It's the little things that you learn that make life easier. I wanted to screenshot the RushCrowds iPhone app this morning, turns out is easy:

1. Open the screen you want to copy
2. Hold down the power and the home button at the same time for a second then release, the screen flashes white and you hear a camera click. (The power button, which might be officially called the sleep button I suspect, is the one at the top right, the home button is the round button at the bottom middle).

It saves the screenshots to your Photos, so you can email them, or just sync over to iPhoto.

I've been implementing a credit card payment gateway recently using the Cybersource system and their SIMPLE API features – it's a COM object based system.

Everything seemed to go swimmingly well until I struck a snag processing Refunds using the follow-on service, which is where you can refund a previous payment by referencing its unique identifiers. As opposed to a stand alone refund credit.

Cybersource steadfastly refused to allow the credit, giving me errors saying that I was missing a data field, which, after spending a bunch of time carefully checking the fields against their SDK documentation, I was convinced was not correct.

Finally I worked it out – and it had been staring at me in the face. Credit card systems generally have two modes:

1. Authorization – where you check that the card number etc is valid, and that the customer has the bucks available
2. Capture – where you then 'capture' the payment based on the Authorization

Virtually every credit card gateway I've used wraps Authorization and Capture into a single function for cases where you just want a straightforward payment. EG you just want to get the customer's money in a single transaction.

Cybersource is different, first you have to Authorize the payment, then Capture it, which of course you have to do as a single set of calls all as part of processing the customer's payment. On the surface of course it makes complete sense, you are replicating the actual process going on behind the scenes.

But in practice it means making two separate calls to the Cybersource API, all while the customer is sitting watching the spinning 'loading' icon in your shopping cart page.

Matters are not assisted by Cybersource's documentation not clearly describing this (a flow chart or diagram would be helpful), and their samples are woefully deficient – they don't actually have a sample that shows a combined Authorize and Capture scenario – which would surely have to be the single most common activity undetaken by developers implementing their API.

I really must share more interesting stuff as a I come across it.

I've been having fun recently using sp_OACreate in SQL stored procedures to use COM objects. For example, I came across this link that shows how to send email using the JMail COM object in a stored procedure.

A couple of helpful hints:

1. You need to  'OLE Automation Procedures are enabled' as true, in SQL Surface Area Configuration
2. You'll need a user with rights on the Master db. I created a separate user just for calling these stored procedures, and gave the them the following rights:

USE [master]
GRANT EXECUTE ON dbo.sp_OACreate TO [user]
GO
GRANT EXECUTE ON dbo.sp_OASetProperty TO [user]
GO
GRANT EXECUTE ON dbo.sp_OAMethod TO [user]
GO
GRANT EXECUTE ON dbo.sp_OAGetErrorInfo TO [user]
GO

My only problem so far is JMail won't send an attachment. I've tried messing with permissions on the file to be attached but that didn't help.