Long time since our last blog post! We’ve been flat out with our projects, so here is the latest update.

We are nearing the end of our second year at Code to Customer, and it marks the end to a year where we have been shifting our focus as a company away from consulting to web products.

What we’ve been working on:

Minutedock – This is our first live SAAS product! Based around time tracking and integration with Xero, We’ve solved a problem us and our Wellington tech friends have identified, and solved it with style. We have a Harvest importer so getting started is easy, and its only $15NZD a month! Check it out at minutedock.com if you haven’t already.

MyTours – Currently still in the pre-release stage, we are developing an iPhone application to publish tours. These can be walking tours, tours of museums, tours of anything! And we are building a website that pairs with the iPhone application to author content, and push it to the device via our updates system. We are currently only doing branded applications for larger customers, but we are looking at building a generic application for anyone to publish tour content, and sell it via our system. Check it out at mytoursapp.com for our prerelease website, which we are going to re-skin and push live mid Jan, along with our first iPhone apps in the app store.

Coming up:

We’ve got some more projects coming up so stay tuned. They are currently in the super secret stage, but all will be revealed around March. We will also be doing a redesign of codetocustomer.com! It is long overdue and will be ready in Jan as well.

Special thanks to Alain and Victoria at Wildfire! They have been our main consulting customer for the last year and we are proud to be part of their project. Wildfire is based around running marketing campaigns on social networks, and is perfect for running competitions/sweepstakes and maximizing your exposure. Check it out at wildfireapp.com

So finally, Merry christmas and a happy new year from Nik and Ollie at Code to Customer. Looking forward to a sweet holiday in the sun.

I just noticed that Apple has announced that snow leopard will be released on the 28th of August. Here are some tips for upgrading to snow leopard that could save you a day of frustration.

I’ve already been running it for the last week, as I managed to get ahold of the GM release which was released to the beta testing community.

Upgrading to this operating system should be easy right? It actually depends on what software you have installed. If you use pre-compiled .app programs you just drop into your application folder, then everything will be easy, and all you need to do is chuck in the DVD and click upgrade!

If you use software that is compiled from source, it will be a different story. The main difference in Snow Leopard is in the base system. Everything is set up by default to run as 64bit. In every other OSX release, everything remained as 32bit, and so upgrading was easy, even with software installed from source. You can still run 32bit software on Snow Leopard, but you cant run 32bit software that has been compiled against a 32bit Library that is now 64bit!

But at first I didn’t notice this. I decided that as I had not reformatted in a while, I would reinstall OSX from scratch and install everything again. Luckily this was the right decision.

This was easy to do, using the standard installer to reformat the hard drive, and install the operating system. Before I started, I had backed up my home folder onto another HDD. This is so that I had my old settings that I could view for reference, or copy back over configurations and data as It was needed. Once this was done I also installed the new XCode off the DVD.

As I am a rails developer, I need to get my dev system up and running. XCode includes a 64bit version of Ruby 1.8.7, and includes rubygems with rails already installed. Below are some tips from when I setup my gems:

• sudo gem update --system && sudo gem update
• Install mysql. The OSX 10.5 64bit version off the mysql website works fine.
• install the mysql gem: sudo gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config
• Installing imagemagick and rmagick require a different approach. The instructions I found here worked for me, as the binaries on the imagemagick website are for 32bit versions of OSX.
• Setup your paths and env, and you are good to go!

This should mean you are all ready to roll with rails. Easy right? Open up activity monitor and checkout how every process is Intel (64bit). Nice.

Now when Nik installed OSX 10.6, he clicked the upgrade button. With older versions of OSX, this would mean you end up with a fully working version of the newer operating system with all your old software. but not anymore! Upon completion, none of Niks preinstalled 32bit compiled from source software worked. So not only does Nik need to reinstall his software anyway, he also has a heap of old 32bit binaries that are useless sitting around on his system taking up space.

Well he eventually got everything working fine, but he probably should have taken the same approach I did. The main annoyance here is expecting everything to work when you click upgrade.

Upgrading your OS is a perfect solution for someone with little opensource software installed, and not at all if you have heaps, So keep this in mind when you buy 10.6 later this week.

This blog can be pretty negative at times. No, don’t act so shocked – it’s true – I spend a lot of virtual ink calling people out and trying to get everyone to improve the quality of their web experiences. I think it’s high time for me to acknowledge some of the good stuff – some virtual pats-on-the-back, rather than e-tongue lashings. So, without further ado, I bring you the Friday Beers.

Kiwibank

Kiwibank’s new Internet Banking site is nothing short of spectacular. I was seriously floored – a bank, with an innovative, attractive and usable experience. Ignore the grumpy old curmudgeons, it’s an awesome change. In fact, it only falls short of the full six-pack because it sticks to the left hand side of my 24″ monitor (margin: 0 auto; plz kthx) and doesn’t include CSRF protection (you would’ve got that for free if you’d used Rails instead of .NET).

Orcon

Well, they got off to a shaky start, but boy, did they pick it up. Congratulations to Duncan Blair (their Head of Marketing and Communications) and the rest of the Orcon crew – great use of Twitter and new media, and an awesome turn around. Honorable mention to their development crew – who fixed the bugs I encountered and added an autocomplete with an impressive turn around. Have a well-deserved 5 beers guys.

Epic Beer

Well, these guys are kind of a shoe-in, seeing as I’m counting down the hours till I head on down to the Malthouse to sample their new Armageddon brew. I’m planning to try more than just 6 ;)

We finally to decided to take the plunge at home, and swap from trusty old Snap ADSL to a shiny, ADSL2+ Orcon connection. Apparently, it’s a no-brainer, and we thought that the hardest part would be splitting the single free hotel night between two couples and Dave.

Aaah, such naivety.

The first hurdle was the signup form on Orcon’s website. Where to begin….

Perhaps with the “Address Locater”, and its select drop down populated with every street type known to man (please, talk to ZoomIn, they’ve done addresses properly).

Or perhaps with the password field – “Your password must be 5 to 7 characters, contain one number and one capital letter”. As this ruled out my usual ridiculously long passphrase, I picked something which I promptly forgot.

Maybe, even the “Phone Number” field, which was marked “REQUIRED”, even though I had previously indicated (twice) “YES, I understand that this plan doesn’t include a phone line”. I entered Orcon’s own 0800 number, and moved on.

Admittedly, I was attempting all of this over a couple of beers with the flatties, but guys – you’re an ISP. Surely someone there knows their Internets well enough to fix this for you? The whole thing smacks of being designed and directed by the marketing department.

With that ordeal over with, and a suitably humorous username selected, it was time to wait for the confirmation email. Which never came. Oh well, it would appear I’m not the only one. When an email eventually came, it looked like this:

(Surely whatever library you’re using has a working strftime implementation? Human readable dates, please!)

Thus ensued a short wait for the jolly Chorus worker (I imagine him looking ever-so-slightly like Bob the Builder) to toddle on off to the exchange and flip some switches.

And then – Success! An email from the folks at Orcon Provisioning – “You’re now connected to Orcon@Home+”. Woo! I raced to my router’s web interface, feverish with new-gadget delight, and punched in my shiny Orcon Username and …. what was that password again?

Bugger. 20 Minutes on hold later, I am armed with a password I can remember (for some reason the character requirements are now relaxed) and punch it in to my router. All lights are green, and we are go for launch! Punch “google.com” into Firefox, and bam! I get sent to http://portal.snap.net.nz which helpfully informs me that my Snap username and password are wrong. Well, duh, I’m using my Orcon ones.

Seems Bob the Chorus switch-flipper has not been doing his job.

Alright, another call to Orcon, and another twenty minutes of my life wasted on hold. To make matters worse, the recorded hold voice says “some-fink” rather that “some-thing“, and I shudder at each repetition of that lazy “th”. I am met with an awesomely polite but entirely useless support person.

I should take some time out to commend Orcon on their support setup here. It seems she’s got screen shots next to her checklist for exactly my router type, and can see exactly what I’m seeing on the screen. She assumes I’m on a Windows machine at first (“Now click Start…”) but is quickly back with me once I mention my Mac-ness. Ten points for Gryffindor.

This is all wonderful, and I’m sure my Grandma would appreciate the careful and polite help, but the first thing I said to this support person was “Okay, all outgoing HTTP connections are being redirected to a portal site for our previous provider. This means we’re not switched over at your end”. At this point, she had two options:

1. Swap me over to someone that could speak my language
2. Continue with the excruciating process of me attempting to explain my setup (No, we have two routers. Yes, they are on different subnets. No, not different networks, subnets…. *sigh*).

Eventually, I interrupted as politely as possible – “Look, would it be possible to speak to someone who knows what’s going on here, rather than just running through another checklist?”. I felt mean, but was transferred nonetheless. Into hold-queue oblivion. Ten minutes later I gave up. Lesson learned: Don’t call in the evening.

So, a call in the morning. And I meet Braiden, a young man who embraces the spirit, if not the letter, of ‘FizzBin.’ (Orcon: That man needs a payrise, stat). We quickly ditch the checklists, and he says they’ll check everything out for me at their end. And now we wait in “a-technician-will-be-there-shortly” limbo.

(Stay tuned for Chapter 2: In Which I Finally Get Our Flat Connected To The Internets.)

“Hi there Nicholas, it’s REDACTED here from REDACTED. I’m calling about your recent switch of electricity provider to Powershop, and I was just wondering if you had a few minutes to run through your reasons for changing providers.”

Well hello! We swapped to Powershop for a few reasons – it’s cheaper, it’s easier for us, and I also have a small stake in a couple of the brands running on the Powershop marketplace – FlowerPower and GreenPower.

“Okay… well, are you aware that REDACTED includes GST on their per unit prices on their bills? And let me check your current per unit price <short pause> your current per unit price is about 19c/unit. We also charge a small daily use charge of 94c”

I was looking at my bill last night, and I’m not sure whether that price included GST or not. But I don’t think it did, there was a GST addition right at the bottom. Also, the average house uses 8000 units of power per year, right? So that works out to <short pause> just over 22 units per day. Which means my per unit price, assuming GST isn’t included, is a little over 22c per unit.

“Okaaaaay….”

I’m looking at Powershop now, and FlowerPower are offering me 18.18c/unit. That’s a lot cheaper.

“That is quite cheap. Are you sure that includes GST?”

Well, looking at my invoices on Powershop now, it looks like it is. Pretty cheap, huh?

“Yep, that is. I will have to check that one out for myself! Ha, I shouldn’t say that! Anyway, are you aware that the electricity Powershop sells Electricity from the National Grid, that’s been all mixed up, whereas REDACTED sells only power from renewable sources”

That is interesting… Well, on Powershop there is a company called GreenPower who will buy Carbon Credits (Actually – we’ll plant trees) to offset carbon generated by providing me power. Cool huh?

“Ummm yeah that does sound cool…”

Besides, I live in a flatting situation, so Powershop is a godsend. We can pre-pay for our power, so that we can work out what each person owes and we’re never left in the lurch if someone leaves unexpectedly.

“Wow! I’ve just had a flatmate leave myself, and now we’re stuck paying their power bill… I’ll have to check that out! Anyway, ummm, haha. If you have any more question, just uh, call us and we’ll let you know”

I sure will. And make sure you check out Powershop!

Yes, this actually happened.

Yes, it will be better for them.