Take control of your spending

I was catching up with the posts on Radar the other day and came across an interesting post from one of the guys at Wesabe.

You can now upload your bank statement lines from any bank in the world straight into Wesabe using a nifty new firefox extension.

I thought I'd give this a try on the flat expense account - sure enough 3 minutes later I had Wesabe programmed (via the Firefox extension) to automatically login to my internet banking (BNZ) every 6 hours and fetch any new transaction. I was really impressed as I was typing in Bank of New Zealand it just appeared on the list as I set it up. Logging in to my internet banking site took less that a minute to browse to the right account and select a Quicken file to export to, Wesabe then captured the downloaded file. I tagged a fortnights worth of income from the flatties and me and then tagged our expenses for the month. Wesabe now tells us at an instant what we are spending on Power, Gas, and Telstra (Internet,Phone,Sky). It bloody rocks!

I'll hook up my personal account as well to see where my money goes - things that instantly come to mind are how much do I spend on lunch a month and where? How much do I spend on petrol? How much do I spend at the pub? With Wesabe now keeping an eye on my spending I'll now know without having to keep a (slow) google spreadsheet up to date.

I'd recommend anyone to do this ...it is dead easy to setup. Lets compare our results in a month or so at the pub we spend too much at!

How slow?

Yahoo has just released a cool new add on for Firebug called YSlow. Seems pretty good at ranking your pages and gives you some simple things to do to improve the speed of your sites.

Putting javascript at the bottom of pages, thats an interesting one, am still learning something everyday.

UPDATE - the stats tab in YSlow is very useful.

Flex app gets some press

Frequent reader of my blog know I'm a big fan of Virtual Ubiquity's Buzzword online alternative to a traditional word processor application.

Here's a cool story about the 11 person startup that was in the Boston Herald on Monday.

Seems to be a wise move they are going for the 20-30 year old age bracket initially, and starting with a free version first then paying version later.

They seem pretty confident that they are miles ahead in the online word processor space. I tend to agree. There isn't that many people out there that have built decent Flex apps yet. There is so much potential for Flex apps, and since they can be skinned using Photoshop or Fireworks the sky is really the limit. Version 3 is probably the time for developers to start seriously looking at the Flex platform for application development.

Young Gun potential

14yr old Sebastian Kornum could be the youngest windsurfer to land a forward loop. Nice one Sebastian.

I remember the days when I was a 15yr old sailing a Tiga Swift 325 in 35 knots. I couldn't boast doing a forward loop back then but worked out how to run across the state highway and get out of the shore break before a car would come around a blind corner and take me out!

Really cool to see the young guys pushing the sport at a young age.

Gran Canaria 07

The Gran Slam starts tomorrow!

Can't wait to see some video footage of the RS-Racing sail (RS 7). The cambers rotate like a dream so it will be interesting to see if Team Pryde nails it at the gybe marks.

Dunky has been going pretty well on North lately and its his home turf so Micah will have a lot to contend with.

I wish my parents had owned a windsurf school in Gran Canaria when I was a kid!

Plastic fantastic

After finding out all about the Boeing 777 yesterday I noticed Boeing talking about the 787 in the news today. The Dreamliner is insane, up to 50% of the plane is made out of composite rather than aluminum. This means a massive increase in fuel efficiency (20% at least). Some industry commentators believe Boeing will increase market share to 70%(currently under 50% - Airbus has been killing Boeing lately) . Airbus are years from having anything close.

The time that it takes to build a 787 has decreased as well, its built more like lego parts snapping together. Boeing has worked closely with suppliers (I guess much the same way Dell has done) to streamline the manufacturing process.

Very cool. Check out this video

The race to freedom

So on Thursday (day 6) we learnt that the iPhone could be unlocked really easily so you could use it as an iPod without a phone. And now on Sunday a week on (day 9) we learnt that we can have command line access.

It'll be great to get to use it on the local telco network, add SQLite and google gears and we'll start to see a whole new breed of business applications that are robust for the real world.

Red rings of death

Interesting news from Microsoft on xbox 360 repairs - they've set aside over $US 1B to reimburse anyone that has paid out of their own pocket to get their 360 fixed and also to prepare for the many other machines in the wild that may have this problem. Obviously they've made some manufacturing change so this doesn't happen in the future.

It gets you thinking that with so much pressure on to get to market some things will fall through the cracks. Software can be patched relatively easily in comparison but hardware defects are a real problem.

Who'd want to be in the game of selling leading edge consumer hardware. I'm sure Apple still does, they've been around the block numerous times and factor in defects. Traditionally Apple hasn't been so caring about problems with their ipods - i.e they let the consumer take the hit to their pocket. That may have to change with the iPhone which apparently has huge margins and consumers are becoming more aware of the tech giant. Commentators have already pointed out that someone can't be without their phone for a minute so Apple will need to invest heavily in customer support, a temporary loan and replacement program.

At first glance it seems that Apple may not have learned as their iPhone battery is not able to be replaced without tech support - you can't remove it yourself! Every other phone allows you to do this, unless they've magically invented the i-cell that doesn't need replacing a lot of consumers will sour over time. They've already announced a fee ($US79) to charge consumers that want a battery replaced but it takes 3 days to get your phone back, you can get a loan phone but it will cost you an extra $US30.

So the multi-billion dollar question is how far ahead are Apple with multi touch? Other device manufacturers has licensed Adobe's flashlite so can offer the sort of GUI that people will now expect but their phones don't have multi-touch. I don't think it will take very long for them to catch up at all. Companies like Samsung should be watched. Interesting times ahead indeed.

Tribute to 777

Today, 7th July 2007 is a great day apart from the fact that it is forecast to only reach a high of just 7 degrees in Wellington. I just googled this to see if we had finally escaped the evilness of last year's 666.

According to Wikipedia "As of June 2007, the Boeing 777 is the only major airliner never to have suffered a hull loss accident". A great achievement in safety design, having been in the skies commercially for 13 years.

Looking head I wonder if the 888 will surpass the iPhone as the greatest phone of the moment. Being able to wear your phone sure does sounds appealing, I think Nokia are on to something there. It's logical that Apple must have a more compact version of the iPhone in the works though, I wonder if they can do mulitouch in the size of a Nano?