World Water Day 2010 – Let’s pledge to conserve
Do you know what date it is? 22nd March. I know its not your birthday (unless you are Prof. Aneesh Gangal), neither is mine. Today is World Water Day, observed world-wide since 1992, popularized by the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development at Rio De Janerio that year. And what are we doing? Forget about standing in the world’s longest queue to highlight the global sanitation crisis or using low flow toilets, we’re not even closing taps when we brush. And please note, its not about the money; water is still very cheap at 25 paise (INR 0.25) a gallon. Just that its not enough. Water like other resources is extremely precious & sadly depleting. Let us atleast pledge to conserve & use it judiciously. Read further if you wish to Go Green!
Anyway, we’re talking water. If you are planning to save water, you should first be roughly aware of how much you are using. Similar to the carbon foot print, water consumption by individuals & companies is measured by a water foot print. This includes the total amount of freshwater used directly and indirectly. Direct consumption is on account of drinking, washing, leaving the tap open š Indirect usage is the water spent on growing vegetables we consume, manufacturing coffee beans, preparing a meat steak, etc. Unfortunately, it takes 20 gallons of water to create a pint of beer. Here is a Facebook app to check out your water foot-print.
So why is water so important?
- Although a person can live without food for more than a month, a person can only live without water for Continue reading World Water Day 2010 – Let’s pledge to conserve
Get updates from any web page via a Feed43 RSS feed
As is evident from several posts on my blog, I am a total food freak! I am also a regular burrper. I have written several valuable reviews at Burrp and also received written appreciation from Burrp. A couple of months back I was thinking of copying food review from Burrp to my blog. Since that was going to be tedious, I went looking for a RSS feed from Burrp. It was sad they don’t offer it, but I wrote them my feedback. Now I was left with no option but to think out of the box!
And then the Web 2.0 enthusiast in me came to life! I had been using a service called Feed43 to process several feeds and remembered that it allows creating a feed out of any page on the internet. I checked the HTML source code of my Burrp profile page to find that reviews were quite structured in terms of markup. So why not let Feed43 read out the page and create a feed for my reviews? This way I won’t have to copy anything manually. Moreover, whenever I post a review to Burrp, it will be available on my blog in less than 6 hours (that’s the refresh rate for free feeds at Feed43) Continue reading Get updates from any web page via a Feed43 RSS feed
A Tribute to Sachin Tendulkar
When Sachin Tendulkar travelled to Pakistan to face one of the finest bowling attacks ever assembled in cricket, Michael Schumacher was yet to race a F1 car, Lance Armstrong had never been to the Tour de France, Diego Maradona was still the captain of a world champion Argentina team, Pete Sampras had never won a Grand Slam. When Tendulkar embarked on a glorious career taming Imran and company,…
When Tendulkar embarked on a glorious career taming Imran and company, Roger Federer was a name unheard of; Lionel Messi was in his nappies, Usain Bolt was an unknown kid in the Jamaican backwaters. The Berlin Wall was still intact, USSR was one big, big country, Continue reading A Tribute to Sachin Tendulkar
Jargon: Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) as a Financial Indicator
Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) is an important financial metric for evaluating the effectiveness of converting credit sales (money owed to you) to cash. Considering the time value of money, it indicates the age of an organization’s accounts receivables or AR (sum of all money owed by debtors) in days and the average time it takes to turn receivables into cash. Ideally, this should never exceed the standard payment terms. So for a 52 credit period offered by credit card to borrowers (which is us, debtors to the issuing company), best DSO for the company will be 52. A higher DSO would indicate inefficiency in their collection cycle (and in our payment which they will gladly oblige by slamming exorbitant interest or by delegating collection to recovering agents).
DSO (measured in days) is calculated for a period,
DSO = Accounts Receivables / Credit Sales for the period * 30 (days)
DSO can vary significantly over the course of a year on account of several reasons:
– Fluctuation in sales volume, due to seasonality, economy, etc
– Negotiated payment terms, promotional discounts
Since these situations are common in business, DSO is argued Continue reading Jargon: Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) as a Financial Indicator
Tarpipe workflows for publishing updates to multiple social media sites
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)
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 Tarpipe workflows for publishing updates to multiple social media sites
Jargon: Electronic Invoice Presentment and Payment (EIPP)
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 ā called Supplier Portal in sourcing jargon ā that suppliers can log-on to and key-in their invoices. āFlipping-the-POā 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
Jargon: 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).Ā As compared to the 3-row QWERTY keyboard, FITALY has 5 rows with atmost 6 letters in a row (as against 10 on QWERTY).
Strategies to Log & Retain Activity Data
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 ā¦..
Connected to ProductionDB: Saved record #862
Executed Query: INSERT INTO SUPPLIERSā¦ : 1 row affected
inside getSuppliersForCategory: Category = “Laptops” Continue reading Strategies to Log & Retain Activity Data
The Need to Log & Retain Activity Data
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 The Need to Log & Retain Activity Data