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JB Hi-Fi – Online Shopping done wrong
From time to time you stumble across organizations that are so stunningly bad at something, that it just takes your breath away. JB Hi-Fi seems to have fallen into that category of late in the way they support their online orders. So the premise is simple. You place an order on the JB Hi-Fi web…
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Startrack doesn’t deliver
It’s kind of funny for a courier company that it seems unable to execute its main reason for existence – delivering parcels. Now, I get it that logistically it’s a huge task to deliver huge volumes of parcels around the country every day without some inevitable problems…but why do almost all my Startrack deliveries end…
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“Magic: The Gathering” Proxygate
So, the latest storm of outrage has erupted in the “Magic: The Gathering” community over the decision by Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro to ban any proxy events being run by a local game store, under threat of that store losing its accreditation to run sanctioned WOTC events. Mmmm…so how do I feel about this? On…
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The never ending scourge of spam
We all have to deal with spam unfortunately, and it seems to be getting worse and worse every year. At Spiffy Stores, we’ve been testing some new spam scanning and detection software, and one of the features it offers is the ability to define an email address which can be used as a spam honeypot.…
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Windows Automation with Watir and Ruby 1.9.1
We love automation at Spiffy Stores, so with this in mind, I thought I’d alert anyone who uses Ruby under Windows using the Ruby Installer that there are some small bugs that you should be aware of when using Watir. First off, if you want to interact with dialog boxes, then you will run into…
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Is Australia Post run by Amateurs?
Ok, this is getting silly. Australia Post provides a copy of their Postcode database, which we use to validate shipping addresses in our software. This database is automatically refreshed on a weekly basis from the data that Australia Post provide on their web site. A couple of weeks ago, this data got corrupted as someone…
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Trying out some Social Media
Well, the new Google Buzz is out, so I decided to give it a whirl. http://www.google.com/profiles/eastsydneyboy I might try to use it to keep everyone up to date with what’s happening in the Spiffy Stores world. We hit a bit of a milestone yesterday as I finally finished the last of the pages in the…
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Been Busy
I’ve not had much time to myself lately, as we push ahead with the final phases of the Spiffy Stores development. It’s almost done and we should be launching early in the new year. I’m just finishing up the account management functions so that we can manage our stores, but everything else is now finished.…
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SBS Hall of Shame
This is just a quick post to highlight the recent degradation of SBS’s SD transmissions… Here’s what it looked like on 30th March, 2009. Now here’s what happened on 20th April, 2009 The main problem here is that SBS is transmitting the interlaced fields offset by 1, which means the two non-movement fields are on…