Mr Rabbit
Julia Gillard seems to keep pronouncing Tony Abbott’s name as “Mr Rabbit”. I thought I’d have some fun with that.
iPhone 4 Australian pricing
Some wild calculated speculation of the pricing for the iPhone 4G in Australia.
So we’ll start off with the 32GB model as the other prices are pretty much self explanatory.
The 32GB iPhone 3GS when it was launched last year was $1040 AUD outright and $299 USD subsidised. with the Exchange rate around 80-83c USD per AUD which is what we’re at now.
Following the announcement of the iPhone 4G yesterday the current iPhone 3GS 32GB has now been reduce now $879AUD outright/$199USD subsidised. We also now have the 32/64GB 3G iPad at $928AUD and $1049AUD respectively.
Back to the 32GB 4G which will be sold at $299 USD subsidised. Since the exchange rate hasn’t fluctuated heavily I’d imagine it to stay around the $1000 AUD mark, maybe the sweet spot of $998 which would also be a careful equilibrium between the 32GB and the 64GB iPad.
Although just from comparing those prices you see a possible problem of the iPad cannibalising iPhone 4 sales. This would especially be significant for those coming off their 24month 3G iPhones and thinking of upgrading. However since most iPhone 3G owners are on a contract, rolling on to a new iPhone 4 would most likely be a hassle free affair for most consumers. The biggest issue at stake here is once again the competitiveness of the Mobile carriers as I predict many customers who have become frustrated with the service and reception of their current carrier (e.g. Optus) will be looking for a better serviced plan. Telstra with it’s much more superior “NextG” network has a chance of gaining many more customers if they play their cards right and price and market their service “competitively”.
Picture Source:engadget
Gathering from all this, the Australian pricing for the iPhone 4G could probably be:
| iPhone 4 32GB | $998 |
| iPhone 4 16GB | $879 |
| iPhone 3GS 16GB | $799 |
as for those on plans, the pricing will most likely remain the same with the equivalent price for 3GS models.
IT Job Hunting Tips and Google
Google is your friend.
It’s probably why some of you are reading this post. But nevertheless here’s some pointers if you’re looking at applying for an IT job at any firm that is not to do with consultancy or software development.
When considering an organisation it’s good to know whether or not you’re going to lose your job. I came across this while looking at the Qantas graduate applications. So i typed into google
Even without clicking on any links we can gather that as of September last year Qantas signed an outsourcing contract with IBM and that 178 people could lose their jobs.
Just so I don’t come off as bagging Qantas, for an IT graduate this could also mean a faster track to a management role in a new lean organisation which has shed all of it’s extra weight.
That or maybe I should really look into applying to IBM.
Making your favourite iPhone contacts stand OUT with Emoji!
Recently the iPhone app Tripview updated to allow users to customise the names of their trips. The developer noted that you could “Give your TripView trips that personal touch with emoji”
Sometime today it occurred to me that the same thing could be done with your favourite contacts. The results of this is more than just pretty icons but it also makes those contacts stand out out in SMS Messages, Address Book and Missed Calls etc. Examples are down the bottom.
The process is actually quite simple:
1. Enabling Emoji
a. Install the free app Spell Number (App Store Link)
—-a1. OR CLICK HERE ‘Emoji Free’ app 1.6 MB as opposed to 0.1 MB and shows advertising—-
b. Launch the Spell Number app and type:
91929394.59
c. Go to Settings > General > Keyboards, and under “Japanese” select “Emoji”
2. Adding the Emoji to the contact
a. Go to the desired contact and ‘Edit’ the entry.
b. Down the bottom of the edit page there’s ‘add field’
c. Add the ‘Prefix’ Field
d. Goto the Emoji page by click the world icon in the bottom left and Emoji away!
3. You’ve got 480 Emoji to choose from so now the hardest part is picking what icons for you want for which contact! Below are some screenshots showing how the Emoji highlight your contacts user experience.
Click to Enlarge:
Emoji tutorial borrowed from (iPhone Download Blog)
Installing WordPress and Plugins using the Terminal and SSH
Welcome to my shiny new site powered by WordPress. The first time I tried to install WordPress it involved uploading it from my computer to my host. With the generous helping of 32kb/s upload speed that is Australian internet, this proved to be exceedingly slow and I ended up stuffing something up anyway.
This time round I decided to exploit the SSH ability of Nearly Free Speech Hosting and nerd it up a bit.
Installing WordPress using SVN
Instead of uploading using FTP I used SVN (Subversion) and checked out straight from the WordPress SVN server. here’s my version of this tutorial from the WordPress codex could be better or worse, you decide:
1. Log into your host using SSH. You can use the Terminal if you’re on Linux or Mac (Applications>Utilities>Terminal). If you’re on Windows download a program called PuTTY.
2. Make sure you’re in your home web directory, it should be where you are right now.
3. Checkout the latest STABLE version. Currently 2.9.2
svn co http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.9.2 .
4. Now you need to edit wp-config-sample.php. If you know your way around Terminal based editors then use that. Otherwise you can use FTP software (I use Fetch for Mac, WinSCP for Windows), and edit using that.
5. Follow the rest of the Installing WordPress instructions.
6. Success!
Installing Plugins and Extensions using wget
Now everything’s set up you’re going to want to install themes and plugins. Once again rather than using FTP or giving WordPress your login credentials, we can do this nice and quickly in the terminal.
1. find the plugin/theme you want and copy the link address by right clicking on download and “Copy Link Address”
2. Back in the terminal navigate to the plugin (or themes) directory
cd wp-content
cd plugins
3. Using wget we can download the plugin .zip file
wget http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/stats.1.6.2.zip
4. Now we can unzip the file and it should extract into a folder.
unzip stats.1.6.2.zip
If you’re unsure of whether or not it will unzip into a directory you can check using unzip -l first.
unzip -l stats.1.6.2.zip
5. now the plugin should be in your wordpress admin plugin manager. Let’s just delete the zip file to save some space.
rm stats.1.6.2.zip
6. activate the plugin in wordpress admin and start using it!
And there we go. The advantage of having your WordPress installed using svn is that upgrading versions is a simple as typing in
svn sw http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.9.2/ .
I also find that this process is a lot faster for downloading and uploading plugins and themes. Hope this helped.
Facebook Events in Google Calendar, iCal etc
Despite all the extraneous quizzes and horoscope notifications that you get nowadays on Facebook, it still remains one of the better platforms for creating and organising events.
Whenever an event popped up I would manually add it into my calendar (iCal or Google Calendar, depending on the mood). This was a rather tedious task, and inevitably events get forgotten. This post by Tarek and this post was brought to my attention and goes through how to add the Facebook events to your calendar.
The problem is that the calendar programs we love can’t read the private events, and just shows the event as “busy”.
This complicated PHP script method fixes it, but it seems daunting and scary at best.
There is a better way though, and that is through the magic of Yahoo Pipes.
1. Go to your facebook events page and click on “Export Events” at the bottom of the page.
(apparently in the new facebook layout as of Feb 2010, this isn’t there, will try to find a way around it once my facebook moves to the move layout)
2. right-click on the fancy link facebook has given us and “copy” the link.3. Create an account at Yahoo Pipes and “create a pipe”.
4. From the left bar, drag the “Fetch Feed” module and paste your facebook event url in.
5. drag the Operators>”Regex” Module and connect the Fetch Feed and Regex module by drawing a line from the circles at the edges of the module.
6. In the Regex Module, clicking on the the “in:” field, should show the option of “item.class“. click it.
7. Enter “PRIVATE” in the ‘replace:’ field and “PUBLIC” in the ‘with:’ field.8. Join the Regex module to the Pipe output.
9. Save and ‘run pipe’.10. Click on ‘More Options’ and right click on ‘Get as iCal’
11. paste the URL into your favourite calendar application!
12. Profit?
Information
Business IT Student. Photographer. CSE Revuer. Lefty.
Fuel me with Coffee, Burgers and Music.
Recent entry
- 2010-08-16
- Mr Rabbit
- 2010-06-10
- iPhone 4 Australian pricing
- 2010-03-16
- IT Job Hunting Tips and Google
- 2010-03-02
- Making your favourite iPhone contacts stand OUT with Emoji!
- 2010-03-01
- Installing WordPress and Plugins using the Terminal and SSH