…not only me. Anyone.

I bought the CapsuleNeo iPhone 3G case made by SwitchEasy from PowerMedia.

At first, it seemed great… it looks sexy, it’s got this nifty neoprene inner skin to absorb shocks, and comes with some neat little pluggy-inny things to stop dust and moisture getting into the docking socket and the headphone jack. It even came with a kooky little piece of plastic that after a while I figured out was to stand the iPhone horizontally in for convenient movie viewing.

First thing: the little stand thing was lost within hours, closely followed by the pluggy-inny things.

Secondly: the snap-on 2-part case design has thin areas of plastic that snapped within a week of use. I’ve now got a dangly bit of broken case hanging off the bottom which catches on everything.

So, this is my second broken iPhone case, so instead, I’ve ordered an OtterBox 3G Defender in Black & Yellow. Let’s hope they’re as rugged as they claim to be.

Douglas F Shearer

… and he also talks about the rather interesting acts_as_indexed plugin for full-text search on ActiveRecord fields, which hopefully I’ll be implementing soon.

Get it here

I’ve just gotta get this off my chest:

Cascada looks like Rose Tyler’s mum.

There… got that outta the way. Who is Cascada ? Well, it’s a shabby Eurodance act that plays with monotonous regularity over the A/V system at my gym. And I can’t help but notice that the singer for Cascada looks like someone’s done a chav-tastic makeover on Rose Tyler’s mum from Doctor Who.

So, so sick of listening to them. Almost as much as I’m sick of listening to Natalie Basingthwaite. Fuck’s sake. She’s a class act that… so classy that Sony advertise her on Facebook, right next to the “Meet hot singles in your area” and Debt Consolidation ads. Style. Well, I guess that something needs to be done about that warehouse full of Rogue Traders CDs that no-one wants to buy. Perhaps we’ll see them being offloaded on eBay in “cheaper by the 1000” lots.

So, today, I concluded an experiment that took about a couple of months to get my head around and organise: I bought some Apple shares.

I got 5 apple shares at $US 95.22 which cost about $AU 850 incl brokerage.

What took so long?

In a word: paperwork.

Things I Learnt

1. It takes 3 days to transfer cash from the CommSec account to the Pershing account.
2. You must request the money transfer over the phone by ringing the CommSec international desk.
3. Next time I’m going to make a transfer well in advance of when I want to buy. That way I can pick a time when the exchange rate is better.
4. Also… and this is pretty obvious, I guess… It’s good to buy when there is BAD news or opinions. In this instance, I bought just before the recent iPhone OS 3.0 announcement, which was lucky otherwise I’d have been paying 5% more.

As part of my overall upgrade to new-style RESTful views and controllers, I have been introducing map.resource statements into routes.rb.

At first, this was great… all of the free routes, path and url helpers make for much DRYer and cleaner code.

Then I hit a snag: I had all these secondary controller methods that did stuff like render graphs (as img requests) that suddenly stopped working. Also, I just had some “other” methods like an extended “edit_details” form, and a “show_details” page. These didn’t seem to be accessible unless they were linked to via a HTTP POST request. This would have been appropriate for the edit, but not for the show_details.

This was puzzling… why were all non-standard GETs failing? Well, it seems that it was because all URLs were mapping the second component to the :id parameter for GET.

So, how to stop that? Here’s how:

   map.resources :assets, :member => {:edit_base_year_data => :get}

This says that there is an extra GET request that matches to /assets/edit_base_year_data, which matches before the default /assets/:id.

Yay.

When you live in the Netherlands, eventually you encounter the Evil Blue Envelopes. They’re from the BelastingDienst (Taxation Service), and they mean two things:

1. You need to read a whole lot of bureaucratic taxation-speak gobbledegook… in Dutch.
2. It’s not going to be simple. Even if your tax situation is simple, like: you left the country 3 years ago, you’ve put all your tax returns in, and hired a book-keeper to make sure that there’s no loose ends left, and you didn’t earn anything in Holland that year or any year since… it’s still not going to be simple.

Sigh. Dutch Bureaucracy. Finest paperwork nightmares in the world.

As you may guess, I got an Evil Blue Envelope in the mail today…

Just done a t-shirt of the Grass Mud Horse

Here’s the YouTube video of the song

And here’s a brief bestiary of double-entendred animals that have found themselves on chinese websites.

So, now that I’ve added the fabulous “delete all comments” button to posts (only when I’m logged in), I have at last been able to nuke the hundreds of spam comments that were added to a few posts, with the click of a single button. Yay!

It was important, because I’d also noticed a spike in my bandwidth recently. It would appear that all the search terms that were inserted into the comments were designed to attract searches, (duh!), and they sure did. Hopefully, they’ll go away now.