as calorie trackers, fitness plans, articles, support groups, etc.

Those familiar with LIVESTRONG.org will be happy to know they will continue to provide survivors information about their cancer-related concerns, worksheets to organize and guide the cancer experience and stories shared by other cancer survivors.

The Lance Armstrong Foundation focuses on cancer prevention, access to screening and care, research and quality of life for cancer survivors. Founded in 1997 by cancer survivor and champion cyclist Lance Armstrong, the LAF has raised more than $250 million for the fight against cancer.

Recently, I was thinking how great it would be to have some script that I could run for a project to automagically add all new files (or remove all deleted files) with subversion. I know, I know, git is the new hotness, so why am I still using subversion? Well, all of our projects here at Plexus are tracked with subversion, and it would be more trouble than it's worth to convert (not to mention re-training everyone who uses it).

Well, I found a great little one-line script that would do exactly what I wanted here. The only problem was that I would never remember that whole line of code, plus I didn't want to type all of that out every time I wanted to run it. So, I decided to add an alias to my .bash_profile file so that I could call that script with just one word.

I played around with single and double quotes for a while trying to get it to act correctly as an alias. The script uses awk, which worked great on the command line, but was backfiring in my alias. Finally, with some Googling and help from Colin, I figured out that the dollar sign in the awk call needed to be escaped. After that, it all worked great.

Here are the two lines that I added to my .bash_profile file:

The first alias will run svn st, get all of the files with a ? next to them (new files that aren't part of the subversion project), then add them to the repository. The second functions similarly, but will svn rm all files that have been deleted from the project.

*NOTE: Make sure you've added an svn:ignore to your project so that it doesn't check in any files that you don't want in the repository.