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Streamlining Receipt Entry
As many that read this blog know, I started scanning in all of my receipts over 6 years ago and pretty much every piece of paper (of some value) that comes into my house gets scanned and then shredded or filed (I'm still not sure why I file it; some places don't accept copies of receipts, but a lot of paper doesn't need to be saved). I use a Fujitsu ScanSnap
scanner along with Mariner Software's Paperless to store everything. I've used a bunch of scanners and still have a few lying around my house.
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Suggestions to SeaWorld
Yesterday my family and I went to SeaWorld as it is now an annual thing for us to visit a theme park (last 2 years was LEGOland). I expected there to be some people (tourists and others that don't celebrate Christmas), but thought it would be a breeze to get into the park. We left our house around 9:40 for a 10 am opening of the park. We live less than 10 minutes away, so 10 minutes to get in, get parked and get to the gate did not seem unreasonable to me as we've done it before.
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Inaccurate speed tests
One of the most popular ways to test Internet connection speeds is to use speedtest.net. The problem with using a site like this is that providers sometimes have a feature that increases the bandwidth for the initial part of the download. This allows for faster downloads of smaller files. Unfortunately this really messes with speed tests. For instance, I'm now getting 15 megabits per second down, but the tests are telling me that I'm getting 28-30 megabits per second. This would be fabulous if I got it, but I don't. A more accurate test is to download a large file from a fast host. In my case, I download stuff from Apple and get about 2 megabytes per second which is 16 megabits per second. This is more in line with what I'd expect.
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Love/hate relationship with Cocoa bindings
When I started ReceiptWallet over 6 years ago, I wanted to use the latest and greatest Mac OS X technologies, so I used Cocoa bindings to make it easier to bring the UI to life. Bindings allowed me to write less code and have UI elements updated automatically based on what was selected and other variables. Bindings work great for simple cases, but once things start getting complex, bindings almost become a problem. Bindings are quite hard to debug as there is no one place where you can see all the bindings and one slight change to the code can cause a crash; tracking down the crash can take hours. I had to write custom debugging routines to examine the bindings and eventually shipped a stable product.