Monthly Archives: December 2006

Excellent Fry’s customer service!

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I’m usually the first one to bash Fry’s as their customer service and shopping experience is quite poor. However, this morning, I discovered that the power supply on my server died (I unplugged 2 of the drives and it booted, so it was quite apparent that this was the plug), so where else do I get a power supply that is close? My choices are CompUSA or Fry’s. Fry’s is slightly closer and is open at 8 am. I got there about 8:15 am, found one power supply in the area where I saw them before, but knew there were more so I asked a guy, who happened to be the assistant store manager where they were and he took the time to walk me over there. Not only that, he asked me about what I was using it for and recommended the brand I was going to get anyway (Antec). Then he explained some of the differences in the Antec power supplies. I was quite impressed and it may have changed my attitude towards Fry’s.

Why is currency programming so hard?

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One of the most requested ReceiptWallet features was to be able to handle receipts in multiple currencies. OK, simple enough I thought as I could just treat all values as strings so that they have a currency symbol in them. The problem was that I had to verify that the currency symbol was valid and format the value so it is appropriate to that currency, for example, the Japanese Yen doesn’t have decimals in the number. My first pass that this was pretty decent, handled dollars, Euros, Yen and a bunch of other currencies. Turns out this wasn’t a complete implementation. In order to build my list of currencies, I used what are called locales on Mac OS X to get the currency associated with a locale. Problem is that some currencies aren’t associated with a locale, such as Swiss Francs (I have no idea why). So I had to find a way to get a list of currencies and do some formatting magic. I think that I managed to do this, but I just don’t understand why it was so hard. Is it inconceivable that people would want to use multiple currencies on one machine? If it was easy, everyone would have this type of code in their programs!