I’m a cleanliness freak – to the extent of cleaning up my Facebook wall. Over the last week, there’s been a lot of spam with wall messages that read: “Hahaha! Mine is hilarious. Check out yours”? Familiar? Yes, that silly app which tells you how you would look in the future. I never tried it, but tired of the requests, I urged friends to avoid it via a FB update. 13 people liked it, but I only hope its the latter of these 2 messages it conveys: how awful I look, and how useless that app is. (I take everybody’s privacy too seriously, hence some masking)
I hope I’m writing a new post just in time – before someone inquires my whereabouts. #exaggeration. No one cares where I am or what I’m doing; whether I’m writing or I’m not. But that’s not too bad either.
But honestly, who am I writing for? I don’t write to seek fan following or money, so numbers don’t bother me. Few read my thoughts, most of them come here to demystify jargon or sync their Thunderbird address book with LDAP or check ferry timings. But numbers are not completely discouraging: in less than 2 years (starting Jun ’09) we’ve got over 28000 hits, close to 50 unique visitors visit us each day. And that’s not too bad either.
Simple Wishes: Was it that bad?
7 months back, I went through the toughest times and life couldn’t have taught me more. I was paranoid for inspiration & motivation. I picked up Amit Gupte’s practice of wishing luck to friends and realized life is short, and my friend list is too long. It would take me over 3 yrs to wish each one of them, and more pain Continue reading But that’s not too bad either→
Apologies! I know that I have been away for quite some time now – but there are reasons! Work being the major sucker 🙂 followed by personal interests. Moreover, my boss paid a visit 😀 I tried hard to spare time, then reversed some – but nothing worked! Anyway, the good news is that I’m back.
Census 2011 Logo
I did miss writing all this time & kept noting them as they happened. To begin with, I hope you are aware about Census 2011. Most state & central government employees have to compulsorily participate in this, over & above their routine responsibilities (pl note 0+1=1). The lady who was doing it in our area was an innovator! Instead of visiting each house & collecting data, she took an iterative, outsourcing model. She took the lift to the first floor, and walked down distributing a form in Marathi to each house. She very calmly told people that the form was very simple (I don’t know of a single govt form that is simple) & that one didn’t need to know Marathi to fill it (I don’t know how Bengalis & Malayalis bought this idea?) Suddenly people realized the importance of Maharashtrian neighbours, and fortunately each floor had one. After putting people to the job, she again took the elevator up to start collecting filled forms. I’m sure with this trick she managed to get home in time for lunch, which otherwise she would’ve had to couple with dinner. Just to note, that innovation is not necessarily rocket science.
Rickshaw Meter
Two notable things happened in the near past, both of which have affected our lives in one way or the other. The first thing: revised auto-fares. As Shubhojit said, this is one thing that makes you feel real poor. What I used to spend both way is what the 3-Tyre boogie now takes away one way. All thanks to the revision graced by skilled instrumentation engineers at garages.
Rupee Sign
The other thing – the symbol that our national currency got – actually makes me feel very proud. It is the symbol of globalization, equality & finally a distinguishing factor from other currencies with the same name. Some websites, like Burrp, picked up the symbol in no time. I’m just waiting for it to show up on currency.
Ambedkar Memorial, U.P.
After news about the symbol hit the stands, people questioned the kind of money that must have gone into its making. But I say, what’s wrong? If someone can spend tons of money raising statues in a city where people don’t have enough, Continue reading And the busy man has found time for his lost love→
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/Gtalkbot. 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 Tarpipe workflows for publishing updates to multiple social media sites→
