KISSmetrics got a lot of publicity around the startup and web development blogs/news sites so it was understandable to have assumed that startups were their target market. This month, KISSmetrics came out of beta and announced their pricing:

• $149 / month: 1m events tracked
• $399 / month: 5m events tracked
• $699 / month: 10m events tracked
• No free plan

W…T…F?! Frankly, I was gobsmacked and shocked when I received the pricing announcement. What the hell was all this? Were these annual prices? Nope. Who was this service being aimed at? Certainly not any sort of bootstrapped startup business. I don’t mind the lack of a free plan (in fact, I think it’s a good move) but where’s the $10-20/month startup plan for < 10,000 events? And then I got angry. I’d liked KISSmetrics. As the name implied I thought it was simple. I wrote a Rails plugin for the service to help rails developers easily send events to KISSmetrics. I spoke about the service at my local Ruby developers group. I recommended the service. Now I have to go and retract that recommendation. Even on the “small” plan, KISSmetrics would need to give you insights that save your business at least $200 every single month and all within 1m events. I wonder how many other people will retract their recommendations for KISSmetrics?

If I put my cynical hat on, I wonder if KISSmetrics’ business plan is actually about extracting large wads of cash from the bank accounts of venture-backed startups… because that pricing is far too rich for anyone else. Though I can’t help feel that for every $149/month plan they sell now, they could have sold more than 15 $10/month plans. It also means I’ll be staying well away from their KISSinsights product (and anything else that team may produce) and we should all be more wary about using pricing-unannounced-beta-products in the future.

1. Heroku (a Ruby on Rails host) uses Git as its deployment mechanism
2. Git supports branches as a more native concept than Subversion

Here’s a few things I’ve noticed about Git:

1. The wording seems off:
   • git checkout <mybranch> is used to change between branches in your working copy. In Subversion, checkout is what you do to get an initial copy of the repository. git switch <mybranch> seems like a more accurate command.
   • By default, Git doesn’t commit the changed files. You need to call git add <my file/path> to add those files to the commit. If you delete a file, you call git rm <my file> to add the removal of the file to the commit. To remove the file from the commit, you call git checkout… it just seems quite confusing. I like the way this prevents files being accidently committed but I think it could have been made clearer. If you want Git to behave like svn, you call git commit -a
   • git branch <my branch> actually creates the branch rather than changes to it.
2. Because Git is a distributed SCM, the branches you create locally are not necessarily present on a remote copy of the repository. Likewise, if you git pull a remote repository, you don’t automatically get the branches. The worst thing is tagging. This is very useful for marking releases but tags are not pushed to a remote repo unless you pass an optional flag. This seems dangerous because if you forget this flag the tag only exists on your computer and not the master repository.
3. Also, it’s worth remembering that Git isn’t during a remote backup of your code until you actually do a push to a remote server
4. Annoyingly, when you switch branches using git checkout, it doesn’t seem to warn of uncommitted files (or, as is Git’s way, it might warn but does it anyway). This has led to some unintended contamination between branches and is just something to watch out for.
5. Unlike Subversion, the cmd-line really is the best way to experience Git. I used the nbGit plugin for Netbeans but found it incredibly slow and clunky. Perhaps better tools will arrive.
6. The main hosting site for Git is Github which is great for open source projects (social forking!) but I’ve chosen Codebase as I can host Git and Subversion projects, along with their associated tickets and milestones. Codebase can also do an automatic push which I might use to ensure each push to the production repository is pushed onto Heroku.
7. Worryingly, I have managed to corrupt my local repo though it might have been due to a power failure

That night I coded up a basic ruby on rails application which did just that. I waited a week whilst the .ie registration was processed and then spent another 2 evenings working on the theme. Another few more hours here and I present to you:

dualpricing.ie

It’s a simple little site that lets you enter a store, an item and the UK £ and Irish € prices. It does the simple calculations to remove the appropriate VAT and then converts the £ to €. The items and stores are tabulated so you can see who the worst offenders are. Give it a go with the price tags you’ve taken off the Christmas presents (you did remember to remove the prices before wrapping, didn’t you?). I’m morbidly curious to see how the tiny server it’s running on will handle the load.

I’m trying not to be too judgemental with this site. There are obviously cost differences between UK and Ireland, and I’m sure Irish prices will always be a little bit more expensive, but I’m also convinced that many of these retailers are exploiting the Irish consumer. After all, if the retailers were just converting from UK prices and adding in a little Irish cost factor, why would our € prices be such neat numbers? Surely £10 should convert to something like €13.37 not €15? Anyway, it is not my intention to understand, criticise or justify these price differences — just expose them.

Didn’t all the stores remove their UK prices? Actually, some did. Here’s my notes from a morning in Mahon point shopping centre:

• Next: places a label over the UK £ price (but you can easily see through or around it)
• Ladybird: detaches the £ price (no doubt, to “prevent confusion”)
• Debenhams: dual priced labels except on fragrances
• Zara: No UK prices
• Ecco: No UK prices
• Principles: detached the UK prices
• River Island: places a thick label over the UK price (can’t see through it, or easily remove it like in Next)

Where stores have removed their dual prices it’s still easy to look them up on their UK shopping sites. I only wish I could make this happen automatically.

Go read this introduction to Git on Windows and install the command-line package of msysgit. Now, if you’ve got Rails 2.1 or later you should be able to do

ruby script\plugin install git://github.com/thoughtbot/shoulda.git

but it will fail with various errors, probably including “Plugin Not Found”. Instead, try:

ruby script\plugin install http://github.com/thoughtbot/shoulda.git/

It’s annoying but it works. Of course, you could just use git to clone the plugin into the directory but then you have to actually install it and I found it just got messy.

Update: I noticed that with a new Rails project I didn’t have this issue and the first method works fine.  I’d upgraded the old pre-2.1 project but obviously something didn’t stick.  So another method might be to recreate the project.

Ruby is actually a pretty cool language and Rails is certainly a reasonably quick framework to use (once you figure out the documentation and various magic incantations).  It took a lot longer than I was hoping to learn the Ruby language and understand the Rails framework, but then I was only working on it occasionally and I’m not a web developer.  It’s certainly better than writing Java code and adds another feather to my l33t programming skillz   Java for work; Ruby for pleasure.

• 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 every year), then the frequency and unit fiels must be present

It turns out that the validates_XXX methods can be an ‘if’ parameter but it didn’t seem to work as expected. You can’t just do

validates_presence_of :count, 
  :if => recurring_strategy == "WeekDay"

but a quick Google codesearch revealed a more standard pattern:

validates_numericality_of :count, 
  :if => Proc.new{|s| s.recurring_strategy == "WeekDay" }

A more experienced ruby’er could tell you exactly what this is doing but I’ll hazard a guess that Proc.new creates a new procedure that’s called with the parameter s to test the if condition. Anyway, it seems to work. The only hassle I had it that in the strategy example they overrode the payment_strategy accessor which isn’t really necessary and makes accessing the ‘type’ of strategy quite difficult.

Years ago I’d tried to use Microsoft Money but no UK/Irish banks support automated transaction downloading so I’d spend 2-3 hours a month inputting the transaction data, correcting it and fudging it to make the balances match. Then I’d spend some time trying to categorise things so I could track my spending in certain areas. It turned out that most of the time I was just getting cash out of the ATM. And I when I started my PhD, I couldn’t even make Money understand that I was only paid quarterly — so I’d apparently spend 2 out of 3 months in serious poverty. Personal finance applications like Money are designed by accountants, for accountants or for non-accountants trying to be accountants or who need to communicate with real accountants. They’re just not designed for real usage.

Like a good software developer, I decided that this problem needed some programming and the idea was simple: keep it simple. All I need to answer is a few basic question:

• Can I pay the known expenses this month (Rent, loans, etc)?
• Given my current rate of spending, will my account ever go below zero, and when?
• Given my current rate of saving, when will I have X amount?

Instead of entering, tracking and tagging transactions all I need to enter is the account balance at a particular time. If my balance was €2000 a week ago and is now €1000 but that included €750 in rent, I know that my untracked spending is running at ~€250/week and, unless I get paid, I’ll hit zero in about 4 weeks. This is the basics of financial survival.

About two months ago I started coding the application as a C# WinForms application using lots of nice looking GUI controls, an embedded Firebird database and some base ADO.NET statements (yuk!). Development slowed but the need didn’t, so last week I started looking at Ruby on Rails. You see, I’ve recently noticed that the applications myself and Hilary need are all online: Gmail, Google Calandar, Remember The Milk, etc. On Wednesday I asked Hilary if she could give me 1 week of “us” time to work on a RoR implementation so that we’d have a functional version which we could start using. I’d might tinker with it, and possibly open it up to public use, but it gave me a defined slot of time to get things done and Hilary knew she wasn’t losing me indefinitely.

By Day 3 I had: the database tables written, Rails scaffolding providing the basic CRUD forms, user authentication working, accounts associated with particular users and balances with particular accounts. I also had some basic charts working with Ziya and account overviews provided by Sparklines.

Unfortunately my block of time idea didn’t really work out. It’s Tuesday night and I haven’t worked on it since Friday night. There’s a lot more to do, including most of the date manipulation and recurring events etc, but so far I’m pretty happy (although my eyes are aching from computer-ing morning, noon and night). It might have been easier with Python/Django (since I’m already familiar with Python) but I felt that was more info/tutorials around about Ruby on Rails (and learning yet another language can’t hurt).