Anyway, I submitted it to the iPhone App Store for approval as a free app and named it Singtel Data Usage. No points for creativity with the name but I thought it’d be nice to know exactly what the app did from just reading its name. After one keyword rejection (which was unfounded but I wasn’t going to argue with the app reviewers), it finally got approved a few days ago.

Yeah that’s what it looks like. I stole part of the design from another iPhone app – can anyone guess which one? I think I spent 80% of development time changing the design over and over again, tweaking font sizes, and agonizing over which icons to use.

Thanks to folks on Twitter (I’m @chuyeow – do follow me if you’re reading my blog), word got around and by the 3rd day of it being approved, my app was the Top Free app on the Singapore App Store. Going to take a time out for the vanity shot:

A similar app, iBBOM, was approved around the same time but I believe I got a head start because of all the awesome people on Twitter who retweeted my tweet and the kind folks who gave glowing reviews on the App Store (thanks especially to Andy Croll for the 1st review). iBBOM actually looks much better than my app (I can’t help tweeting about it) and works perfectly (only thing I don’t like are the ads). I believe I couldn’t have gotten to the top of the App Store without the guys and gals who spread the word on Twitter.

On to the not so fun part of this post. Yet another similar app, SG BBOM, was pulled from the App Store by Singtel (the telco) recently so I’m expecting to hear from Singtel really soon. We shall see.

In the meantime, if you own an iPhone and have a Singtel data plan, do check out my app (App Store link) and give an honest review on the App Store. If you’ve already downloaded it, I’d like to know what you think in a review as well. Thanks!

Here’s a before and after shot:

I think it’s much better, definitely more modern and minimalist.

The new blog theme is basically a heavily modified version of the
wonderful and free Compositio WordPress theme –
you can check out a demo of Compositio here to see how different it is.

The only thing I kept from my old theme, which I affectionately called “Clover”, was the same clover logo. I did that with the shape tool in Photoshop – it’s a simple logo and no skill was required to create it, obviously!

If you’re reading this in a feed reader or one of those aggreggator-type sites, you can help me out by checking out the blog itself and giving me some good old constructive criticism.

If you belong to what I imagine must be now the microscopic population of loyal readers of my blog, please do hook up with me on FriendFeed or Twitter. I’ll follow you back if you’re a reader!

Here’s a shot of Portland Convention Center where it’s all happening:

There’re queues for collection of badges after registering your attendance:

Patience in the queue rewarded me with a RailsConf badge/name tag:

I was at the Meta-programming Ruby for Fun & Profit tutorial in the morning. I think when I selected the tutorial it was before I’d seen Neal Ford and Patrick Farley’s (the speakers) presentation videos from elsewhere – I know Patrick presented at MWRC and enjoyed that video.

So anyway, after the break I went over to the Refactoring Your Rails Application tutorial. Was pretty good, but I didn’t learn much I didn’t already know.

Lunch came in the form of a pretty box:

After lunch was the 2nd tutorial session and I went to both CI for the Rails Guy (or Gal) (by Chad Woolley) and Developer Testing Tricks (by Brian Takita). There were some scathing comments about how the tutorials were rather underwhelming so far in #railsconf on IRC. While I agree that the tutorials were rather underwhelming, I think I should have expected it. Oh well, I’ll know to skip them next time.

Later that night, at the Birds of a Feather session, after stealing a Pivotal Labs t-shirt (they’re launching a bug tracker, project management type app called Pivotal Tracker at RailsConf), Yehuda Katz (Merb and jQuery ninja) gave a presentation on Merb (geared towards Rails folks). It was a pretty interesting talk though there wasn’t much above what Ezra had presented previously at GoRuCo 2008 and at MWRC 2008 (I think Yehuda did one too but I can’t remember where now). Yehuda pointed out a (heated) discussion that happened recently on keeping Merb syntax as Rails-friendly as possible. I have no objection against a different syntax really, especially since Merb looks pretty well-documented in the source itself – would be nice if someone could point out an up-to-date Merb tutorial though.

Anyway, that’s it from me – as always, if anyone who reads my blog recognizes me at RailsConf, do say hi (#railsconf works too).

history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head

4605 cd
3576 svn
2141 ls
1701 ruby
1308 cap2
1066 ss
978 rake
867 sshb
688 rm
635 mate

cap2 is just my alias for Capistrano 2 (I use both 1.x and 2.x, since I’m lazy to upgrade some old Rails applications, ss is my alias for script/server. sshb is a shortcut for ssh with a certain port number for SSH daemons (i.e. -p 22) that we use in Bezurk (you know, security through obscurity).

If you’re staying in Singapore and looking to try out the food at Shokudo Japanese Food Bazaar after it was featured in the local newspaper, my advice to you is, “don’t bother!” Why? In 2 words, horrible service.

Despite some positive reviews (yes, the decor is not too bad), my dining experience at Shokudo consisted mostly of getting the service crew’s attention (and failing spectacularly despite standing right at the counter) and being scowled at or avoided by most of the staff (which is not good, since being a bazaar-style restaurant, you needed to place your order at each stall manned by different members of the service crew).

My friends and I were speculating that either the staff got scolded that day (and reacted negatively to that), or they were just too stuck up because business was good. Either way, it was just terrible. When leaving, I even got rudely reminded that I’d left that one of those things they gave you to reserve a table. Did I mention the service was horrible? (Granted, there were 2 counters where the staff were attentive and actually quite friendly – this was at the macha drink stall and the katsu curry counter.)

What about the food? With such bad service I would say no one shouldn’t really care about the quality of the food – thankfully enough, the food is of a consistently mediocre level to even bother!

Has anyone had a similar experience at Shokudo, or was it just our unlucky day?

PC Game of the Year

This has definitely got to go to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. The single-player campaign was short but visually impressive and amazingly realistic. It was like watching a movie in most parts. And really, sneaking by Spetsnaz just a few metres away in sniper ghillie suits and was totally pimp. Multiplayer is real good fun too, I’m still playing it now (usually on GamingSA.com servers as ‘konata’).

Special mention: World of Warcraft (yes, I quit it ages ago, but it’s still good for the early part of 2007 when I was still playing casually).

PSP Game of the Year

Yes, I got a PSP just this year. And yes, Jeanne d’Arc is the best game I’ve played and completed in a while. For those who don’t know, Jeanne d’Arc is a very accessible Strategy RPG (SRPG) that is very loosely based on Joan of Arc. It’s much easier to play than Final Fantasy: Tactics or Disgaea: Hour of Darkness and doesn’t leave you constantly wondering about missing out on secrets. Highly recommended if you’re looking for an RPG-like game on the PSP.

I haven’t had the chance to play many other PSP games, but look forward to getting deeper into Disgaea: Hour of Darkness (and highly anticipating Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core in March 2008).

Anime of the Year

2007 is the year I switched my anime tastes from mostly shonen anime (like Naruto and Bleach) to the seinen genre.

My favorite anime for 2007 (this is a tough one) has to go to Lucky Star. I even went through a prolonged Konata-ism phase and even had a printout of Konata saying “Relax” pasted right above where I sit in the office.

It’s therapeutic :)

2007 was a good anime year. Tekkon Kinkreet had an edgy, surreal drawing style but had a fantastic plot. I highly recommend it if you’ve missed it – it’s about 10 times better than your run-of-the-mill Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away type anime movies, in my humble opinion.

Potemayo‘s moeblobs were just too funny to watch. Gochuko (below) had me LOL when she went around using tape to fix everything she sliced with her big scythe. At first appearances Potemayo may look like a kid’s anime but it’s really a work of comic genius for adults.

Genshiken 2 picks up where the 1st season left off and while the ending left quite a bit to be desired, on the whole it was enjoyable watching otakus cope with life (who knew it was so tough to get a job in Japan).

What about you?

What did you enjoy in the last year and more importantly, do you have any recommendations for an ani-otaku like me?

This week’s report covers changes from 31 Dec 2007 to the day the podcast was recorded (6 Jan 2007).

Caching changes

Looks like most of the changes from the 2.1 caching branch have been
merged into the trunk. Some key points:

1. memcache-client has been vendored (included in Rails directly). MemCacheStore works out of the box in Rails now, no need to install the memcache-client gem!
2. The caching code has been refactored and moved into ActiveSupport (ActiveSupport::Cache::*).
3. Added ActiveRecord::Base.cache_key to make it easier to cache Active Records in combination with the ActiveSupport cache libraries introduced in this changeset.
4. Fragment cache keys are now by default prefixed with ‘views/’.
5. Deprecation: ActionController::Base.fragment_cache_store is now ActionController::Base.cache_store

Fragment caching now works in RJS and Builder templates

Yup, you couldn’t do fragment caching in non-erb views before – now you can.

Freezing Rails now automatically updates your Rails app

If you’re using edge Rails and use the rails:freeze:edge rake task, you probably usually forget to run (or maybe you’re not even aware of) rake rails:update to update your Rails app with the latest config/, scripts/ and javascript files from the version of Rails you just froze to. On edge Rails, the rake rails:freeze:edge task runs the rails:update task for you. +1 for convenience!

I prefer to use Piston so I’m gonna have to keep remembering to run my rake rails:update now and then!

Check out the related changeset.

Optimizations

Only 1 optimization in the past week worth talking about: the ActiveRecord::Base#exists? method is faster. It now uses ActiveRecord::Base#select_all instead of a more expensive ActiveRecord::Base#find that unnecessarily instantiates AR objects. (Check out the related changeset.)

Bug fixes

• http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/8541 – Fixed a nasty bug when trying to render partials with layout when done from within the site layout. Yes, you can have layouts for your partials in Rails 2, and yes, you can run into a bug when trying to use partial layouts in your main page layout.
• http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/8529 – Fix atom_feed_helper to comply with the Atom specifications.

Whatever Zed Shaw may say about Rails its community, Rails has done a huge part in making web development fun again for jaded web developers (first-time web developers probably won’t be able to tell the difference), and more importantly, raising the profile of Ruby more than any other Ruby project/library/framework/tool ever did (and I’m sure we’re all constantly rolling our eyeballs at the new web frameworks that’re so terribly familiarly Rails-like). Hell, I bet at least 90% of Rubyists now wouldn’t even be Rubyists if they hadn’t come across the web framework that could 2 or 3 years ago. So yes I’d still be contributing to Rails so that it can make my life as a web developer easier, thank you.

I think I had about 18 accepted patches in December 2007 Rails Hackfest (a few of the patches were not attributed properly in the Hackfest due to technical issues with the Rails Hackfest site).

Probably the only significant patches were:

• Allowing a proc to be set for ActionController::Base.asset_host (changeset 8421).
• to_xml should not automatically pass :procs to associations included with :include (changeset 8258).

Of course Ruby 1.9 compatibility was a big deal in December 2007 since that Ruby 1.9 was targetted to be released on Christmas (changesets 8369, 8309, 8398, 8397, 8412). Yes, I know, Ruby 1.9 is a development release.

There were also broken tests to be fixed (changeset 8271), bugs to be fixed (fixing Array#to_sentence), and some refactoring (changesets 8343 and 8522).

And what would patching Rails be without random documentation fixes (changesets 8457, 8471, 8472, 8280, 8279, 8278, 8521). The API documentation always needs a hand, so if you see any outdated or incorrect documentation, or think you can improve them with better examples or whatever, just submit a patch (it’s easy and should take you all of 3 minutes).

This month’s hackfest has a terribly attractive top prize of a RailsConf ticket. Too bad I won’t be able to take part in this month’s hackfest since winners of past month’s hackfest are automatically excluded from the next’s. But maybe you can ;).

Jeanne d’Arc is a great little SRPG I’m enjoying right now – I don’t even want to start Final Fantasy Tactics until after I’ve completed Jeanne d’Arc.

I have a Nintendo DS Lite as well and I have to say that I’m more of a PSP gamer where portable consoles are concerned. There just weren’t that many involved games in the DS (except Puzzle Quest) and coming from a big fantasy CRPG background kinda made the DS a poor companion on train and bus rides. Being able to play videos on a large screen (relative to the iPod video I carry around all the time) is awesome. It’s not an iPhone but it’s good enough for watching videos!

Well anyway, I found that one of the crepe shops in Harajuku, Marion Cafe, that was just opposite Angel’s Heart, has opened a branch right here in Singapore at the IMM Building.

I tried their mango crepe (it had mango and ice cream in it) which set us back about SGD 5.80.

It was alright, not as good as the one I had in Harajuku of course, but still a nice treat. They have 105 different types of crepe – anything ranging for your run-of-the-mill strawberry and ice cream crepe, to tuna crepe, and even crepe with Japanese curry.

I vaguely remember seeing Rails Hackfest mentioned somewhere but only just realized it’s a “contest” run monthly. The winners are the top 10 contributors to Rails (contribution being determined by the number of accepted patches, docfixes, and even comments). That’s really nice of the sponsors and Working With Rails, since that wasn’t really what I’d expected in return for contributing to an Open Source project (that would be a sense of satisfaction, personally-speaking).

I’m just really glad that the JSON patches went into Rails before Rails 2.0 and it is satisfying to see my code get into Rails (I’ll blog about the patches in a separate post). There’s still some more work needed though – please help to verify and give suggestions or +1s ;).

• PLAY! A Video Game Symphony – this is just a fanfare piece composed by the great Nobuo Uematsu (composer of, most notably, many Final Fantasy game soundtracks).
• Super Mario Bros – what a game to open with! Being a fan-favorite, it came as no surprise to hear the collective gasps of recognition in the audience when game footage of the original Super Mario was played on the video screens. A suite of various in-game music was played, each time with much audible amusement from the audience.
• Shenmue and Shenmue II
• Lost Odyssey
• Sonic the Hedgehog – oh man, I didn’t realize how much I used to enjoy this game until I recognized every single tune they played in this suite. I played the very first Sonic the Hedgehog on a Sega Mega Drive (as well as a few others after this one – I remember Tails and Knuckles) way back in the day.
• Metal Gear Solid
• Blue Dragon – the much-hyped game had a few pieces of its soundtrack performed. I think I’d have been much more excited if they’d shown some actual game footage instead of scripted cutscenes.
• Kingdom Hearts – a bunch of obvious console gamers near us made loud excited noises when the conductor mentioned this.
• Final Fantasy VI
• Daytona USA – the composer Takenobu Mitsuyoshi performed this piece himself!
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
• Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross
• World of Warcraft – I have the Collector’s edition of the original World of Warcraft which contains the game soundtrack (mostly consisting of music composed by Jason Hayes), so these were familiar tunes. My only gripe was that they didn’t play the Undercity background music – it’s my favorite.
• Halo
• Castlevania – I played the NDS version if that counts for anything. Can’t say I recognized the music though.
• The Legend of Zelda – yes, I really didn’t play Zelda. I never owned a Nintendo before I got my NDS but I am eagerly anticipating the release of Phantom Hourglass! The conductor was expecting a great cheer from the crowd but it never came heh.
• Final Fantasy VII – for the ending, they played One-Winged Angel from the game soundtrack which was pretty memorable since it was played during the boss fight against Safer Sephiroth and more recently in Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. A very nice grand ending piece I must say. Still, I do wish they played game footage and more FFVII music than just a single piece. There’re so many memorable songs in the game, and the chocobo tunes would have been amusing.

There was also an encore which was very very cool, because the music was from Super Shinobi (also known as The Revenge of the Shinobi). This old Sega Mega Drive game was one of the coolest games of the time (you get to play a ninja!). The composer of the soundtrack, Yuzo Koshiro, was there himself. Super Shinobi’s theme music was chosen as the song to play for an encore on Game Axis – I must say, good choice folks! Game footage was played and I recognized every single part of it – I didn’t even realize I had memories like that. I’m sorely tempted to see whether my old Sega Mega Drive still works so I can play Super Shinobi again.

After this, the audience demanded another encore and we were rewarded with another rendition of One-Winged Angel (I’d have liked to hear Super Mario Bros again).

All in all, an enjoyable performance – if you’re a gamer and missed it, I feel bad for you! If Play! is coming to your location, be sure to get tickets.