Para continuar con el post del otro dia, sobre como Costa Rica es un pais para ricos, pues ya me llego el susodicho teclado.

Precio del teclado: $26
Costo de la traida: $56

Pues resulta que como el paquete es medio grande y los IMPUESTOS que nos clavan inflan el precio a un tamanno desproporcionado. Es un ridiculo y creo que con esto me voy a negar a seguir pidiendo cosas.

O sea, no hay forma de ganar. En Costa Rica todo es estupidamente caro y si se compra en US es muy barato pero nos clavan en la traida.

Que vida, no hay forma de ganar…

PD: Y hoy lei en el gobierno como un sr decia que el plan fiscal era bueno pues en paises desarrollados se pagaban impuestos altos pero se vivia bien. Claro, en esos paises no se tiene la cultura del vivazo y del pobrecillo y no se roban el dinero del gobierno de esa manera tan descarada.

Chicha me da hoy cuando se me riega el cafe encima de mi teclado, el cual Amazon me recuerda que tiene 14 meses nada mas.

Pero mas chicha me da ir a Office Depot y otros lugares y ver que el teclado que en Amazon vale $28 esta aca a 40 000 colones, que son aproximadamente $80.

La pereza es que todo es asi, los carros valen un 40% mas, cualquier cosa aplica la regla de 10, que significa que si algo vale $10 aca vale 10 mil colones que son $20, es decir casi el doble.

Y dicen que no pagamos impuestos… Y la chicha de los impuestos no es pagarlos. Es pagar impuestos para que alguien del gobierno se los robe!

JIRA, Greenhopper, Agile, project planning, tasking, reporting, sprint planning and similar words are my daily bread. I spend most of my time checking progress on multiple fronts. The number of tasks that I have to review and keep track of has grown to a level that is a little bit over the capabilites of a regular human being. Organization is key, the devil is in the details and if you fail to prepare you better prepare to fail.

That’s why I identified so much with James O. Coplien with his It’s Ordered — Not Prioritized! article.

My favorite way of structuring the work assigned to developers in JIRA is to sort out by fixversion using either the GreenHopper plugin or bulk change via the Issues pane and then simply sit down with the dev, estimate the duration of each task and then set the due date so that we both agree in which order they are going to be working on their tasks.

The due date is a guide, and although it is not written in stone, we need to try to reach our objectives. That’s why estimating is so important!

Here is a sample of the tasks for a specific developer in the order in which he needs to work on them:

And also the most important part, focus on the task at hand and try to finish it first. Seven tasks in progress that are “almost complete” don’t count as one!

So, how do you prioritize your work?

We all know Netflix is having a hard time keeping customers happy. So I guess they got very creative in how to retain customers. Look at this:

– I tried to cancel my subscription today

– And voila! I can’t! Nice way of keeping your customers paying month to month!

I got today this error, which is brand new to me. I like to write about uncommon errors that I bump into, so here goes an explanation of what happened (btw: me very dumb! hahaha)

I am creating an ASCX control for a .Net 3.5 site. I have an all white control and wanted to have a quick UI just to do a bit of testing and prototyping without having to spend too much time working on the UI piece of things. My motto is “get it to work first, and now make it look pretty”, which is not exactly what most devs do. Most devs do “get it to work, who cares about it looking pretty”.

Anyway, I created a Master page, copy pasted directly from the web and VOILA, besides an endless set of strings and multiple forms I also got the following line in my new master page.

Just delete all references to viewstate in the copy pasted text. Do the same for forms, simplify and use the new UI

Error text:
Server Error in ‘/PaymentsWeb’ Application.

The state information is invalid for this page and might be corrupted.

Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.Web.HttpException: The state information is invalid for this page and might be corrupted.

Source Error:

[No relevant source lines]

Source File: c:\Users\xavier\AppData\Local\Temp\Temporary ASP.NET Files\paymentsweb\8e1d30e5\5e7998b7\App_Web_smihqcyt.0.cs Line: 0

Stack Trace:

So I’ve ran into this error on my Jira 4.4 installation a few times. At first I didn’t know what it was, but now I know and here is the solution

HTTP Status 404 –

type Status report

message

description The requested resource () is not available.

Apache Tomcat/6.0.32

The problem is that I am co-hosting my SQL Server 2008 database with my Apache server – which holds JIRA. Therefore Apache starts quicker than SQL Server, so when Jira tries to connect to the database it is not available, times out and Jira does not start.

Simply wait a few minutes for the db to start and then execute startup.bat inside the bin folder in JIRA, usually located in “C:\Program Files\Atlassian\JIRA 4.4\bin\startup.bat”

The error looks something like this

Foto tomada hoy desde el gimnasio nuevo por donde Pepe Figueres! Ya esta a punto de llegar el tren!!!!! Estoy feliz, si llega ahi entonces ya no ocupo tragarme todas las presas diarias atravesando la ciudad.

Being a loyal customer during my multiple trips to the US, I was THRILLED that finally Netflix is coming to Latin America. Until yesterday…

As soon as it became available, I signed up and went straight to my beloved Documentaries section. I am disappointed…

Look at what I found, there are only like 20 documentaries, mostly low quality :

Check out the equivalent US section taken at exactly the same time, it has hundreds of titles in multiple categories:

Netflix: will the Latin America service be equivalent to the US one? Please don’t disrespect us. Just because we live in a third world country, that does not mean that you should give us a third world service.

Also, don’t make the mistake of adding translated titles to spanish. We want the movies in their original language!

I found this on a site and found it very funny. Sadly, it is reality!

My hourly rates should be:
$35 per hour.
$45 per hour if you want to watch.
$65 per hour if you want to help.
$95 per hour if you tried to fix it, and failed.

I was reading today this great article, Can you hear Apple’s iPad competitors sobbing?, and just thought to myself that instead of making a huge pile of Android devices – why don’t all these companies that built IPad look alikes and failed miserable – instead of just throwing them away they give them away for free to children in third world countries.

It is not exactly a one laptop per child, but it is a one internet-enabled-device-that-children-can-use-to-learn that could make a difference in the upbringing of many underprivileged financially minds that can also have potential for a better life.

It all makes sense to me, maybe not Nicholas Negroponte’s dream, but still it is a great way of helping the poor and not throwing a way those devices. Some of these companies might even get some good PR… you know… help the children… third world… which as we all know some big corporations would never give something away without a tax break or good PR in return. But who cares! What I care is about giving opportunity to those that don’t have one.

Am I being just too naive?