iTelescope

Off-late, I have had too much social presence on the internet. How do I manage it? Ping.fm! This service lets you pre-configure & then simultaneously update multiple social media sites by pinging Ping.fm which can be done via email, SMS (to a UK number - noooooh!) or a Jabber/Gtalk bot. Now that’s enough for the aam zindagi, but when you live the mentos (or should I say prasadgupte) zindagi, you might just want some processing to be done before you post to multiple services. That’s where TarPipe kicks-in! Here is a short tutorial.

Tarpipe lets you build custom workflows through an intuitive UI (like Yahoo pipes) to control how, where, and what part of your data is to be published. In my example, I’m creating a workflow to upload a photo to Facebook via email and then post its URL to Twitter & FriendFeed. I avoided using a URL shortening service to KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid)

My First TarPipe Workflow

I first drag a Email Decoder connector onto the canvas, and then Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed. Note that bubble on the left side of a connector indicates ‘input’ & the one on the right side indicates ‘output’.

So when I connect the Mail Attachment bubble to the Photo in Facebook, it means that the attachment (a photo) will act as input to Facebook. On similar lines, the message body acts as the caption for the photo. The URL for the photo, generated by Facebook, will be available as output which I will use as a link in Twitter. The photo-thumbnail goes to Friendfeed along with the title & link. The title in either case comes directly from the email. (continue reading…)

Electronic Invoice Presentment and Payment, or EIPP, is more general concept (as compared to ERS discussed earlier) that is based on electronic invoice submission. ERS uses Advance Shipping Notices (ASNs) instead of invoice. However, they share benefits: avoidance of data entry, errors and exceptions, lost invoices and vendor inquiries. Most solutions are capable of receiving invoices in CSV, XML and few other formats over EDI.

EIPP or e-Invoicing is part of the larger procure-to-pay (P2P) cycle (will be writing soon on this). A huge challenge lies in supplier on-boarding: getting suppliers to automate at their end. In the current era, supplier enablement can be hastened by hosting an internet facing portal – called Supplier Portal in sourcing jargon – that suppliers can log-on to and key-in their invoices. ‘Flipping-the-PO’ is a standard feature that saves data entry effort for the supplier, and minimizes error. On referencing the PO being invoiced, information about line items viz. description, ordered quantity & price are defaulted. This helps reduce the number of expections in automated invoice matching. Imagine this as handing over your groceries list to a baniya who converts it to a bill by stamping his name and adding prices & total (and discounts if the baniya is willing to spare)

References:
http://scm.ncsu.edu/public/facts/facs041014.html
http://www.agilent.com/oracle_supplier/downloads/ERS_supplier_guide.pdf
http://www.jpmorgan.com/tss/General/Invoice_Management/1159348844579

FITALY Keyboard Layout

FITALY is a keyboard layout that places the most commonly-used letters closest to the centre, to minimize finger movement while entering a word. Designed by Jean Ichbiah (Patent), it is specifically optimized for stylus or touch-based input. The name, FITALY, is derived from the letters occupying the second row in the layout (like QWERTY comes from the 1st row of standard keyboards)

The aim of the design is to optimize text entry by organizing keys to minimize key-to-key finger movement, allowing faster input through one-finger entry (compared to 10 fingers required to type efficiently on QWERTY layout).  As compared to the 3-row QWERTY keyboard, FITALY has 5 rows with atmost 6 letters in a row (as against 10 on QWERTY).

Letter Frequencies in the English language

(continue reading…)

My previous article The Need to Log & Retain Activity Data argued the very need of logging & retaining data. In this post, I am listing out various logging strategies along with some brief explanation, utility, associated constraints and effectiveness of each method. As highlighted before, most people fail to understand the difference between logs/traces, audit trails and database time-stamps. Each of Log/Trace, Audit Trail & Timestamping has its purpose, pros and cons.

Log or Trace

When I think of a log, the first thing that comes to my mind is a trace consisting of developer injected SOPs (SysOuts), messages/exceptions generated by the server or any third-party component used. This trace could be written to a flat file or a database table.

Example:

2009-31-12 23:59:59 ::: LoginServlet >>> john.doe >>> Incorrect Password
192.168.10.101 - 10/Nov/09:13:55:36 -0700 “GET /logo.gif HTTP/1.0″ 200 2326
instantiated Bean: com.detangle.ejbs.whatever
Java.Lang.NullPointerException at …..
Connected to ProductionDB: Saved record #862
Executed Query: INSERT INTO SUPPLIERS… : 1 row affected
inside getSuppliersForCategory: Category = “Laptops” (continue reading…)

In the current age of On-Demand & SaaS combined with multi-tenant hosting, we are likely to generate tons of activity data every hour. For this data to be useful to administration & support teams, IT has to plan for its conversion to information. The strategy to implement information logging should be built right into the development process.

The Confusion

However, to most people, that I have communicated with while developing systems,

• the terms Audit log, server log, audit trail, time-stamping, change history are synonymous
• implementing ’soft-delete’ probably appears a development overhead

I don’t know if it is because of exposure to ERP or otherwise, but unlike these people, I am overly sensitive to recording audit trails. Are you one of these? Are you not convinced about implementing a logging strategy? Then this post was written thinking about you. (continue reading…)

As I was getting over Monday blues, Aditya Tripathi sent this funny-yet-realistic! I’m sure this will get every dev-devil laughing with delight; reminiscing the KLOC written with cryptic comments or nothing at all. Here you go, the best code comments seen in source code…!

//When I wrote this, only God and I understood what I was doing
//Now, God only knows

/*
* You may think you know what the following code does.
* But you dont. Trust me.
* Fiddle with it, and youll spend many a sleepless
* night cursing the moment you thought youd be clever
* enough to “optimize” the code below.
* Now close this file and go play with something else.
*/ (continue reading…)

I sometimes spend a lot of my time and blog-space publicizing (often, through criticism) other products, websites, hotels, etc. But sometimes I just want to show respect for  great ideas. And nothing excites me more than green initiatives! While going through Gopal Shenoy’s blog on Product Management tips, I got to learn of this cool company called Gazelle he joined. Gazelle, based out of Boston, pays you for taking away used electronics which it recycles. So instead of going to landfills, you’re gadgets are erased and either re-used or sold in the secondary market. It takes a week after receiving the gadget to complete inspect it and issue the payment. What more could you be asking for with Money in one hand and carbon-credit in the other!

I got too excited and checked what I will get for my 4 year old Nokia 6600! Have a look at the disheartening result!

Gazelle will pay me $9 for Nokia 6600

PS: No links on this page have referral commissions

Type in English, Save as Marathi

Last week I stumbled upon this amazing service called Google Transliteration that can be accessed through a bookmarklet (jargon explained at the bottom). You can use this to type in one of the Indic languages in any text input box on the internet! (whether it really gets saved depends on the website ) Language currently supported: Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Persian, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu & Urdu.

Update (21-Feb-10):
After reading this post, one my valued readers questioned the utility of this service! And this is what I wrote back:
Few years back acquiring Indic fonts, and learning to use Indic keyboard layout was a challenge. Google eased that with a web service which takes away reluctance to reply in local languages.
With such a service, an application developer need not provide for transliteration as a feature (its a feature in Gmail). Creating a database with double-byte storage is enough to record input in any language.

Also, Transliteration can help people understand how words are pronounced when they are familiar with a different script. However, this may not work when the same word is spelled in multiple ways. eg. Mohammed [Read more]
With CJV languages, transliteration will often yield only an approximate result.

(continue reading…)

This weekend has been quite different. With Valentine’s day falling on a Sunday, it should have been something for my heart, but instead it was great for my stomach. I had been eating out all the time. The food forced me too take long walks to make place for another meal, and I used it to compile 5 new foodie reviews at Burrp. Do check them out! By the way, did you know that I have a dedicated RSS feed for my food reviews? If not, please do subscribe through your favorite reader!

• Sabkuchh Food Plaza, Malad (W): ‘Great paneer!!! Average chaat‘ [3/5]
• Tangerine Restaurant, Andheri (E): ‘Nice place for buffet!‘ [4/5]
• Chakra, Andheri (E): ‘My favorite place around Marol/Sakinaka‘ [4/5]
• Wazwaan, Andheri (E): ‘Misled by Burrp; Silly/Cheap place‘ [2/5]
• Garden Court Restaurant, Malad (W): ‘Great ambience; Good prepartion; OK service’ [4/5]

It took close to 25 person-hours to get 15 people for lunch. During all this, I got a mail I’d like to share with you. If you are planning an outing with friends, Don’t let this happen to you! We were misled by Burrp on the venue, and landed uourselves at a silly place called Wazawan (naam pe mat jao, hume bhi dhoka de gaya!) somewhere on Military Road in Marol. But in no time we figured out that this wasn’t the place for us! No drinks & too cheap! So we moved to our all time favorite - Chakra and had a gala time!

Quorum: Prasad Gupte, Ivan Quadras, Sandeep Gokhale, Hemant Ubhe, Rohit Jham, Anand Natarajan, Shubhangi Billore, Shilpa Nair, Kanul Wadhwa, Prakash Konduru, Kunal Patel, Drup Desai, Sandeep Shenvi
Drop-outs: Neha Moghe, Vinit Reddy, Parwinder Singh, Sourav Ghosal & Jayesh.