I used to use my Mobile phone as an alarm clock but i find that these days I’m already awake before it goes off!
Talk about waking up with a smile 
![P280708_11.46[01].JPG](http://www.floydprice.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/p280708-114404.jpg)
Harrision (5 1/2 months), Liberty (3) and Charlie (9) who is far to grown up to participate in a family photo 
As part of my role at Component Workshop Ltd over the last 12 months I have been responsible for internet marketing of our Code Spaces product and in this time we have spent ~£20,000 on google adwords.
While I have not compiled the stats in a presentable form I can say without any doubt that bidding for the #1 spot on your given search phrase is not only expensive in comparison to the 2nd – 10th slots it also yields pretty disappointing results.
Recently I have been able to cut a third off our Google Adwords spend while retaining the same level of conversions by doing no more than excluding the #1 slot from our adword bids.
While I can’t fully explain why this phenomenon occurs my feeling is that as users of google we are instinctively drawn to the genuine search results verses the sponsored links and as the 2nd and 3rd placed sponsored links usually appear closer to the genuine search results we are naturally drawn to them rather than the #1 placed link.
Food for thought me thinks…
Bourbon Creams and Bananas are not a balanced diet.
Phusion Passenger on Amazon EC2
Some useful stuff relating to Phusion Passenger (mod_rails) on Amazons Elastic Computing Cloud.
Moving from Java to C#
A senior ThoughtWorker talks about his first C# project 10 years after he first tasted the Java bean.
IPhone GUI PSD
Some photoshop goodies for mocking up IPhone UI’s.
If you have recenlty or are about to Upgrade an existing Rails application to Rails 2.1 (and why wouldn’t you), be aware that your implementation of Exception Notifier might not work due to a scope change in Rails where:
@controller.filter_parameters
Is now protected, therefore the code in Exception Notifier that called it needs to be change as follows :
1 2 | #exclude_raw_post_parameters? ? @controller.filter_parameters(parameters) : parameters exclude_raw_post_parameters? ? @controller.send!(:filter_parameters, parameters) : parameters |
Utilizing the send method allows you to call the protected method.
Fortunately the Exception Notifier plugin on GitHut has already been updated to accommodate this fix and can be installed by :
1 | ./script/plugin install git://github.com/rails/exception_notification.git |
NOTE
Exception Notifier (like most plugins) comes with a suite of tests that you should run as part of your build or at the very least whenever you change something as fundamental as the Rails version your using… BTW I did neither of these things and found out the hard way :-/
