Andy McKay's blog

Yesterday Apple phoned me trying to sell me Apple Care because it's almost one year since I bought a MacBook and the warranty is going to expire. I really haven't seen much good about Apple Care so wasn't going to bother. But I did spur me into action on the MacBook crack I suffered (in the post a few days ago).

I actually got this about 4 months ago. I searched online and found many people who had the same problem. So I wandered down to the local Apple reseller on the Albert Dock who completely sucked. After wandering off for a while with my Mac they told me it user damage and any protests to the contrary would have to be made to Apple. I was very annoyed.

Of the 5 MacBooks in the office, 3 have the exact same flaw. Searching online will show many with the same problem.

So Apple phoned to sell me Apple Care. This prompted me to phone up Apple and see about this. The 10 min chat with the person on the other end was frustrating. He wouldn't look at a photo of the laptop. He wouldn't look at evidence of others with the same problem. I had to take it to a store and go through some long process of him writing to Apple. He referred me to a store 1 hour away. I phoned the store, they don't deal with Apple support.

Getting wound up I got an appointment at the Manchester Apple Store for a genius. Walked in to find 12 staff doing nothing (why did I need an appointment). Looks at MacBook and "Says, yep no problem, when do you want it back is tommorrow soon enough?". My faith in Apple is restored, just a shame the other people were idiots.

To really screw me I wandered through the Game store on the way back to the car. "Got any Wii's?", my standard question for about 4 months now every time I wander by. "Yep got a shipment in this morning, one left.". Wibble. Bank account got hit and I've got Wii elbow.

The RSS feed for this blog has been a bit wonky in Safari for a while. Specifically Safari would randomly pick dates for posts, randomly showing old posts as new ones. I think the problem was I was missing a timestamp on each item. This was as simple as adding in:

    def item_pubdate(self, obj):
        return obj.timestamp

...on to my feeds class. Apologies if this has been messing your feed. Safari and Shrook now seem much happier.

Come up a few times on the list. The difference between using WebDAV and not is that in a WebDAV client when you get a page, you want to get the source to edit the page, not the HTML with the rendered template. To do this Plone tries to determine if you are using WebDAV or not, one way is to use port 1980, the WebDAV source port in zope.conf.

An easier way I prefer is adding your client to the zope.conf so that it recognises your client as WebDAV. This makes a simple change for Zope's sitting behind a proxy. To use finder with Plone add the following webdav-source-clients line and then restart:

<http-server>
   webdav-source-clients WebDAVFS
   address 8080
</http-server>

Just saw this code and it instantly sent shivers down my spine.

namespace :rubaidh do
  task :tag_layout_with_release_info, :roles => :app do
    [snipped by me]
    run "perl -p -i -e 's??#{release_info}?' #{layout}"
  end
end

A rake task for rails that contains a shell out to perl which then outputs HTML. Could as well be done in Make file, ugh.

Sorry for the delay on posting, been a busy few weeks and sat down at the browser with complete writers block. Odd consider the normal quality of my posting.

Absolutely sucks. Right on for doing a terrible job.

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