2008

Why do Apple laptop upgrades cost 200% more than Dell’s?

Erm… economies of scale might have something to do with it, perhaps?

CNet only manages to touch on that in their conclusion…

So why so pricey, Apple? Less buying power? Greed? Good business sense?

…whereas it perhaps should’ve been the focus.

A quick googleage would’ve uncovered that in the 3rd quarter of 2007, Apple sold 1.1 million Mac units in the US. Dell sold 5 million PC units in that period. I’m going on the assumption the difference is similar on the worldwide scale, but perhaps it’s not. Dell’s worldwide figures might be much larger in comparison.

In any case, if I’m buying 1 million items from you, it seems likely I’m going to get a much larger discount than someone who’s only purchasing around a fifth of that amount. Which might account for at least a percentage of the difference. It might not as well, but surely the possibility invites more than 3 words in a conclusion…?

I’ve decided to release 1.1.0 of YAK for Wordpress as an “experimental” version. It hasn’t been fully tested yet, but enough people are hanging out for some of the features that I hope a few early adopters might kindly help out with the process.

1.1.0-exp includes features from the not (publically) released 1.0.4:

1. Add new non-unique order id
2. Move javascript on cart off page and into separate script. split javascript into generic and admin specific files — to stop problems with (missing) jquery on the wp pages.
3. Add warning message for people with session.auto_start turned on.
4. Integrate YAK back into the WordPress menu structure. The top-level menu was a nice idea, but it’s inconsistent with all other plugins (plus isn’t recommended, according to the WP devs). You can now get to YAK’s options through Settings->Yak, and to Orders/Products/Sales Reports from the Manage menu.
5. Fix PHP4 problem with the view products screen

Along with a few additional features:

1. Add https support
2. Add first cut of Google Checkout integration.
3. Tidy up setting payment types (drop downs now rather than input boxes). Add setting of a credit card landing page.
4. Add support for tags with square brackets [ ]. The html-comment version of tags will be removed in an upcoming release

Google support is minimal so far. It’s one-way integration at the moment (allowing customers to submit an order through Google Checkout) — with no automated return path for handling purchase. That will come with a later release.

These updates hopefully make configuration a lot more user-friendly — particularly the changes to the Payment Types. Note that if you decide to upgrade, please make sure you backup your installation, and you double-check all your configuration options after upgrading.

YAK version 1.1.0-experimental can be downloaded from the WordPress Extend site.

I’m now charging for support of YAK for WordPress. Basically for anything that can’t be handled via a few messages on the General Discussion page or on the Bugs page.

The main reason for this change is that I can’t justify (particularly to the family) the amount of time I spend both on development and bug fixing, AND on the volume of support requests I get (at times).

See the new Support page for more information.

It appears the only one who’s lost contact with reality is the NZ finance minister…

On one hand:

In particular, households are being squeezed by higher fuel prices since the budget, he said. Gasoline prices have surged 14 percent the past three months

and then on the other:

…workers needed to be aware of the outlook for the economy when they made wage claims… …Wage expectations in the public sector haven’t caught up with the changing economic environment. Some have lost a bit of contact with reality.

The word that jumps to mind starts with T and ends with WIT.

A recent file rearrangement on my server resulted in all the links for “Snake Wrangling for Kids” breaking.

The problem is fixed now, and the zip files should be accessible again.

As a matter of interest, just searched on Google for “wordpress shopping cart” to see how far down the list YAK turned up. Surprisingly, it’s on the first page. Well, the bottom of the first page, but it is the first page.

Cool geek-out moment!

YAK 1.0.3d has been released (the WordPress plugin page hasn’t updated yet, but the files are currently available from Sourceforge).

Please backup your existing installation before upgrading. Deactivate, remove the current yak-for-wordpress directory, then copy the new version into the plugins dir and re-activate. You’ll need to double-check the configuration settings, because many input boxes have changed to drop-down selects (for category and page selection for example… see below). This upgrade will also require you to go through your products and set the price in the “YAK Product Details” tab (see point 5 in the changes below) — the custom fields are no longer required.

This release includes the following bug fixes:

1. Problem with table creation.
2. Country options not saving properly.
3. Fix an odd problem with globals.
4. The return URL appears to be broken with PayPal IPN. PDT works fine, but IPN seems to wind up back at the home page of the blog. Added a fix to cleanup the order from the shopping cart when this happens.

And the following changes:

1. Frank Malina’s new look-and-feel.
2. French translation (provided by Charles Dixon-Spain).
3. Change money format and currency format to be simpler drop down boxes.
4. Change the download url from the settings screen so it is now an override (i.e. optional).
5. Add new data input on the post/page edit screen for yak price and title (replacing the old method of using custom fields).
6. Remove the “Auto Set Price” option (doesn’t make a huge amount of sense now).
7. Fix the Auto Set Quantity so it works with selected categories.
8. Tidy up the stylesheet.
9. Add a hidden link to the checkout and to the buy button form — vain hope that this might drive more search engine traffic to the YAK plugin page — if you don’t want the link included, it can be switched off on the Basic settings page.
10. Change the product category (settings page) from an input box to a dropdown.
11. Change the redirect on buy (setting page) from an input box to a dropdown.
12. Change the return and cancel urls on the PayPal settings page to a dropdown so you can select a page rather than having to type a url.

The latest YAK release is slightly delayed because I’ve, thus far, been completely unable to test PayPal integration.

First problem: The return URL doesn’t appear to work (cancel return URL works fine). PayPal keeps sending me back to the index page of my test site.

Second problem: When trying to save the Website Payment Preferences (in PayPal Profile) I get a “Page Not Found” error. So there’s no way to change between IPN and PDT. This has been broken now for at least 5 days.

If anyone is using YAK and PayPal and is willing (and able) to test both IPN and PDT integration, please let me know. Worst case scenario, I’ll release this version as unstable, and wait for PayPal to fix their problems…

UPDATE: Problem solved. PayPal have updated their site, but this has somehow corrupted old test accounts. Deleting the old account and creating a new one fixes the problem.

Interestingly, there doesn’t seem to be a WordPress Community group on LinkedIn.

Or, possibly, there are dozens. There’s no way to tell since LinkedIn’s Group directory isn’t open and also isn’t searchable. Unless you’re lucky enough to find the relevant group on someone’s profile, you’re stuck with creating your own.

So that’s what I’ve done. If anyone is interested in joining, the invitation link is in the groups section of my profile.

And let’s hope LinkedIn develops a really good ratification process for merging millions of one-member groups…

It’s been over 2 years since I released YAK for WordPress (6th of March, 2006 according to Sourceforge), and the forthcoming release finally starts to tidy up a few loose ends. It was always a bit hacky — from a user interface perspective, that is — and 1.0.3 sorts out a few of the most obvious problems (this is not to say it’ll be perfect, of course).

YAK has always represented a reasonably significant investment in time. I don’t put a huge amount of effort into development now that it’s hit the 1.0 release, but popularity brings an inevitable increase in the number of calls for support.
Family commitments mean that I have less time available — or at the very least, it’s harder to justify spending the time. The obvious answer, suggested by a couple of people, is to commercialise (at least in part) the plugin.

There are plenty of open source projects which have at least a small commercial component. And plenty more which are mainly commercial, but release unsupported open source versions. An example of the former are projects which have paid-for documentation. An example of the latter would be something like JBoss or MySQL, which release community and enterprise versions of their apps — the enterprise version, rather obviously, providing commercial support.

So this brings me to a question: where to, with a semi-commercial version of YAK?

There are a few options on the table:

1. Reduce the detail of the online documentation and release a paid-for installation manual.
2. Release a supported, commercial version of the plugin with the latest features, and the open source version (with those features) would follow a few months later (only the commercial version would be supported).
3. Per-request charge for support, perhaps based upon the time taken.

What do you think? Any better ideas?

I only found out the Wii was (might be) region-locked after carting all my Wii stuff from NZ to the UK. A rather depressing thought — I’d have to export any new games I wanted from back home.

I contacted Nintendo UK to find out for sure, and they confirmed, yes it was region locked… but then went on to describe the region locking as though it was tied to the TV colour encoding system. They continued, “For example, the UK uses PAL-a, and New Zealand uses PAL-b which should be compatible”.

I’m guessing the question was completely misunderstood.

Anyway, rather then destroying any chance of becoming carbon-neutral this century, I thought it was worth buying a local game and trying it out. Zack & Wiki duly arrived from Amazon, and was inserted, with some trepidation, into the console… and worked perfectly.

Conclusion: if the Wii region encoding is controllable by the publisher, as some have reported (see the comments of that page), then Capcom, at least, have not exercised that control. Well done Capcom, and… awesome game, by the way.

Well… not so sudden.. but yesterday I realised that this year will be the 30th anniversary of the first time I sat down in front of a blinking white cursor.

Said cursor was a small rectangular block, about 4 millimetres by 5 millimetres, and the machine was the Radio Shack TRS-80 — bought by my father for what is, now, quite a lot of money for a computer, comparatively speaking. That was also the year I started to learn programming (BASIC) — using a book which was the inspiration for my own programming book for kids. I was 8 years old at the time (in case you were wondering).

Thirty years is quite a long time to be using computers — although that’s elapsed time, rather than actual. There was a good period in my late teens when motorbikes were far cooler than computers…

HP + EDS

Two wrongs making a right? Only time will tell.

If anyone is interested in previewing YAK 1.0.3, please get in contact. This release adds a new (admin) UI design (provided by Frank Malina), and fixes a couple of nasty bugs that emerged with the latest version of WP (tables not being created, globals not working as they used to, etc).

Apart from the new UI, there are no major feature improvements in this release, however there are a couple of “big ticket items” I’m thinking about adding in version 1.0.4.

In a moment of either inspiration or madness (I’m pinning my hopes on the fact that there’s a thin line between madness and genius), I decided to start work on a version of SWFK for the OLPC.

There are a couple of reasons why this is more of a challenge than the other versions of the book:

1. I don’t have an OLPC
2. The version of Python installed on the OLPC includes neither Tkinter nor, more importantly, the turtle module.

The first point is easy to solve. I’ve been running OLPC on VirtualBox (occasionally) for a few months now, so at least I have a vague idea of how to interact with the Sugar interface.

The second point is slightly more problematic. As far as I’m aware, the OLPC runs GTK, and so the pygtk module is available — but I have yet to come across a turtle implementation for gtk (ignoring, for the moment, the TurtleArt activity already installed on the OLPC, which I don’t think is particularly useful for my purposes).

It seems like quite a fun project — implementing the turtle module using pygtk — until you consider the arcane pygtk API, the (IMHO) lack of reasonable documentation (I’m not particularly impressed by the pygtk reference manual… particularly the lack of index), and simple examples to expand from.

Technical issues aside, a week later, I’m considering the semantics of an OLPC edition of the book. SWFK for Windows, Mac and Linux, all target the same fundamental audience. An OLPC edition has a completely different potential audience. The Western+English market is, no doubt, vanishingly small — so while, to date, I’ve had over 6500 downloads, I’m guessing an OLPC edition might garner less than 1-3% more. The real market would be translated versions (assuming the interest in translating actually results in translations) — but that begs another question: will kids in non-Western countries actually understand some of the references? Is talk of DVD players, in-car computers, Nintendos, etc (i.e. some of the references in chapter one, for example), at all meaningful in the developing world? I’m doubtful.

Which leads me to posit the question, is it worth the not-so-insignificant effort?

What do you think?

Genius or madness?

Through cruel (pronounced in melodramatic fashion with emphasis on all the verbs) twist of fate, I wound up clicking on a spam link the other day.

I never click on spam links. To mix a few metaphors, one has to be rather too many brain cells short of a four-cylinder engine to click on anything in a spam message.

I do have an excuse for my actions, although rather a feeble one: I was skimming rather quickly through my new mail and went from one email, from my father, to another. The second email was about replica watches.

Why is he sending me emails about replica watches?

The email was in a similar format to some of his others (a paragraph of text followed by a link), but the words “replica watches” and that link somehow caught my attention. An ominous orchestral theme should have started up as I moved my mouse, in slow motion of course, towards that little blue underlined set of characters…

I realised yesterday, after receiving another message about replica watches that I’d been duped. By the bizarre combination of a spam message formatted exactly the same as another, and the fact that Thunderbird occasionally doesn’t update the header info (from address, subject, etc) at the top of the message when I flick through too fast.

And somewhere there’s a twit with Dr Evil ambitions who’s currently rubbing his hands together with glee, because the “sucker” light has just flicked on next to my email address. I can look forward to an inundation of messages about cheap gucci bags, replica watches, “enlargement” remedies, and so on.

Needless to say, I won’t be buying that Breitling at the fraction of the price of the original.

Long awaited by… well a couple of people at least… I’ve recently been working on splitting out Snake Wrangling for Kids into 3 separate editions: one for Windows, one for Mac and one for Linux.

This proved rather more challenging than expected (rather characteristic of LaTeX as a whole actually), and I haven’t fully proofed the final result yet. Those interested can check out the new editions here:

SWFK - Linux Edition
SWFK - Mac Edition
SWFK - Windows Edition

The Mercurial repository (here) containing the LaTeX source has also been updated with the latest changes.

So I’ve sort-of figured out how to do conditional blocks. The following LaTeX initially appears to work:

\newboolean{cond1}
\newboolean{cond2}

\setboolean{cond1}{false}
\setboolean{cond2}{true}

\ifthenelse{\boolean{cond1}}
{
A block of conditional text in here.
blah blah
}

\ifthenelse{\boolean{cond2}}
{
A separate block of conditional text in here.
blah blah
}

I say initially appears to work, because it works fine for the first 4 or 5 attempts, but then some combination of blocks (\begin{verbatim} for example), causes it to break on the 6 attempt. If I include a verbatim block in that 6 attempt, latex outputs an obscure error message… something along the lines of:

Runaway argument?
some code here \end {verbatim} \end {listing}
! Paragraph ended before \@xverbatim was complete.
<to be read again>

Which is rather infuriating, considering that I’ve got verbatim blocks in the previous conditional sections (it doesn’t complain about those), and because I’ve almost got the answer to my problem.

Response from someone who grew up in the somewhat tectonically active east coast of NZ (i.e. me):

…

Meh

…

Does anyone out there know of a way to have conditional blocks in LaTeX that are controllable by external parameters?

The sort of thing I want to do is something like:

\configurablesection{someparameter_1}
some stuff here (this is block1)

\configurablesection{someparameter_2}
some different stuff here (this is block2)

Then, from the command line, set a parameter to include the text in block 1 AND/OR in block2, and produce different output as a consequence.

Any pointers welcomed!

I’ve had a few requests to release the “source” to Snake Wrangling for Kids, by people interested in translating the text into another language.

SWFK is still a work in progress — although that progress has been rather slow since we moved to the UK — but I can’t see any reason why I should put off releasing the LaTex source until some sort of mythical completion date, particularly not when there are willing participants out there.

So for those who are interested in translating SWFK to another language, the latex “source” can be found in the following Mercurial repository:

http://www.briggs.net.nz/hg/swfk

Note that it isn’t “buildable” in its current state. I haven’t added the image files yet because some of them are rather large (the cover alone is over 2MB) — the wonders of the EPS format. Mercurial doesn’t seem to handle excessively large image files that well (at least not on my web host it doesn’t), so if anyone has ideas on that front, let me know.

A somewhat surreal conversation with my daughter last night:

“Papa, what’s yod?”

“What’s WHAT??”

“Yod!”

“I don’t know.”

Kid wanders off, and comes back 2 minutes later.

“What’s yod?”

“I don’t know. What do you mean by yod? I don’t know any such word.”

Kid sighs in exasperation (conveying depths of feeling only possible in the average 5 year old), and stalks off down the hallway…. singing the NZ National Anthem to herself:

“Yod of Nations, at thy feet, in the bonds of yove we meet”.

Ah… that Yod…

I’ve just fixed (rather hurriedly) an annoying bug in domyinvoice.com. Invoices generated for a project with a daily rate (rather than hourly) were calculating the days incorrectly — basing the calculation on the number of tasks rather than the distinct list of days. Easy to fix, but since I haven’t been doing any Python for the last couple of months, it took a few hours longer than it should have.

Haven’t been posting lately because we’ve made a move back to the UK.

Again.

My carbon footprint must be of obscene proportions, given this is now the 5th time I’ve made a move from NZ to the UK.

A couple of immediate impressions after arriving back in the Mother Country:

1. I’d forgotten how dang cold this part of the northern hemisphere is. Even after leaving a rather average start of summer (well it was pretty average in Dec).

2. Getting longer-term accommodation is a nightmare — particularly the referencing process. We’re (hopefully) moving out to Rickmansworth next week (that’s Hertfordshire for the uninitiated), but it hasn’t been straightforward. Touch wood, cross fingers, etc, etc, etc.

3. Mobile phones are so much cheaper than back home. Even prepay. 15p for the first minute and 5p after. That’s about $NZ0.41c per minute followed by 0.14c per min. Plus free mobile phones with an 18 months plan, and in some cases free gifts like Sony PS3s, Nintendo Wiis, iPods, etc. Of course, those are for the crappier models.

4. Dang it’s cold here.