Jamie’s Weblog

I’ve been using the beta version of KISSmetrics on Shutter Scouts to track conversion rates. Frankly, this was more of an experiment as the site hasn’t really been promoted and opened up yet but I wanted the get the analytics infrastructure in place first. KISSmetrics allows you to track events in a user-specified conversion funnel [...]

Git, in case you don’t know and haven’t met a recent Git zealot, is the latest/greatest/coolest/funkiest SCM ever invented. Personally, I think Subversion still has a lot going for it for individuals but I’ve moved two project to Git for the following reasons: Heroku (a Ruby on Rails host) uses Git as its deployment mechanism [...]

About 2 weeks ago I was thinking about the dual pricing issue in Ireland (whereby UK stores/brands markup their prices for the Irish market). There are many reasons given for this dual pricing (tax, wages, rent, transportation and most often, currency). It occurred to me that some of the major price differences can easily be [...]

Ok, so everyone is the rails world seems to have moved over to Git for their version control (which is fine if you’re into the sort of thing). The downside of this is that Windows developers are left without much help when they want to install all those fabulous plugins hosted on GitHub (since most [...]

So, I’ve been out of work for the past 3 months since the accident but recently I haven’t been entirely idle.  I’ve finished off the personal finance site I first talked about almost a year ago and I’ve also written 2 other Ruby-on-Rails websites and got them deployed.  These aren’t fancy sites but they fill [...]

I was implementing the Strategy pattern presented here to avoid the limitations of Single-Type Inheritance but I wanted to implement some conditional validations based on the type: If it’s a “MonthDay-based” recurring event (e.g. 23rd of every month), then the monthday field must be present If it’s a “Date-based” recurring event (e.g. 1st August, repeating [...]

I previously used an Excel spreadsheet to budget my quarterly student stipend and ensure that rent was paid, known expenses were accounted for and Visa cards paid off. This worked reasonably well but marriage and moving back to Ireland has made the personal finances a little more complicated: We each get paid at different times [...]