I am supposed to fly to Surabaya tonight due to attending to my cousin’s wedding this Sunday. But since Mount Kelud erupted last night, all airports in Central and East Java are closed. When I called Tiger’s Customer Center (+65 3157 6434, must call using mobile phone, I can’t use my office land-line), they said there’s no changes with the flight. For a while I was happy because it means I can still attend my cousin’s wedding.

Unfortunately, my flight is confirm cancelled. Changi’s flight status website confirms it:

So there’s no other alternatives but to ask for refund. To get a refund from Tiger is a little bit tricky. Hopefully these steps can help you:

1. Visit http://gethelp.tigerair.com. Click the orange button.
   
2. Select your airline. Look at your flight number, my flight number is TR 2258.
   
3. Fill your personal information. Almost all fields are mandatory.
   
4. Select Flight delay/cancellation.
   
5. Select My flight was cancelled unexpectedly.
   
6. Indicate that you want to refund. Also, state your booking reference no, and beg sympathetically (or not, i’m not a good beggar)
   
7. That’s it. They’ll give you the case number. What you need to do is pray! 😀
   

PS: I’ve submitted my form 3-4 hours ago. I have yet to receive any news from Tiger Airways.

“What? PayPal personal payment? I thought Singapore-based PayPal account is no longer allowed to make a personal payment?”. Yes, you are absolutely right. That’s why I put the word ‘Fair’ in the title of this post.

Ok, in case you’re wondering, the purpose of this post is to get better deal because PayPal’s exchange rate is sucks. For example as of today (01 Jan 2014):

• USD-SGD in Yahoo! Finance is 1.2630. E.g. US$100 will get S$126.30
• But if you withdraw from PayPal to your bank account, PayPal will give you rate 1.23067. E.g. US$100 will get S$123.06
• Worse, if you convert your SGD balance to USD, PayPal will give use rate 1.2930. E.g. S$129.30 will get US$100

Consider the scenario where we have two person. Person A has USD PayPal balance to withdraw. Person B want to top-up his PayPal USD balance. Both of them agreed to use Yahoo’s rate, e.g. 1.2630. So first, Person B transfer to A’s POSB account S$126.30. Then, Person A send US$100 to B’s PayPal account.

Unfortunately, B will not have US$100 in his balance because PayPal charged transaction fee. The transaction fee is 3.9% + S$0.5, which is US$4.4. This means effectively the exchange rate used is 1.3211, which is very unfair to Person B.

To make it fair, Person A must send amount in which after transaction fee cut, is US$100. This value would be: US$104.57. This US$4.57 is the transaction fee, which will be split into two, i.e. US$2.285. So in this arrangement, Person A send US$104.57 to Person B. Person B transfer to S$129.18 (US$102.285 x 1.2630).

So using this scheme: Person B will save 11 cents in every US$100. Equally, Person A will get extra around 25 cents in every US$100. If you’re interested to use this scheme, you can use the calculator below.

PayPal Personal Payment Calculator

Above steps kinda look like too much hassle for just saving 45 cents in every US$100. But it might worth it if you transfer frequently.

Another method to get even better deal is the Person A buys directly the goods/services, with the Person B’s address as the shipping address. This way, both Person A and Person B will earn/save around S$3 for every US$100.

Cheers!
Hardono

Last November, there was a bug report in JSON Table Editor‘s support page. The person note that the table editor unable to load non-linear JSON. If he loaded the following JSON, the table is only showing two columns:

[{ "name" : "gggg", "desc" : "gggg"},
 { "text" : "gggg" },
 { "text" :"gggg" },
 { "text" : "gggg" }]

So today I finally have the time to look at this problem. After a quick look, I realized that it’s a simple problem. Previously, the ExtJS Store is initialized with the first object in the JSON array. Now, we must iterate all items inside the array and combining all of their attributes.

We do it as follows:

	// ...... CODE SNIP ......
	
	//obj is the JSON array
	var initObj = obj[0];
	
	//copy all properties' name into initObj
	Ext.each(obj, function(item){
		for (var key in item)
		{
			if (initObj[key] == undefined)
			{
				if (typeof(item[key]) == "number")
					initObj[key] = 0;
				else
					initObj[key] = "";
			}
		}
	});
	
	//initialize the ExtJS Store with initObj
	initStoreWithObject(initObj);
	
	// ...... CODE SNIP ......

And it works:

Happy holidays all!

Cheers,
Hardono