Fake Steve has picked on the iPhone Ireland ripoff. Just don't take the hollywood Oirish accent stuff too personally.

Jaysus! Howja make a fookin phone call with this fookin thing?

After the Sunday Business Post highlighting the rip off of the iPhone in Ireland, lots of other stuff is cropping up now.

Apparently is was in the Mirror today and here is a selection of links discussing the same thing.

The high price of iPhones in Ireland - News.com

Irish telco firm blasts O2/iPhone price package - Silicon Republic

O2 Ireland defends controversial iPhone plans - Mac NN

O2 Ireland defends high iPhone costs

Dear Ms. Danuta Gray

iPhone hits Ireland with rip-off tariffs

O2 - The Irish iPhone Rip-off

iPhone launch 14th March on O2 Ireland...

The Sunday Business Post have highlighted the rip off going on with the iPhone in Ireland.

I can't find an online link but they highlight the difference between the packages available in the UK and in Ireland. As they put it, "When it comes to 'Eire surcharge' that mobile operators traditionally levy on Irish customers, its business as usual with the iPhone. Basic package customers pay four ties the tariff per minute than British customers do and five times the texting rate. From the phone's basic cost to its data allowances, we will pay more for less than our counterparts on the same operator in Belfast or London. Only on calls outside package limits is the Irish customer better off.'

The thing is, there are so many minutes in the packages in the UK it makes no difference that the outside package minutes cost more.

Basic Package

I have just read on AppleInsider that O2 will not be implementing Visual Voicemail in Ireland. Thats just nuts. One of the few features that might have kept me wanting a legit is gone.

Two things happened in the last two days. This morning the iPhone was announced for Ireland, as I pretty much expected O2 got it, they had it in the UK so it made sense.

However, also as you would expect the prices are a joke. €399 for the 8GB and €499 for the 16GB. It sells at these prices elsewhere in Europe so I suppose no surprise there.

The other thing that happened was that the Euro reached a new high against the dollar, $1.51. So €399 is now $602, and €499 is $753.49. In the states these two handset models sell at $399 and $499. So even accounting for VAT, we are still looking at over a $100 premium on the handset alone.

Then there are the tarrifs which are as follows:

Additional Data 2c per MB

Voicemail 15C

Well the 1GB data limit it clearly a joke, I don't think much needs to be said on that. We get ripped off for mobile data in Ireland unless you get one of their broadband modems. But if I can buy the modem and get 10gb for 24 euro I don't understand how they couldn't work that into their 100 Euro price plan.

Currently I am on the Business Time 500 plan. For €70 I get 500 minutes talk time, 150 anytime minutes or 250 texts, extra calls are 17c and extra texts 8c.

So price wise the €65 iPhone plan would be the equivalent plan. However, for the privilege of paying out a few hundred for a phone, I would have 150 minutes less talk time, 100 less text and actually pay MORE!! for additional calls and texts.

Only in Ireland.

It has to be said the idea of sticking to my existing plan, getting in a phone from the states, unlocking it and ignoring the fact that I have mobile safari on the phone is still looking like a viable option. Its still likely I will end out getting an iPhone but with these plans they have hobbled the use of a great device.

We have now employed our first oursourced resource and so far things are great. We have code coming in to our SVN server each day and we can see the project developing.

We got an extremely good developer from Russia who speaks great english. We found him through ODesk.

Odesk is very impressive, its a great platform. On signing up someone to do a project you get access to SVN and Bugzilla through their system. It also provides monitor of work done and hours put in by your resource.

We will continue to update how we get on and will give more details on what we are getting built soon enough.

I have held off using Rails 2 on our existing apps for a while now and I decided it was time to give it a try. We have a number of apps running on various releases of rails 1.2 but I always figured it would be too much work to upgrade them. However its turns out to be pretty easy.

First off I ran:

rake rails:freeze:edge TAG=rel_2-0-2

The funny thing is that you have to run this twice. The reasoning is that the first time you run it you are running your rake command from rails 1.2, which isn't aware of several new pieces of rails 2, in my case Active Resource.

So if you get this error:

..vendor/rails/railties/lib/initializer.rb:159:in
`require_frameworks': no such file to load—active_resource

All you need to do is run the rake command the second time.

The advantage of freezing is that you can easily unfreeze later if you run in to problems.

The next item that came up is that a session key needs to be set in the environment.rb file. This takes the form of:

config.action_controller.session = { :session_key => '_project_session', :secret => 'blahblahblahblahblahblahblahblah' }

where the blah blah bit is a genuine key.

Without this the rails 2 app doesn't want to start.

Once those two were resolved our apps started up fine. They still nag about a few things, mostly deprecated items in our code. The only other config item that we had change was that
in config/environment/development.rb the line

config.breakpoint_server = true

has no effect anymore and I just commented it out.

So all in all its pretty easy to upgrade, and although your milage may vary, I'd recommend giving it a shot.

For those of you interested in Rails Development, we recently purchased a copy of The Rails Way by Obie Fernandez. It is the best rails book I have read bar none.

Don't get me wrong, the Pragmatic books are excellent too but The Rails Way takes it to a whole new level, going in to the detail you will need as you try to progress beyond the basics of rails.

I've been doing rails sites for one and a half years now and I am still learning stuff thanks to this book. It even has a forward by DHH (He hates that apparently, but it sounds too familiar to call him David as he prefers.)

In the last few weeks we have hit a couple of instances of Irish Banana republic public services.

We moved in to our offices and naturally wondered about how to get our bins collected. We have no room for a wheelie bin. We are on the first floor, we have no access to the back of our building and the front goes straight out on to the street. So we figured its no problem, we will get those stickers for the bags.

So we called Dublin Waste only to be told under the current rules we cannot use bags. Now bear in mind, we can see other people using bags. This was about six weeks ago.

After numerous calls by Naoise we were told we should use a private company, Greenstar. We called them. They didn't come out. Well ok they did but only after calling the guys supervisor on the fourth or fifth call. Then out he comes.

We generate about one bag of waste a week. The guy comes out and explains that we have to buy the bags 200 at a time and in total it will come to about €1500. Now ok, we are a business and I accept the fact that we have to pay for things but paying for four years of bin service in advance seemed a bit much to me.

To top it off at the same time we got a letter "demanding" the first "moiety" of our rates. I highlighted the two words on purpose. Firstly, they demand the rates. This is the first communication we have received about this "moiety". Given we can't even get our bins collected you can imagine how we feel about this. The second problem was I didn't have a clue what a moiety was, unless we are talking quiet man stuff here and someone is a "moiety fella". A quick search turns up the fact that moiety is the old french word for half. So these people who can't even collect our bins and demand our money can speak old French.

In the end Naoise got on the phone to Dublin Waste and threatened them with calls to politicians. The guy then says, while he was on the phone, that the inspector has just approved our request. Hmmm.

This has all happened in the same week that our telco left us without a phone for a week and now I have just been told I am getting no post at home all week as the postman is holidays and there is no cover.

I'm supposed to pay some VAT and PRSI now but I'm just not feeling it.

Now lets get this straight. I am a bit of an Apple fan boy. Not the rush out the door every time they release a product type, nor the type who gets overly excited when the store goes down but I really like their machines and software. I have personally converted several people to be apple users as well.

However, the one thing that constantly annoys me is the price difference between Ireland (or generally europe for that matter) and the US.

The new Apple TV is $229 in the US. By google magic this is €157.46. On the Apple Ireland site, €299!! Almost twice the price.

Now I can understand that Apple can't keep up with currency variations on a day by day basis but this is ridiculous. Come on Apple get your act together.

I noticed the O'Reilly Rails Conf Europe for 2008 site is up. Its on the 2nd to the 4th of September in Berlin.

I'd be very interested in having Marino Software there in force but I am wondering is it worthwhile. Did anyone go to the 2007 version? Did you pick up anything worthwhile?

We now have 4 bids in for Rails Manager application. The prices vary quite a bit and also it difficult to determine what the price will end out at as some are offering fixed price and some hourly rate. Its also hard to determine how good the people are but I am fairly impressed by the calibre of what I have read anyway.

And we have uploaded our second project up on to the sites today. Its a more web based one so I expect more quotes as web projects seem to draw more quotes anyway.

Today I travelled through 2 airports, Heathrow and Dublin.

Now Heathrow at least had a large selection of wireless networks I could join, although all at a price.

Dublin Airport was a joke. The new gates, the ones starting with D don't have any wireless at all. None whatsoever. I actually couldn't believe I didn't have the option of paying.

But how operations the size of major airports cannot afford an internet connection and a few wireless access points is beyond me. Business travelers have to go through these completely under serviced and overpriced building on a regular basis, can't we at least expect to be able to get some work done while there.

Funnily enough, just after I mentioned that the merger between AOL and Time Warner never really worked there are rumors about that they are going to split.

Its hit Slashdot today - Time-Warner Planning AOL Split

I've wanted to experiment with some of the outsourcing sites like ODesk for a while now. It always sounds like a good idea but when I head stories about outsourcing it often falls flat.

I've just posted a test job though. You can see it here: Rails Manager

The idea is I'll get someone to build a simple rails manager for Leopard and see what happens. If its good I'll put it up for download. Its a small enough app that its not a big risk and its no risk to our core business.

I'll continue to post updates on how we get on, but I'm getting worried now. The job is posted an hour and we have no bids :(

Looking at the proposed merger of Yahoo and Microsoft I am reminded of the merger of Time Warner and AOL.

I worked for Netscape up until 1999 and saw Netscape get swallowed up in AOL and then the merger of two huge companies. It didn't work at all. In fact very quickly the Time Warner people wanted their old shares back. It still hasn't worked and the share price will never get back to its old levels.

Another example was the HP Compaq merger, while it has worked out ok long term it slowed them down for the first couple of years.

If the deal goes through it is inevitable that someone will pay the price, whether its Yahoo or Microsoft it will most probably be in some way the shareholders. Pulling the two companies together will take time, time that Google will enjoy. If you take two large companies that can't beat Google, I don't think putting the two of them together makes a company that can beat Google.

Also, the ethos at the two companies is miles apart right now. Yahoo runs on Open Source and champions open source projects, I don't have to mention how MS sees this hippy stuff.

If you look at this deal in light of the level of cash that Microsoft has left, it looks like a huge gamble to get in on the internet game by Microsoft. One that I can only see backfiring.

The guys over at Rails Envy have done a fantastic presentation on Rspec testing of rails applications.

To be honest its been on my list for a while to look at RSpec and this is just the kick I need to do it. How I leaned to love testing

Rails Envy is definitely one for the feed reader.

While browsing through some items on the iTUnes site it really became apparent how much the changing exchange rate play havok with pricing on electronic products. There really is a need for more dynamic pricing.

Right now Apple have a number of albums on sale in iTunes at $7.99. Which works out at only €5.88. However, on the Irish iTunes store the same album is €9.99, a huge markup even taking VAT into account. Thats some joke for an electronic product which doesn't even have to ship anywhere. A 41% markup. Soon the DRM version will cost even more!!

Strangely it doesn't seem as bad for some physical products. The Apple TV is $299 dollars which is €220 euros. The €299 charged by Apple in europe is a 26% markup, not much over VAT.

If electronic items such as music, tv and video are ever going to catch on in Europe its time they priced them based on what they actually are, a non-manufactured, non-shipped, drm crippled item. It completely unfair to overprice items like this for Europe. It seems the sensible thing to do is wait until the CD you want it in the 3 for €20 sale in HMV.

PS. I am not 100% blaming Apple here, I know its probably the record industry behind it.

We have spoken internally about how important it is for us to keep customers.

With a recurring business model even if your acquisition of customers is slow, so long as you keep every customer you win, you can at least mark a date on the calendar when you will be in good shape. As soon as we have mProperty live we will be building in the customer service features.

Scott Carson, mentioned this on the Carsonified blog a while back and I agree with his sentiments. Build in your customer service features into your app and also empower your support people to use them. For example, we need to have a button for refunds in our back office and anyone who is dealing with a customer has to have the power to click on it.

Anyway, the main point of this post was Dyson. Seven years ago I bought a Dyson DC01, their first mass market model. Over last weekend it's main belt broke due to me not cleaning out some crud that got caught up in it. I considered buying a new one but I decided to chance giving them a call. Their phone system was quick and to the point, no shouting "One", "Two" down the phone. I spoke to someone quickly who took my address who agreed to send out the belts for the price of postage only. Considering this was a seven year old vacuum cleaner which only had a five year guarantee I thought this was great. I have since told several people how good they were about it. And I would definitely buy another.

So they prove the point up above. My seven year old cleaner will probably die sooner rather than later anyway, and for the price of one piece of rubber they have ensured I will spend about three or four hundred euro with them in the near future.

One of the benefits of starting a new company is the fact that you start with a clean slate.

Given we have no previous investment in hardware etc we can select the best items for the job instead of sticking to something we have already spent money on.

We went with MacBook Pro's for all our machines and at this stage we will probably never bother with a desktop machine.

The laptops have a number of benefits for a start up company. For a start, they take up less space. But another one hit me while reading a Slashdot article, they use less energy.

If you want a computer to use less power you only have a couple of options, use an older less demanding processor in a machine with integrated graphics or use a laptop. Laptops are already designed for low power consumption so essentially they are the green option. So we should keep our carbon footprint down by our all laptop 'policy'.

Now of course someone will tell me that for every laptop made a whale drinks a litre of battery acid and trackpads are made from the left eye of an african child.

I have to say I applaud the Irish Government for making the effort on E-Government.

We had to do our first annual return recently and it was great to be able to use the web based system to file the return. The system also has a lot of helpful prompts when you make a mistake which of course a paper form can just never do.

There was one silly problem though. I got to the end of the form and everything validated fine and then it explains I needed an account with CRO.ie, right at the very end. Now to get this account you have to fill out and post a paper based form. Had they have explained this at the start I would have filled it out in advance but now I have to wait on the Irish postal system.

In the last few days I wanted to create part of our address entry partial using text_field_with_auto_complete. I did some googling but in the end it required some brain power to figure out myself.

Adding them is easy. I have a Country, County and Location entry field so I added three text_field_with_auto_complete boxes, one for each like so:

<div class="formElement"><label>Country: </label>
<%= text_field_with_auto_complete
 :country, :name,{}, :indicator => "country_activity" %>
    <span id="country_activity" style="display:none;" ><%= image_tag 'spinner.gif'%>
</span></div>

and so on. The indicator attribute allows you to specify an element in the document which becomes visible while the text_field_withautocomplete is carrying out a query.

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