I Eat Geeks

After 6 hours of lining up in freezing cold for the Optus midnight release, I now have my very own iPhone. Optus did a great job keeping us all comfortable during the night with copious amounts of pizza and coffee.

I just saw I made it into the cnet vid:

Very exciting news, Optus in Australia has now released their prices for the iPhone. The iPhone will be available on both contract and pre-paid plans. An 8gb iPhone will cost $729 and a 16gb iPhone will cost $849 on pre-paid plans. The handset will be locked to the Optus network and will cost $80 to unlock it if within the first 6 months.
There are many different contract plans with two distinct type, the ‘cap’ plans and the ‘yes’ plans. The cap plans don’t include data whereas the ‘yes’ plans include data (and a fairly generous amount imo). For more details of the plans have a look here.
Im unsure what I’m going to go for. I was shocked at the cost of the pre-paid handset to be honest…. now i’m going to have to have a think about it.
The Optus website is extremely slow at the moment, a definite indication of the iPhone’s popularity!

Today Telstra announced their iPhone prices. They were the last carrier to announce they would be stocking the iPhone’s but the first to actually announce handset and pricing details. Whilst the other carriers, Optus and Vodafone, will be offering the handset on pre-paid plans, Telstra will only be offering the handset on contracts.

The 8GB model will be $279AU upfront on a $30 per month contract, or $0 upfront on an $80 per month plan. The 16GB model will be $399AU on a $30 per month contract or $0 upfront for a $100 per month plan. All plans are for 24 months.

More details here.

ZOMG, Spore is so much fun. If you haven’t already downloaded the trial creature creator, you must do so! I spent about 2 hours sticking legs on oddly shaped bodies last week, check out my favourite creature: Snufffedorf Jnr.

I would like to post that the full version of the Spore Creature Creator was available for download for mac’s but apparently the “digital download is temporarily sold out”. Um, what the? It’s a digital download, how can you sell out!?

Ive decided to finally kick of my pet project - an Australian tech podcast with a focus on Australian tech news and women in the technology. So now I’m on the look out for some co hosts! I envision the podcast to be fun and upbeat yet informative, something along the lines of cnet’s buzz out loud. The podcast would likely have sections on gaming, development, gadgets, ‘how to’s’, and interviews with people in the industry. Nothing is set in stone and we would all be on the same learning curve.
If you are interested or you know of someone who may be, please email me - george [at] nerdgerl [dot] com.

I found a really nice web 2.0 customisable page, pageflakes. It’s quick to set up a page with lots of different “flakes” and they can be moved around the page with pretty Ajax drag/drop. The flake search feature is also intuitive. It’s more graphically rich than iGoogle. Ajax is so hot right now!

This exception has got me more than once and each time I get it, it takes me a 10 minutes to remember how I solved the problem the previous time so I thought I’d write up a post about it, essentially for my own future reference.

Let’s take a look at the exception:

org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.HibernateOptimi sticLockingFailureException: Unexpected row count: 0 expected: 1; nested exception is org.hibernate.StaleStateException: Unexpected row count: 0 expected: 1


A HibernateOptimisticLockingFailureException is thrown by the Spring transaction manager after a failed attempt from Hibernate to commit a record. The transaction is then rolled back. The reason for the failed commit could be a number of things, but for me is usually the same thing. Trying to insert a number that is too long for the specified datatype on that field in the database.

Have a look at the values you are trying to insert, there could be a really long BigDecimal that’s trying to be inserted into a field that only allows 8 dp. If this is the case either increase you’re data type length or set some scaling on your BigDecimal’s.

This is only one of many reasons the good old HibernateOptimisticLockingFailureExceptionmay be thrown.

I really like this new theme. However there was some problems with ordered lists and comments. To fix them I just opened up the style.css file and replaced the “ol li” tags with the following:

ol li{
list-style:none;
margin:0px;
padding:0px;
}

This is a bit of a hack really, it will get rid of the ugly black bagrounds of the comments but does remove numbering for ordered lists. To put numbering back in remove the list-style:none line, but in doing so numbers will now appear against each comment.

EDIT: I have now changed my theme… just so you know

With all the recent hype about Hulu I thought I’d take a closer look at what us Aussies have in the way of legal download options. To back up a bit, Hulu is basically a free video on demand service which has a library of videos from some of America’s biggest tv networks. The videos are full length tv episodes which contain advertisments catered to the viewer. Hulu is a joint venture between a few big US media houses. Hulu is only available in the US and my guess is this won’t change.

So what are our Australian Hulu equivalents? Read the rest of this entry »

If you haven’t heard about The Guild, nows the time to become a fan. It’s a fantastic webisode series and has recently been awarded the Greenlight Awards at SXSW. The show is currently up for a couple of awards, vote for The Guild: yahoo.

I think Felicia and the team are doing a great job. Grats for the award, I hope you have a couple more coming your way.