I just got Merb running under Phusion Passenger on my OS X Leopard MacBook and it all went well but with a couple gotchas. I looked at Manfred’s and TopFunky’s notes, but I couldn’t get Merb to kick in.

It turns out I was missing a config.ru as they were running straight Rails apps and Merb has to (gets to?) run as a Rack app. This page on Merbivore has all the info. I was being a bit dense about actually taking that first bit of code (# config.ru, etc) and putting it into a file at the root of my Merb app named config.ru. Once done Merb fired right up and it’s working swimmingly.

In April I changed jobs, moving from a position with a company-supplied phone to one without. I decided to go with AT&T as I wanted to make the plunge and get an iPhone. However, being a loooong time Apple customer (first Mac: 1984) I was aware that the new version was right around the corner, so I got a cheap LG flip phone and figured I’d upgrade when the new iPhone came out.

You’re probably already shaking your head at my naiveté. I’ve never been a heavy cell phone user — my plan before my company provided phone was a pay-as-you-go with Virgin, which suited my pretty well actually. I’m not a big talker, but I am a big emailer/web browser, etc., hence the iPhone lust.

So here’s some numbers I’m running through my head — the cost of my LG phone (a refurb, fwiw) was about $10 — they seem to be going for $80 used — I’d imagine AT&T would have gotten them for that at most. So say they funded $70 of my phone.

I have the cheapest phone plan at $40/month with a $10 media plan. So far:

AT&T -> Tom $70
Tom -> AT&T $50/mo * 3 = $150

Now, due to that $70 AT&T won’t provide me the upgrade price, but will generously allow me to upgrade for the open price of $399/$499 — although in order to do so I would still be required to extend my plan. Why? I don’t know.

What I would like to do:
AT&T -> Tom $200 (iPhone subsidy)
Tom -> AT&T $70/mo + $5/mo for text

I would even be happy to pay off that $70 debt I have for the LG subsidy. AT&T would be $25/month ahead, meaning they’d pay back the LG subsidy within a few months and have $300/year more of my cash indefinitely.

It’s just hard to not feel penalized as an existing customer and boy, do I regret not doing a pay-as-you-go plan for a while. At this point looking into alternatives like a cracked phone and switching providers would look good, if it was feasible. It just makes me want to leave AT&T. Here they have a chance to increase their revenue from me, but they manage to turn that around and make me an unhappy customer.

Sheesh.

I’ve been trying to load a local file with some dummy data and hitting a security warning. I was running out of FlexBuilder 3 and trying to read a local file, so wasn’t sure why I was getting a security error.

I’d come across many references to adding a cross domain policy to a web server, but this is the first full explanation of the security sandbox that made sense to me. Following this, I added:

-use-network=false

To the custom compiler line in the project preferences and all is well. Here’s the link with a great explanation:

http://blogs.adobe.com/flexdoc/2008/06/the_security_sandbox_in_flex_b.html