NZ Post Ratefinder API beta released

August 10th, 2010

Able Technology has built an API for New Zealand Post that calculates the cost and delivery options when sending packages nationally. The specification and some sample API calls are available from our beta testing site ratefinder.abletech.co.nz.

parcel

Please try it out, and let us know what you think.

Address Finder

In addition to the Rate Finder, you can use Able Technology's Address Finder product to find postal codes, and validate New Zealand postal addresses. Some great API examples are available at api.addressfinder.co.nz

Posted in javascript, web | No Comments »

Able Technology acquires ProjectX On-line Mapping and Addressing Capabilities

July 12th, 2010

Able Technology has acquired the on-line mapping and addressing business of ProjectX Technology Ltd.

The acquisition promises an exciting future for ProjectX developments such as the Address Finder service and mapping applications.

Able Technology director Marcus Baguley says ProjectX’s expertise in geospatial data and mapping services will enable Able Tech to quickly deliver location-based applications; from hand held apps to large corporate websites that want to geo-enable existing datasets.

“The acquisition strengthens our specialised online mapping and data visualisation capabilities,” says Marcus.

The move is a natural progression for Able Tech, an influential member of Wellington’s growing Ruby on Rails software development community.

John Clegg, founder and CEO of ProjectX, says he is very pleased to be handing over to Able Technology “because their experience and reputation guarantee our customers will receive exceptional leadership, services and support.”

The ‘new’ Able Technology will be headed by Carl Penwarden who has joined the company from his previous role as Marketing and Product Development Manager at CityLink.

Carl says, “We are very excited about the capabilities we have brought together – the combination of ProjectX’s broad geospatial and addressing experience along with Able Technology’s strengths in agile development offers a compelling proposition for organisations seeking innovative web applications.”

Members of ProjectX’s team joined Able Technology in early July and will continue to support their existing clients. All staff are located together at Able Technology’s Wellington-based office.

About Able Technology

Able Technology specialises in cloud-based software development and consulting. In addition to their loyal customer base, Able Technology is also the developer of SAAS share portfolio management service, ShareSight.

About ProjectX

ProjectX, an award winning software services company, specialised in online maps development and data visualisation. Recognised by the Open Source Society for its use and contribution to Open Source in business, ProjectX has lead modern technologies such as HTML5.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

LibXML Segmentation fault

June 21st, 2010

I have been getting intermittent segfaults with Ruby Enterprise Edition 2010.01 on both Mac OSX Snow Leopard 10.6, and Centos 5.3 with LibXML:

See the LibXML Rubyforge page more details, but the solution is to code your document finders as below...

Posted in apple, linux, rails | No Comments »

RVM gotcha and ARCHFLAGS on snow leopard

June 21st, 2010

After installing Ruby Enterprise Edition 2010.02 via RVM, I was getting seg faults in the native gems. The solution was easy:

I think i will be adding ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" to my bash_login....

Posted in linux, rails | No Comments »

OSX 10.6.3 installs new Ruby with faulty BigDecimal

March 30th, 2010

Installing the latest upgrade from Apple of Snow Leopard version 10.6.3 will update the installed version of Ruby.

The version of ruby installed is:

Unfortunately, there is a known problem with patchlevel 173.

Under the previous version of ruby that was shipped with Snow Leopard, you would have received the expected answer of 3.0009.

There is a patch that you could try in the short term, otherwise you're probably best advised to hold off installing 10.6.3. Or, if you've already installed it, you can wait until Apple or someone else releases an update.

Update: We are all using RVM now, as this allows us to easily install and use different ruby implementations. At the moment, this is normally the current version (2010.02) of Ruby Enterprise Edition.

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Able Technology Sign

March 10th, 2010

Able Tech

Make your own sign here

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Country and Currency Code Mappings

February 15th, 2010

I have had a to load a list of valid country and currency mappings for sharesight. It proved difficult to find a current correct list with the mapping between currency and country on the internet that is easily extractable.

wikipedia has a good source of current and obsolete codes – currency codes ISO 4217, country codes ISO 3166.

Here is what we came up with. If anyone knows of a reliable up to date source then please comment.

And to load into your rails app

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Recurring billing of expired credit cards

January 13th, 2010

At Sharesight [www.sharesight.co.nz] we operate an online, subscription based portfolio management for DIY share market investors. For convenience, most of our customers choose to pay by credit card, and we bill them on a recurring basis, either monthly or annually. When customers subscribe, we make it clear to them that we will bill their card on a recurring basis (and, most importantly, we also make it easy for customers to cancel their subscription whenever they want).

We use the ActiveMerchant plugin (Ruby on Rails) to connect to the DPS Payment Express payment gateway. DPS connects to our BNZ Buyline merchant account which allows us to bill customers in both NZD and AUD. When we pass through a customer’s card details to DPS they return a billing token, and when we need to bill the card in the future, we simply send through the appropriate billing token to DPS along with the amount to be billed (this amount may change if customers upgrade or downgrade their accounts). This saves us from having to store our customers’ credit card details, and worry about the security issues that this entails.

Expired Credit Cards

Until now, the only real issue that we faced was the problem of expiring credit cards. Credit cards generally expire every two years (sometimes more frequently), primarily due to the fact that this is the life expectancy of the magnetic strip on the back of the card. When a customer’s credit card expired, they needed to provide us with the updated card details, otherwise when we tried to charge their card, we would receive a ‘card expired’ error back from DPS. Clearly this somewhat limits the convenience factor for our customers, in fact many customers told us so, pointing out that their card number hadn’t changed.

The solution, as it turns out, is a little known feature called the recurring billing flag. Essentially when a payment is sent through to the bank with the recurring billing flag set, they will (generally) ignore the expiry date when processing the transaction. I came across this feature via this blog post, but could not find it documented anywhere in the technical documentation provided by either the bank or DPS. A quick call to a knowledgeable staff member at DPS, confirmed that they could in fact set this flag for us provided that we obtained written permission from the bank. Luckily we had no problem in obtaining prompt approval from the BNZ, and we were able to have the recurring billing flag enabled on our transactions within a couple of days.

I hope this knowledge is useful for other SaaS vendors who bill customers on a recurring basis. From what I understand, the banks may have different policies on allowing the recurring flag to be set.

Please let us know your experiences.

Special guest post by Scott Ryburn.

Posted in rails, web | 1 Comment »

Oauth presentation

December 2nd, 2009

He is a copy of my Oauth presentation [806 kB] from tonight's WellRailed group. I discussed Oauth from both a client and a server perspective. Plenty of examples from Sharesight, where we are building an API.

Here is the example test.rb

I also discussed LoadStorm.com, which has a free plan that allows up to 50 simultaneous users. I recommend you check them out.

Posted in rails | No Comments »

Korimako (Bellbird) iPhone ringtone

November 27th, 2009

bellbird
I’ve been enjoying listening to New Zealand native birds as ringtones on my iPhone. Here is one of my favourites – the Korimako, or Bellbird [164 kB].

You are welcome to share this with your friends and redistribute – as long as you retain the copyright information contained within the file.

To add it to your iPhone, just download the file and then double click it. It should open iTunes and import itself. It will be copied to your iPhone next time to connect it to your computer.

Let me know in the comments if you like it, and I’ll create some more. Any requests?

Posted in apple | 6 Comments »

« Older Entries