“By putting this money in the hands of the nation’s 10-13 year olds, we will stimulate the economy on multiple levels. First, parents will have to drive their children to these stores to make the purchases. That will inevitably lead to more tire changes, oil changes, and windshield wiper replacement at our nation’s service stations. Secondly, the stores will have to hire new clerks and salespeople to handle all of the incoming customers. Thirdly, children tend to get hungry, which means increased visits to the Food Court. You see, it really works. By giving $500 to the nation’s children we will be putting so many American adults back to work.”

Skeptics immediately questioned how the government would know that the children had spent the money on jeans, high tops, video games, or candy and not on other “un-stimulating” things like food, medicine, and school books. President Obama has a plan for that and announced the creation of a new federal program, the Children’s Recovery Accountability Program or CRAP for short. President Obama said:

“Under this new CRAP, the federal government will require the 10-13 year olds to submit a stimulus spending report with receipts detailing their purchases. Employees of CRAP will then examine the receipts to make sure that the youngsters spent their stimulus money as they were instructed (on jeans, high tops, video games, and candy). If a CRAP employee determines that a child spent the money inappropriately, he will be authorized to fine the child $1000 per offense or sentence the child to 1 year in prison.”

What do children and their parents think about this program? We asked little Charlie Miller of Davenport, Iowa and he told us:

“Sounds great! I can’t wait to buy a new pair of Levi’s, Nike Air Force sneakers, Super Mario Brothers, Call of Duty, and a 100 pound bag of M&Ms. It is also cool to know that I am patriot!”

Charlie’s dad, William, 35 unemployed, said he has plenty of free time to take Charlie to the mall anytime he wants to do his stimulus spending. William is proud to see his son becoming a man and hopes that some day his son will do some grown-up stimulus spending on a house or a car. “You gotta start ‘em young”, William said.

Will this new program work? Only time will tell, but so far the prospects look great!

Thinking about work at Sliced Simple, we were able to avoid buying a printer and scanner for almost two whole months at the beginning of the company in the fall of 2009.  However, during the incorporation process we were invariably told by our lawyers that we had to print out and sign things to follow the most conservative and best practices for a new company.  So we bought a multifunction printer / scanner and a single ream of paper.  It is now summer of 2010 and we are still on the same ream of paper.  Without much effort, we have avoided doing a lot of printing.  For run of the mill contracts like NDAs and consulting agreements, we just use DocuSign, a very simple electronic signature service that is more than good enough for everyday contracts.

I have to be a bit weird though.  As I mentioned, I recently got an iPad and now really have very little use for printing.  But, when I read the reviews of the iPad, I seem to constantly come across some reviewer pointing out how there is no native printing capability.  People write into Walt Mossberg’s column just to ask about printing.  I really don’t get it.  Why would you buy an iPad and then want to print from it?  You can read Word files and PDF files right on the iPad and if someone else needs a copy, e-mail it to them!  I think if you look at the iPad and the first thing you say is “Now how do I print from this thing”, you probably should not be buying an iPad.

So I want to know, do you still print?  What do you print?  Why do you print?  Do you think you will ever stop printing?

PaperClip is a useful file attachment library for ActiveRecord that allows you to attach files (in our case photos) to an ActiveRecord object.  It abstracts a way a good deal of complexity and tedious code and is particularly great for uploading files to Amazon S3.

Problem

Like many Ruby on Rails apps, we have a method for searching this particular set of ActiveRecords and returning a set of results that include URLs for the attached photos. As part of constructing the result set we were calling the url method on the photo attachment. For some reason, calling this url method about three times per record was taking forever (like say upwards of 20 ms per record). Returning just 25 records or so was really introducing a lot of delay.

Solution

In our case, the urls for the photos don’t change after they are set and can be easily computed in constant time. So to really speed things up, we stopped using the url method on the PaperClip attachment and simply built the url string manually. As you can imagine the speed up has been awesome as the time to produce these new URL strings is almost nothing.  On the above mentioned search, we shaved off about half a second in the controller, which makes the search feel more “instant”.

In case you have to move a WordPress blog, here is roughly what I did:

1. Created a backup of old installation on old webhost (this directory had index.php and the wordpress subdirectory)
2. In wordpress/wp-config.php you can find your database information (see DB_NAME, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD, etc.)
3. Make a backup of your wordpress database as a .sql or .dmp file (basically a text file with all the SQL to re-create your wordpress tables
4. On the new server, create the database, user, password, etc. that is specified in the wp-config.php file.
5. On the new server, if necessary, update wp-config.php/DB_HOST to point to your new db server (could just be localhost)
6. On the new server, expand the backup into a directory you have picked out to hold your new blog
7. On the new server, update your web server settings to point to this new directory for your blog

That should be about it. I definitely recommend googling how to do this as my information may have limited use depending on the complexity of your setup.

For background on this most recent case, read the Wall Street Journal article concerning the FCC inquiry into Apple’s iPhone app approval process with respect to Google Voice.

It would seem that these cries of “anti-competitive” behavior center around the notion that AT&T wants to be the exclusive provider of voice service on the iPhones that they have subsidized to the tune of several hundred dollars per unit. And shockingly, they don’t want to put software on these subsidized iPhones that allows people to reduce the amount of revenue they give to AT&T every month.

I suppose, these critics want Apple to approve Google Voice for use on the AT&T subsidized iPhone. From their point of view, that would be “pro-competitive” behavior. Does that really make any sense for AT&T? How is that going to help them make back all the money they gave to the customer when they purchased an iPhone? How is that going to help them pay down all the large fixed investments in voice infrastructure they made in the past? Is it really in their best interest, at least in the short term, not to exercise their influence with Apple to keep Google Voice off the iPhone?

In the long run, AT&T will have to find new ways to get customers to pay for using their network, but in the short term it makes very rational sense for them to squeeze as much revenue as possible out of these subsidized iPhones. So called pro-competitive behavior on AT&T’s part would just lead to it losing money on a large number of iPhone accounts.

Currently, though when you download the vCard attachment, you can’t open it because no suitable application is found.

If vCards are really out and no one uses them anymore, I’d like an alternative to add/update contacts from an e-mail message.

1. User opens a meeting with 2 or more participants on their Pre.
   
2. User changes the time of the meeting
   
3. User back gestures because they are done with the changes
4. User is prompted to send out an update e-mail to meeting participants
5. Pre sends out (or has the Exchange server send out) a meeting update with the new time.

This would be very similar to how the meeting invite / update feature works in Outlook today.