QuotesRT is a US stock ticker application for the iPhone and does need a bit of testing. It’s not a free app and is really a US only app but for some reason Apple allow us to get confused by it over here in the UK.

It’s a single stock ticker in that the ticker price is displayed full screen and appears to update real time. For a start this can’t be legal as to get real time stock prices, as opposed to the usual 15 minutes delay variety, you have to pay for that service but with this app you don’t have to pay anything. Convenient for us users but don’t bet on it working for too long. The next version of this app will include European stock markets. To monitor Euro shares append .L to the share’s name i.e. RIO.L which will then display the Rio Tinto price, in sterling and in pence and percentage pence but unfortunately preceded with the $ sign. So a Rio Tinto price of 4007.25 pence which is actually £40.02 plus .25 of a pence is brilliantly displayed as $4007.25.

This app also has a tendency to crash a bit, in fact sometimes it doesn’t even start. If you are monitoring a stock who’s price fluctuates a lot then after awhile it falls over. Rio Tinto’s price was changing a lot yesterday, every couple of seconds sometimes, so this is a good stock for the developer to test against.

Just saw a review of a home wind turbine which is supposed to create wind generated electricity. Problem is it needs electricity to convert the wind power into erm…electricity and it uses more electricity than it generates. Sounds a bit chicken and eggy. What the heck, you can blow a few grand and let the neighbours think you are helping global warming.

Somebody did an ad-hoc regression test of a new version of one of our systems and found a hole in code that is already running live, but he won’t tell us what he did to generate the system crash. He says he just ran it with the usual data and it fell over. Not sure if I believe that. I think he’s been thinking of how to break it for a while and had a eureka moment when he thought of a scenario that would never work, ran it and reported that ‘it’s still a piece of horse manure’.

I’ve been trying to replicate this issue for the last day and can’t. I went to the hole finder and again asked he how he ran it but he wouldn’t tell me and what’s worse he won’t raise a defect against it. I suppose it is my responsibility to find every single bug but this guy’s also a tester and he does also have a responsibility to help the developers if he knows in what situation the code becomes a wobbly heap, or maybe he’s one of those people that like software being buggy.

Just been reading some Warhammer reviews on Amazon and they aren’t good at all. Nearly half the reviewers gave it 1 star, and one third gave it 5 stars, so the median is pretty average. Maybe I should go for WoW’s The Wrath Of The Lich King instead.

I downloaded LondonCam for the iPhone and it works very well. There’s a scrolling wheel where you select which cam’s you want to see and they are grouped by area of London. The first one selected takes between 3 and 5 seconds to load and any after that about 2 seconds to load. There’s also a good film trailer app, using Flixster, which works on 3G, is no quite HD, in fact it’s a bit rough but it does work.

There’s also Air Sharing, by Avatron, which allows you to drag and drop files between your PC and the iPhone/iPod Touch. It is quite professional with some well laid out help pages which were very nearly right. Managed to get it to work and have copied my resume to the iPhone, though what I’ll do with it I haven’t a clue. Flycast is another radio type application which gives access to 1,000 digital music channels and some radio stations. It’s supposed to work over 3G and even Edge but those are a bit patchy. Works great with wi-fi though.

I just read that retail sales went up by 1% in the month of August, the second consecutive month of increased retail sales. Also apparently house prices went up by 1%. There was no chance of either of those two statistics making headlines this week.

I mentioned both of those stats to someone I know who works in the media and he was shocked. I could go further and say that he just didn’t want to believe it at all. I mentioned the same stats to someone at work and he said something like ‘no one wants to read that kind of news’. Seems that some people are a bit intoxicated by lousy financial news and want to keep reading it for a good long while yet. Good luck to them.

Someone sent me a shocking email about how HP EDS are going to shed 24,000 IT jobs and take on some other people. The email alluded to jobs being shipped to Asia. Makes sense in an odd way as EDS have been mucking up IT projects for ever so why not get them done in Asia where they’ll probably muck them up even better and they can save a few bob. A-hem.

I downloaded IE8 beta onto my Vista PC recently, more fool me, and it messed it up a bit. I couldn’t install iTunes 8 onto it as the root registry permissions were non-existent. I tried setting them up again but with no luck. I tried various restores and repairs to the O/S but nope it wasn’t getting any better. So I gave up, copied my docs folder to the XP PC, accepted that WoW was going to get lost and ran the HP restore disks which took the PC back to the state it was in when I bought it in January 2007.

Installed Office 2003, Dreamweaver, Photoshop CS3, Skype and a bunch of other stuff and then tried Windows Update. That found 60 odd upgrades which I let it install and which of course failed. Rebooted and had another go but with only 20 odd upgrades which appeared to work. Rebooted and let it try and install all of the remaining upgrades (Don’t you ever learn? Ed). They downloaded and tried to install. The PC reboots itself to apply the upgrades to the registry and lord knows what else. Of course it doesn’t actually ever finish updating the system and so doesn’t actually reboot, just sits there in a sulk. Hard reboot time again. I can see I’m going to have install all of these upgrades one at a time. I wonder if people have these problems at Microsoft sites when they are upgrading or are they like all corporate sites so well locked down that they never encounter these horrible issues. Probably. It’s just us poor schmucks at home that have to go through these painful problems.

I then had a go at installing WoW. Got the basic install on and tried to login so that it could apply a year’s patches. Predictably there was a problem with downloading or installing the patches which looked a bit familiar. Hopefully I may have written a blog entry here somewhere so I can dig myself out of this problem. Then I can have a go at installing The Burning Crusade.

Or maybe I don’t bother with WoW and get Warhammer instead.