James Crisp

I put holiday photos on my screen saver, and these favourites just came up. I thought I'd share them with you...

Wondering if your loan repayment calculations have been performed correctly this month, taking into account interest rate rises and extra repayments? You might be interested in giving my monthly loan calculator a go.

As my home loan provider doesn't show balances online, and only sends statements every 6 months, I like to ring up every month or two to make sure things are on track. I used to calculate interest, new balances etc in a spreadsheet / calculator but spent an afternoon writing a little Rails app to calculate it for me. Hopefully my little monthly loan calculator is of some use to you too.

Well, being married and all, we decided to splurge and buy a Flikr account for us both. It is:

http://flickr.com/photos/soosun_and_james

For the impatient, jump straight to:

• Our Wedding in Korea
• Travelling around in Korea
• Honeymoon in Vietnam

Soosun and I got married in Suseo Church, Seoul on 5 January 2008.

It was pretty exciting, with multiple costume changes, lots of food and exotic ceremonies! Soosun had heaps of family and friends, and my parents, sister and her husband and one of my grandmothers and some of my close friends were able to come to Korea for the wedding.

We got up bright and early and went to the Korean hair, make-up and dressing place before the wedding, and also had a spot of breakfast.

One we got to the church, we welcomed friends and relatives and had photos taken.

At noon, we had the wedding ceremony in the church. Soosun's uncle is a Catholic priest, and he performed the ceremony and took our vows. It was then time for lots of photos with all possible permutations of relatives and friends.

After the religious ceremony, we changed into our hanboks. Meanwhile, the guests were enjoying the banquet. The food looked really good and we had a chance to nibble a little bit before cutting the wedding cake with a sword and making toasts.

The last part of the ceremony was traditional Korean. We dressed up in a double layer of traditional Korean hanboks and bowed away like crazy to relatives, and they gave us advice and honeymoon money in envelopes. We poured plum alcohol for close relatives out of a teapot and drank with them. We at dates stuffed with pine nuts and various other traditional foods. Our parents threw chestnuts and dates and we had to catch them in Soosun's hand veil. We caught 10 dates and chestnuts altogether, which means we're meant to have 10 children!

After the wedding, the younger crowd headed out to Beer Plus for an after party...
  

The whole wedding ceremony was recorded, and we're going to edit together a short highlights movie. Stay tuned...

Over the last 6 months, my old Treo 600 touch screen was dying. Cleaning and re-seating helped for a while, but eventually, the touch screen stopped working. As the Treo 680 barely improves on the Treo 650, and costs a lot more, I bought a new-ish Treo 650 on eBay. All went well until I tried to send SMSes using my Optus SIM. No luck - I got an error 4027 every time I tried to send a SMS, although voice and GPRS worked fine.

First attempt at a solution was to set the Message Centre Number in the phone. Strangely, the Message Centre number (configured though the SMS app) was always empty, and when I tried to set it to the correct number for Optus, the value wouldn't stick past a phone reset.

Thanks to Google, I found the outline of a solution on a message board.

In summary, the Treo 650 (unlike the Treo 600) is not compatible with Optus's standard post-paid/plan SIMs used in Australia. However, it is compatible with the Optus pre-paid SIMs. If you have a Treo 650, and a post-paid/plan SIM, you can buy yourself a new pre-paid SIM for $4 from your local Optus store, then ring the Optus call centre to have them do a "SIM replacement" to move your account and number to the new SIM. This solves the problem within minutes of the "SIM replacement".

Recently, I've been catching up on my reading. Haruki Murakami is one of my all time favourite authors. His novels are always interesting, and the writing style is generally gorgeous, although it does vary a little between different books. I'm not sure if this is Haruki Murakami changing his style in the original Japanese, or simply results from different translators.

Something I've been noticing lately is that in all of the Murakami novels I can recall, the protagonist always has a lot of time. This is so different to most other novels which try to rush from one exciting event to the next. Perhaps this is part of the reason why I really like Murakami's writing so much. Anyway, here's some memorable quotes from Murakami novels that I've read recently:

From Kafka on the Shore:
"Perhaps most people in the world aren't trying to be free, Kafka. They just think they are. It's all an illusion. If they really were set free, most people would be in a real pickle. You'd better remember that. People actually prefer not being free."

"Pointless thinking is worse than no thinking at all".

From Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World:
"Huge organisations and me don't get along. They're too inflexible, waste too much time, have too many stupid people."

"It's frightening," she said. "Most of my salary disappears into my stomach."

From The Wind Up Bird Chronicles: (language warning on this one)
Show quote, although it contains 4-letter words.

WebJam is usually quite fun. The premise is that a large group of people meet in a pub, have a few drinks (often sponsored by some generous company) and see quite a number of presenters who have 3 minutes each to show off cool, web-related stuff they've done recently. The next one is this Saturday. Details as follows:

Place: Bar Broadway (opposite UTS)
Date: 29 Sept 07
Time: 6pm

I'm planning to go, and also to give a 3 minute presentation on my new free wedding registry site.

Hope to see you there!

After being inspired by the Rails screencast long ago, I thought it would be fun to make a screencast for my free wedding registry site. It takes a bit of work.

I checked out a few different screencast recording packages and ended up going with CamStudio. It is a fairly basic product but free and good enough for my needs. It lets you choose a window to record and also lets you include an audio track. I think the easiest way to use it is by recording to AVI (very quick) and then converting to Flash SWF (slow), when you are happy with the movie. In terms of SWF settings, I found the best combination was 16 bit colour, Playback rate and Keyframe rate at 20 frames / second. It is also a good idea to set the 'Percent of movie to preload' to something like 15%, to get things rolling quickly for your viewers.

I'm reasonably happy with the resulting wedding registry screencast, although there is certainly room for improvement. CamStudio unfortunately doesn't let you set the look and feel of the playback controls, so they feel a bit out of place. When I get time, I might also split the screencast into two - one from the bridal couple's perspective, and one from a guest's perspective.

I'm really pleased to announce that YourWeddingPresents.com (a free, independent, wedding registry site) is now live!

When my sister was getting married, she had a lot of trouble finding a good free wedding registry that was not tied to any particular shop. I developed the wedding registry site to fill this gap, and also to improve my web programming skills. I've tried to design Your Wedding Presents to be really quick to sign up and easy to use. Please tell me if there are any problems with the site, or ways the site could be made better.

On the technical side, I developed Your Wedding Presents using Ruby on Rails. It is running on an Apache load-balanced Mongrel cluster and data is stored in MySQL. It is hosted on Rails Playground.

It is BarCamp in Sydney this Saturday. I haven't been to one of these unconference style events before, but I've heard good things about it from my colleagues. I'm quite excited to go along and see what it is like.

If you're in Sydney and interested in stopping by, details are as follows:

When: Sat 25th August 2007 from about 9am
Where: University of Technology, Sydney (Jones St entrance)
More details...

One of the novel aspects of BarCamp is that all participants are encouraged to present or start a discussion around something that interests them. For my part, depending on what people are interested in, I was thinking of one of the following:

• new stuff in the .net space (C# 3.0, .NET 3.5, LINQ, WPF, WCF, etc) and showing some demos
• giving a bit of a Ruby/JRuby introduction with help from Ola's JavaBin slides
• or, if people are keen, a discussion around JRuby vs C# 3 vs Java vs ?? and their stacks for different situations and problems

By the way, the conference is free, and it is not too late to sign up
Hope to see you there!

Jim Webber and I will be co-presenting at Tech Ed Australia and Tech Ed New Zealand this year. Here's the low down:

Hope to see you there!

Better than money can buy. Made by my dad

A present from my adorable fiancée

Let me tell you a sad tale. One day, out of the blue, the digitizer on my palm started to drift. Every hour, it got worse. This meant that when you tried to click a button like 'Add' the Palm thought you clicked 'Delete' - no fun at all! It was possible to temporarily improve the situation by running the re-calibration program built into the system, but within a few hours, where you clicked again had very little relation to where the Palm thought you had clicked. After about a week, it was not possible to run the re-calibration program, as the digitizer was so far out (program just looped forever so I had to reboot the Palm). I discovered that there are actually keyboard shortcuts for just about everything, and that the 4-way nav button gets you most places, so the device wasn't a total write off. However, it was slow and cumbersome to use.

Now, one month later, I'm sure you'll be thrilled to know that things are better, the sorry tale has had a happy ending (touch wood!). Much googling led to many suggested approaches to fixing the problem including:

• Various auto-calibration programs (AutoDigi, DigiFix, etc).
• Running paper around the screen under the casing to remove gunk.
• Cleaning the insides by putting a vacuum cleaner to all openings.

However, all of these approaches ended with disappointment and no noticeable improvement.

Finally, near buying myself a new device (aside: it is a shame that Palm has not managed to produce a device significantly better than my several year old Treo 600), I came across a site selling replacement Treo 600 digitizer/screen modules. They kindly provide a very useful movie on pulling your Treo apart to help you replace your digitizer/screen module. With little to lose, I decided to open up the case of my Treo and see if there was anything I could fix.

Following the instructions in the movie was not too difficult. I didn't have a small star alan key myself (required for opening the case), but I borrowed one from my dear dad, who has an amazing tool collection. Also, lacking a plastic case opening tool, I used a butter knife - this worked OK, but did damage the plastic of the case a little. If you have something made from thin and strong plastic, like the case opener in the movie, it would be a better tool for the job. I had a great time pulling everything apart and finally had all the components spread out before me. I cleaned the screen carefully (there was a fair bit of grot around the edges), fixed the buckled taping on the side of the screen, and put everything back together, carefully re-seating the various cables.

And now, almost a month later, the digitizer still seems to be working fine! Hurrah! So if you are contemplating what to do about your Palm's broken or drifting digitizer, I recommend pull it apart, clean it all and re-seat cables and then hope for the best!

Recently I ordered 12 books from Amazon. It was my first time.

The process started really well - quite easy and pleasant to find the books I was after. Not to mention that amazing range and the great option of getting cheaper second hand books. Adding to the shopping cart was also a breeze.

I was pretty impressed, good prices, nice process. But then the honeymoon was over. Time to check out - stream of consciousness. First, I need to enter address details. Fine, as expected. Then I get a message (from memory) "There is a slight problem with your order. Some of the books you have chosen cannot be shipped to your address. Change your delivery address or change the quantity to 0 on these books.". Not happy! One third of my books (second hand ones) cannot be sent. That means I need to cancel the check out process, remove 4 books from my cart and then try and find the same books from other more expensive suppliers which can be shipped international. So I try again, adding the same book from multiple suppliers to my cart, in the hope of finding one which can deliver to Australia. Then it's back to the checkout process again.. Problem - I missed one book and have to cancel the process and go back to basket process again. Great, all books are OK, finally time to complete the order. So I get to review my order, and it says at the top something like "With an Amazon credit card, this order would be $324 rather than $368". No other total including postage is provided. So is my order $368? Maybe? Further screens finally confirm that this is the case. Nowhere is it possible to see how much postage is per book - you have to work it out yourself doing best guesses and following the Amazon formula. Maybe it would have been better to get a new book rather than a second hand book, as second hand books have twice the postage charge.. ah well, too late now, I'm not going to go through the whole process yet another time! So finally I can check out and my credit card is charged. However, since my credit card is hit by a multitude of different vendors that use Amazon as a front, within seconds of each other, some transactions are rejected as my credit card does not allow too many transactions in too short a time (some sort of security feature?). Finally, after getting a few emails from Amazon saying the card could not be charged, and then telling Amazon to retry, my order is at last paid for and on the way.

Okay, so what could be done to make this better?

1. Allow buyers to filter their results so they only see books that can be delivered to their addresses.
2. Do not use patronising messages like "there is a slight problem".
3. Do not suggest that people change their delivery address to another country.. that is clearly not going to happen!
4. Show the cost of postage all throughout the process. Book buyers know they are going to have to pay postage and want to optimise their orders taking it into account.
5. Do not show the order total including postage for the first time as a confusing advertisement ("With an Amazon credit card, this order would be $324 rather than $368"). Instead, provide a simple breakdown in a table, including postage on each book.
6. Hit the credit card once per order, and divvy up the money at Amazon internally, rather than allowing each book vendor to do it and having credit card rejections as a result.

UPDATE: My books arrived about two weeks after I ordered them. Delivery was smooth and on time. Unfortunately, one of the CDs that came with a book was broken. Amazon has kindly agreed to replace it and the book.