Clear Text

New Year, first post.

2012-01-28T22:26:00.001+05:30

Happy New year ,everyone. Yeah, I know, this post is long overdue. I changed jobs some time last year, and the work at the new place is not exactly what I expected. Crazy deadlines, unrealistic requirements, last minute changes…the works.

But I did get to learn more about this whole CRM world.. And here’s hoping I find more time to share more of what I learn.

I began my career on Siebel 5 years ago, and it has been my bread and butter. The tried and tested On-Premise mode of CRM installation has always been popular with the blue chip and Fortune 500 clients I had the opportunity to work for. Although cloud based applications are gaining foothold, most of my employer’s clients steered away from sharing mission critical data on the web. They seem to feel more comfortable maintaining and storing their customers data in company’s storage rooms. A lot of them have have simply said no to SalesForce CRM because they don”t get to secure their customer’s data. But all that is changing.

SalesForce.com has understood this customer concern, and the have decided to do something about it. This year, they will introduce a new feature called Data Residency Option or DRO. Simply put, DRO will enable On Premise storage of mission critical data on Cloud.com servers, which can be setup inside client office locations.

DRO will be a part of database.com - a cloud database Salesforce made generally available. It gives an option to the customers of Salesforce to store their mission critical data at their own location and hence keeping complete control of the inward and outward flow of the data across the customer firewall.

The technique developed by Navajo, also called Virtual Private Saas, provides the cloud vendor, Salesforce.com in this case, a key that enables it to translate the encrypted data as it passes through its cloud application. The data is then re-encrypted as it leaves the cloud vendor's solution and returns to the customer's data source. The corporate data is unreadable on cloud provider's servers during this entire operation. VPS is available both as a cloud service, as well as an appliance sitting on the customer's local or Wide area network. With VPS, the customer is solely responsible for its data security as it will hold all the encryption keys.

The flip side to using such a technique would be the security of the encryption and decryption keys used for the process. It is highly critical to properly manage the keys as once the key is lost, the encrypted data can no longer be accessed. Hence, this calls for robust key management to avoid any such eventuality.

But, barring the above, In my view, this technique will overcome the most important impediment to cloud adoption and will be a foundation of technological acceptance as it addresses the key customer fear i.e. about potential data threats in the cloud.

Coming to the acquisition, Navajo systems, founded in 2009 was one of the existing encryption service providers for Salesforce. Salesforce decision to acquire Navajo hence made a lot of sense when other cloud based CRM tools such as Sugar CRM already has possible options for deployment on public clouds (Amazon EC2, Rackspace etc.), private clouds such as VMWare and also on-site behind customer firewalls.

According to a recent report from IBIS World, one of the world's largest independent publishers of U.S. industry research, CRM industry today stands at 60% on-premise deployments and 40% cloud based solutions (1). For customers who are looking for new purchases or upgrade of their legacy applications, DRO might just be the key decision influencer. Let's wait and watch!!

References:

(1) http://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/Columns-Departments/Insight/Are-CRMs-Worst-Years-Behind-It-79254.aspx

Happy Christmas to One and All

2011-12-26T17:10:00.001+05:30

Happy Christmas to One and All:

Wishing everyone who reads this a very happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year!

How To Restore Sharing Options And Old List Spacing In Google Reader

2011-11-16T23:34:00.000+05:30

How To Restore Sharing Options And Old List Spacing In Google Reader:

Google sure has been busy lately. Gmail has a brand new look, Google+ received some new add-ons and even YouTube is getting a facelift. But did you notice the changes to Google Reader? If you’re a regular user, you must have noticed how the color scheme changed, how the spacing changed in list mode, and to top it all off, that you can’t share items anymore, unless you use Google+.

As opposed to Gmail, where you can control the spacing between items in the new look, no such option has been added to Google Reader. This means your screen is now less utilized and you can see less items in your feed, just because of added padding. And if you were used to sharing items via Reader’s sharing options, they no longer exists. The only way to share is via Google+. So what are avid Google Reader users to do?

Here are two add-ons that will help you restore some of these features and get your good old Reader back.

Reader Sharer [Chrome]

Reader Sharer is a simple Chrome add-on that restores the sharing functionality to Google Reader. If you want to continue sharing through Google Reader with its own sharing configuration, or if you simply don’t have Google+ and don’t feel like opening an account just so you can share, you should definitely try out Reader Sharer.

Once you install the add-on, head over to Reader and check if your sharing buttons have been restored. You might need to refresh the page to get them back. But sure enough, here they are!

Reader Sharer restores the entire Reader sharing interface. You can set up who you want to share with, and then share items or share with note, exactly like it used to be. The sharing settings are now back on your sidebar where they used to be, between “All items” and “Explore”.

Reader Sharer comes in two versions. One that simply adds the sharing options (linked above), and another one which also takes care of the new spacing problem in list mode. Using the second version, you can kill two birds with one rock – get your sharing options back and fix the spacing.

Reader Sharer [Firefox]

Reader Sharer Monkey for Firefox comes in just one version, the one that also takes care of the spacing problem. This is not a Firefox add-on, but a Greasemonkey userscript. In order to get it, you have to first install Greasemonkey, and then head over to the userscript page and install the script.

Now, when you open Google Reader, all your sharing options will be back, and the extra spacing in list mode will be reduced.

FixStyleSheet [Chrome]

If you’re OK with Google+ sharing, and don’t want to mess with sharing options, try FixStyleSheet for GoogleReader. This is a simple Chrome extension that does just one thing: it changes the new spacing in Google Reader and lets you use your screen efficiently again. Here is what Google Reader looks like in list mode with the new look:

It’s not that this looks especially bad, but many people have lots of different feeds, and the more items you have on your screen, the easier it is to scan through them and find what you really want to read. The extra spacing also makes the post excerpt smaller, which makes it just a bit harder to understand what the post is about without clicking.

If you’re ready to fix this, download FixStyleSheet, and take another look at Google Reader. The change is automatic, you don’t even have to refresh.

See how much more compact it is? On my 15’’ screen, it increased the number of posts I can see without scrolling from 13 to 23! That’s a lot of wasted space recovered.

Another small thing FixStyleSheet does is make the post view a bit wider and a bit more compact. This is what it normally looks like:

And this is what it looks like after installing the add-on. The title is now smaller, and the whole post stretches over a somewhat wider area, so it takes up less room on your screen.

The change is not huge here, but if you’re minimalistic and don’t care much for formatting, it’s a nice change.

Bottom Line

Changes to the user interface of a product you use regularly is always a tough ride. We all have our way of doing things, and when a company comes in and changes everything on us, we’re bound to be looking for ways to soften the blow. This doesn’t mean the change is necessarily bad.

Making users share only through Google+ is quite a different move, and is not necessarily meant to improve our experience as users, but to improve Google+’s standing. So don’t be shy, if you’ve been using the share option in Google Reader, get the add-on and resume your normal sharing routine.

What do you think of all these changes from Google? Do you like the changes to Reader, or are there other elements to the change you don’t like? Share in the comments!

Siebel 8 Local DB Encryption & Backend Access

2011-08-06T21:18:00.001+05:30

Anyone who has worked on the Siebel version 8 flavours is bound to have run into problems with its new local db encryption feature. As a default setting, Siebel encrypts the local db with an RSA encryption key, which means the local db thus extracted, cannot be accessed via the backend. Tools and the locally installed client will continue to work, but if you need to actually debug data entry issues in the database, the system will just respond saying incorrect password.

Traditionally, there is a tool called dbisqlc, an executable present in the Tool\Bin folder, which is mean to access Sybase databases. I have used this tool numerous times in the past to debug data entry issues and run spooled SQL statements. But if your localdb is encrypted, you will need to provide some more inputs to dbisqlc so that it can open up the dbf file.

Thankfully, there are helpful documents on suppportweb here and here which explains everything in detail.

Determine the location of the local database that user wants to connect to and note down the full path of the database file for example %SIEBEL_CLIENT_ROOT%\local\sse_data.dbf.

Launch dbisqlc.exe from the %SIEBEL_CLIENT_ROOT%\bin directory to bring up the Connect to Adaptive Server Anywhere dialog. On the Login tab fill out the following fields.NOTE: The values for the User ID and Password have to be in upper case:

Field	Value
User ID	DBA
Password	<Enterprise Name> in ALL CAPITALS

NOTE: The default DBA password value is the enterprise name. If the enterprise name has less than 8 characters, the name is padded with consecutive digits 1234. For example:

o If the Enterprise Name is Siebel2005, then the DBA password is SIEBEL2005.

o If the Enterprise Name is Siebel, then the DBA password is SIEBEL12.

On the Database tab fill out the following field:

Field	Value
Database File	C:\Sea\local\sse_data.dbf

NOTE: Starting in Siebel version 8.0, you will need to run the following query to retrieve the encrypted value for the local database owner and enter this value on the Encryption Key field.

SELECT PREF_CD, VAL FROM S_NODE_PREF s1, S_NODE s2 WHERE s1.PREF_CD ='RemLocSec:PlainKey' AND s1.NODE_ID = s2.ROW_ID AND s2.NAME='<mobile client name of the local database';

After clicking on the OK button, the user will connect to the local database. A message "Connected to database" should appear in the Statistics sub-window.

Knowing the DBA password for your local db can also be useful when the tables need to be extended. Sometimes in Siebel tools, when you do an apply activate, the tools wizard goes into a hang and refuses to come out. I found that when I entered the userid as DBA and corresponding password generated as in the steps above, the tools system was able to complete the apply DDL step easily.

Also refer to this excellent post which explains how to reset forgotten passwords.

Java integration to Siebel Webservice

2011-06-12T08:46:00.001+05:30

A few weeks back we had this requirement to have a Java client connect to our Siebel Webservice and do various operations. In this model, the Siebel side was the backend, and a Java applet was the frontend to the system. I setup the inbound Webservice in Siebel in no time, using ASIs. But the Java folks were having problems in setting up a connection to the system. They even said there were problems in the WSDL and Webservice, and that they were getting various parser errors on their side. Guess they were too dependent on eclipse, and they could not find an import WSDL feature on it !!

Truth is, Java is one of those languages which understands webservices very well, and if properly used, could make the integration work easiest to implement. You don’ have to build the SOAP request by hand (though, that is one option) as is done in some scripting languages. You just have to figure out how to generate the stub file, or the necessary class files into the system.

Now there are two ways to import a WSDL into a Java system, you would use the WSDLtoJava.bat file if you are using the apache axis framework. This is when a Java servlet on Tomcat/Apache is talking to another server. I preferred the easier way to using the wsimport command as this is a simple client talking to a Siebel server. I will be using the Service Request ASI WSDL from a previous post.

You need to have the Java SDK installed and the paths properly configured on your system. Open up a command prompt window and type in “java -version” or “javac” to see if the paths have been added correctly.

Go ahead and import the wsdl using the command wsimport SR_WSDL.wsdl. Here I am running the command from the root of C: drive. You will see the importer at work generating class files.

You can ignore any warnings you see as long as you don’t get any errors. wsimport would have created a nested folder structure with multiple class files. Here the path created is C:\com\siebel\xml\sm_servicerequest.

Now its time to start writing your main java file which will make an instance of these class files and trigger the integration to siebel. You will have to know which class represents the webservice, here it is SMServiceRequestWS_Service.class. You can also generate the actual java files to see how the class and methods under them have been defined. Inorder to do this, use the command wsimport –keep.

This time wsimport will create the java files for each class file.

Back to our main java file. Import the generated class files using:

import com.siebel.xml.sm_servicerequest.*;

As can be seen, this string is actually the path of the generated class files. This is what my final Client.java file looked like :

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

import com.siebel.xml.sm_servicerequest.*;

import java.io.Writer;

//the above namespace is from the generated code from the wsdl.

public class Client

{

static SMServiceRequestWS_Service service = new SMServiceRequestWS_Service();

public static void main(String[] args)

{

try

{

Client client = new Client();

client.doTest(args);

}

catch(Exception e)

{

e.printStackTrace();

}

public void doTest(String[] args)

{

try

{

SMServiceRequestWS pm = service.getSMServiceRequestWS();

// Building the Request hierachy

QueryPageSRInput req = new QueryPageSRInput();

req.setPageSize("10");

req.setViewMode("All");

req.setStartRowNum("0");

ListOfSmServicerequest list = new ListOfSmServicerequest();

ServiceRequest SR =new ServiceRequest();

list.getServiceRequest().add(SR);

req.setListOfSmServicerequest(list);

// Variable to store Response hierarchy

QueryPageSROutput res = new QueryPageSROutput();

// Invoke the service

System.out.println("Invoking the Webservice ");

res =pm.queryPageSR(req);

System.out.println(res.getLastPage());

for (int i = 0; i < res.getListOfSmServicerequest().getServiceRequest().size(); i++)

{

System.out.print(res.getListOfSmServicerequest().getServiceRequest().get(i).getStatus() + "\t");

System.out.print(res.getListOfSmServicerequest().getServiceRequest().get(i).getSRNumber() + "\t");

System.out.println(res.getListOfSmServicerequest().getServiceRequest().get(i).getOwner());

}

catch(Exception e)

{

e.printStackTrace();

}

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

All the information you need to build up the request and parse out the response is in the .java files created by wsimport. As can be seen, the final code does not have any variables for the URL,namespace or SOAPAction. These details are taken care of in the .java files.

Time to compile and run the Client.java file. Commands are:

javac Client.java

java Client

The client instance should connect to the Siebel Webservice now :

This code runs a Query and prints out the Service Request Status, RowId and Owner details.

That’s it !! This is all you need to have a java client invoking a Siebel Webservice.

Inbound ASI–Keeping it simple

2011-06-10T07:19:00.001+05:30

What is the easiest way to setup a new inbound web service in Siebel ? Well, a lot depends on the actual requirement, the complexity of the schema, error handling features etc. If the requirement is really simple, I try to go for an Application Service Interface or ASI. And specially if the requirement calls for multiple operations at a single web service, then ASI is the way to go.

An Application Services Interface (ASI) is a release-independent interface published by Oracle that allows you to integrate Siebel applications with external applications. An ASI is a collection of related methods; each method contains input and output parameters. The methods and parameters are listed on the business service definition. Simple method parameters (such as a string or number) are defined directly in the service definition. Hierarchical method parameters are defined using integration objects

Lets assume that the requirement here is to expose a query operation as a web service. The end point would invoke a Siebel web service which would extract data in a schema. Simple query operation. Here is how to do it in an ASI.

Step 1 : Define your schema. Decide upon an already present Integration Object or design a new IO from scratch. Here I’m choosing a custom Service Request IO, with attachments as the child IC. Don’t forget to decide upon the user keys and status keys.

Step 2: Define the ASI business service. Create a new business service, and set the class as CSSEAIDataSyncService. Define a method for this BS as QueryPage. Here I have added one more method for InsertOrUpdate.

Define the arguments of the methods. There has to be at least one argument of type Integration Object. Mention the IO name you had chosen in Step1

Two Business Service User properties are required.

Instead of creating the BS, an existing ASI can be simply cloned, in which case you would only need to change the IO name.

Step 3: Expose the BS as an Inbound web service. Compile the IO and BS. On Siebel 8, simply right click the BS and choose deploy as web service. Or you could setup the service yourself.

In the application, go to Sitemap > Administration – Webservices > Inbound Webservice.

In service name, give any name and set the namespace. The namespace can be taken from the IO userproperties.

In Service Port, choose the newly created BS. Set the binding and transport values. Here I have chosen SOAP_DOC_LITERAL and HTTP Transport

In the Operations applet, the methods of the custom BS will be available. Set them up, and clear the cache.

That’s it, your done !! You can generate the WSDL, and this can be consumed by the end point. The end system will get to see the various operations exposed under the service.

Here is how the WSDL looks when consumed in XML Spy:

And on choosing QueryPage method, XML Spy will generate this SOAP Request.

Regarding the different methods that can be exposed, there are six to choose from. And if needed, you can also provide datamappers for the request or response.

ASIs implement error handling in their own way and return SOAP fault codes back to the calling system.

Siebel ASIs are prebuilt and can be used immediately. ASIs provide a release-independent integration interface to the Siebel application, which remains unchanged with each upgrade to a new release. This is one of those few areas in Siebel where there is an upgrade-proof guarantee from Siebel/Oracle.

Scripting and Task Based UIs

2011-05-14T21:40:00.000+05:30

Siebel 8's task based user interface (TBUI) is a nifty feature, but it still needs some more polishing though. A really simple looking requirement came up the other day, and I was surprised that there was no out of box feature I knew to support it.

The requirement was to conditionally disable tasks in the Task View pane applet. The Task Groups have to be associated with the triggering views, and when the logged in user enables the tasks by clicking on its button, an applet opens up in the UI on the left side, always showing all the tasks associated with the current opened view.

Now we wanted to conditionally disable certain tasks depending upon the user's position, and there was no way of achieving this. On searching on the bookshelf, I found a way to trigger the task from script.

if (name == "Test")
{

var inputPropSet;
var outputPropSet;
var taskUIsvc;

inputPropSet = theApplication().NewPropertySet();

outputPropSet = theApplication().NewPropertySet();

taskUIsvc = theApplication().GetService("Task UI Service (SWE)");

inputPropSet.SetProperty("TaskName","Create a Contact");

the outputPropSet is created. outputPropSet is not used to send results back to the task UI--!>

taskUIsvc.InvokeMethod("LaunchTaskFromScript",inputPropSet,outputPropSet);

return ("CancelOperation");

}

So now, instead of showing the tasks in the task pane applet, we trigger it from scripts behind buttons in the UI. We have buttons for different tasks, and the buttons themselves are enabled/disabled based on positions.

I'm hoping Siebel provides an vanilla way of achieving conditional task enabling/disabling in the UI soon.

SQL Spools in Siebel and Trace commands

2011-04-30T10:52:00.005+05:30

We have all been there; at some point or other, Siebel starts throwing SQL errors, or the application slows down due to some long running SQL statements.

“An error has occurred executing a Sql statement. Please continue or ask your systems administrator to check your application configuration if the problem persists.(SBL-DBC-00105)”

The best way to figure out what went wrong is to spool out the actual SQL statement (could be query or insert/update or delete) which ran in the application.

You could turn on SQL spooling when the client starts using the /s option.

Or you could increase Log levels

Now both these options enables SQL spooling when the client itself starts; and the resulting file will contain every SQL statement which ran up until the error can be reproduced. Is there any way we can turn SQL logging on the fly, to spool up only the SQLs we want and ignore the rest ?

Turns out, there are script commands TraceOn and TraceOff, which can be used the spool out the SQL statements. Documentation can be found here.

We will have to start SQL tracing using script at the beginning of the even,and then stop it after the spooling is done. I found that these commands can also be used in COM controls.

So I have created a simple SQL instant spooler in Excel macros, which will do this for you, without the need for increasing log levels or writing scripts. I have tested it on Siebel 7.8 and Siebel 8.1 local and dedicated clients, and it works fine. All you need to do is

1) Open the Siebel local or dedicated client (does not work on the thin client)

2) Use the start and stop buttons on the sheet to enable SQL tracing.

3) The SQL which was run in Siebel between start and stop will be opened in notepad

You can download the SQL instant spooler here and try it out. You need to have Siebel installed properly and enable the macros on the excel when it is opened.

Cheerios !!

Fusion Event : Free Online Training

2011-04-26T23:48:00.001+05:30

The Horses Mouth

via Antony Reynolds' Blog by antony.reynolds on 4/26/11

Oracle is providing a free online training session on the tools used to create Fusion Applications.

Learn how Rich Enterprise Applications, powered by Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF), are developed, assembled and configured using Oracle Fusion Middleware technologies like Oracle JDeveloper, Oracle WebCenter, Oracle BPM Suite, and Oracle SOA Suite. These applications uniquely deliver:

Desktop Quality, Multi-Channel User Experience
Integrated Collaboration and Social Computing Services
Enterprise Services like Content Management, BPM, Security and Entitlement
Integration with Business Processes and Oracle Applications

Register Now!

Siebel 8.1 menu items not opening in IE 8.

2011-04-26T13:59:00.001+05:30

Another issue I ran into in IE 8, regarding the Siebel 8.1 Mobile client. This issue was reproduceable on both debug and non-debug modes.

After the mobile client opened up fine, none of the menu items inside the UI framework would open. The menu items at each applet would not drop down, and even the Help->About View would not open up.

At first I thought the pop-up blockers were playing spoilsport again, but the problem persisted even after pop-up blockers were turned off.

Then , a colleague suggested making a change to the client CFG file. In my case, it was scomms.cfg.

1) Open the client CFG file.

2) Find this line :

EnableFQDN = FALSE

3) Change it to :

EnableFQDN = TRUE

And that fixed the problem !! I don't know what FQDN has to do with menu items, maybe its something wrong with the UI framework.

Siebel 8 debug mode problem with Internet Explorer 8 ?

2011-04-25T11:22:00.001+05:30

The last few months have been some of the worse in my career so far. The hectic project schedule and huge amount of "last minute changes" left me very little time to relax. Hopefully, its all going to change soon.

I am working on Siebel 8.1, and had Internet explorer 7 running, which ran without any issues. After an upgrade to IE 8 (thanks to the IT guys), I found that the Siebel debug mode would no longer open. The IE window would open up and throw a "page not found" error. But the Siebel client would open fine, when started via its own shortcut.

A little experimenting, and I found that inorder for the Siebel 8.1 debug mode to open up in IE, there should be no other instances of IE running. Just kill all other IE instances, and simulating the workflow should be fine.

Not sure if there is another way to fix this.

Differentiating New Record & Update Record

2010-11-13T18:22:00.001+05:30

There are cases when a particular data validation or Business Process invocation should only occur when a new record is being written down to the database, but not when an existing record is being updated. Or it may be the other way around, but the Siebel developer has to figure out what operation is happening. I have found many ways these can be achieved, here are my favourite three.

1. Using a Boolean flag in script. This is how I first implemented such a scenario. I was new to Siebel and hadn't yet mastered all the scripting events . Easiest way out seemed to declare a Boolean flag in the declarations section of the Buscomp server script, and giving it a default value of false. Then in NewRecord event, this flag should be turned to true. Finally, in the PreWriteRecord or WriteRecord event, the value of this flag could be checked, and new records can be differentiated fromo exisiting records.

2. RunTime events. This is a No-Scripting approach to the same problem. In Runtime events, if you select the buscomp events supported, it can be seen that Siebel now provides three events for WriteRecord operation :

· WriteRecord : Triggered everytime after records are committed.

· WriteRecordNew : Triggered only when new records are committed.

· WriteRecordUpdated: Triggered only when existing records are updated.

But these events only occur AFTER the records are committed. They can't be used to do validation/invocation before records are committed.

3. IsNewRecordPending. This is a new specialised Busines Component Method, meant for EBCs, documented here. But on trying the command out, I found that it works perfectly well in normal business components as well. This method can be invoked from any other event in BC level, but it only makes sense to invoke it in the PreWriteRecord section.

var isNewRecord = this.InvokeMethod("IsNewRecordPending");

This way new records can be differentiated from old records before they are committed to the system.

Declarative Alternatives to Using Siebel Scripting (Doc ID 477842.1)

2010-10-15T17:10:00.001+05:30

Maybe you already know this, but I there is a document on supportweb which documents many alternatives to scripting. Its Doc ID 477842.1 available here:

https://supporthtml.oracle.com/ep/faces/secure/km/DocumentDisplay.jspx?id=477842.1

It also points to another document which discusses the data validation manager . 478298.1

https://supporthtml.oracle.com/ep/faces/secure/km/DocumentDisplay.jspx?id=478298.1

Validating multiple Datamappers

2010-09-01T15:44:00.023+05:30

We were facing these strange error during ADM import on target system:

Source component % does not exist.(SBL-EAI-04063)

This was coming when we tried to import the datamappers inot target system.We follow a continous deveopment model with numerous integrations, and the external IOs for them keep on changing. The problem occurred because the new WSDL imported did not contain some IC levels which were developed and mapped earlier. But the problem was complicated because now we did not know which datamapper to check.

Now there is a very useful button which could help us here. On the Datamap administration view, there is a validate button on the top applet. It checks the structure of the mapped IOs with the ones compiled into the SRF and threw up validation errors. For some time now I have been wondering the functionality behind this button.
I found this in the Siebel log files when the button was clicked:

Begin: Business Service 'EAI Data Transformation Engine' invoke method: 'Validate'

But if you check the definition of this BS in tools, you will not fin the Validate method. But after a little more tweaking, I was able to figure out the input parameters. One thing I found was that if the Datamap is valid, the BS does not return or throw any message, and if there is any validation error, it throws an exception. Hence if multiple datamps need to be validated, the try catch loop must be put inside a loop. I wrote a simple script at client side services which validates multiple datamaps in one go. The search spec can be modified according to your project requirements.

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
function Service_PreInvokeMethod (MethodName, Inputs, Outputs)
{
var oBCDataMap = "";
var sMessage= "";
var iCount = 0;
oBCDataMap = TheApplication().GetBusObject("EAI Data Map").GetBusComp("EAI Object Map");
oBCDataMap.ClearToQuery();
oBCDataMap.SetSearchSpec("Source Object Name","*");
oBCDataMap.ExecuteQuery(ForwardOnly);
var oBSDTE = TheApplication().GetService("EAI Data Transformation Engine");
var psInput = TheApplication().NewPropertySet();
var psOutput = TheApplication().NewPropertySet();
var bIsRecord = oBCDataMap.FirstRecord()
while(bIsRecord)
{
psInput.Reset();
psOutput.Reset();
try
{
psInput.SetProperty("MapName",oBCDataMap.GetFieldValue("Name"));
oBSDTE.InvokeMethod("Validate",psInput,psOutput);
}
catch(e)
{
sMessage = sMessage + oBCDataMap.GetFieldValue("Name") + ":" +e.toString() + "\r";
}
iCount = iCount + 1;
bIsRecord = oBCDataMap.NextRecord();
}

sMessage == "" ? TheApplication().RaiseErrorText(iCount + " Datamaps validated successfully.") : TheApplication().RaiseErrorText(sMessage);
return (CancelOperation);
}
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

When the code is execute, it validates all Datamaps using the EAI Data Transformation Engine BS's Validate method, and presents the errors in a message box.

You can hit Ctrl-C now to copy this message, and paste this in notepad.

AMSRefData_ServiceCenter:Parent component map 'q' not found.(SBL-EAI-04061)
AMSRefData_Service_Func:Parent component map 'q' not found.(SBL-EAI-04061)

What'ya think ?

OpenSolaris is Dead

2010-08-17T09:01:00.000+05:30

Oracle just sued Google for patent infringement on the Android system. And now OpenSolaris is dead. Here is a company with an aggressive business strategy buying and consuming everything in its way. Now it has eaten its way into the very principles of Open Source. Here is an article regarding the OpenSolaris OS.

OpenSolaris is Dead.

via Planet OpenSolaris by Steven Stallion on 8/15/10

What follows is an email sent internally to Oracle Solaris Engineers which describes Oracle's true intentions toward the OpenSolaris project and the future of Oracle Solaris.

This concludes over four years that I (and many other external contributors) have worked on the OpenSolaris project. This is a terrible sendoff for countless hours of work - for quality software which will now ship as an Oracle product that we (the original authors) can no longer obtain on an unrestricted basis.

I can only maintain that the software we worked on was for the betterment of all, not for any one company's bottom line. This is truly a perversion of the open source spirit.

Solaris Engineering,

Today we are announcing a set of decisions regarding the path to
Solaris 11, and answering key pending questions on open source, open
development, software and binary licenses, and how developers and
early adopters will be able to use Solaris 11 technology before its
release in 2011.

As you all know, the term "OpenSolaris" has been used colloquially to
refer to any or all of a collection of source code, a development
model, a web site, a logo, a binary release, a source license, a
community, and many other related things. So it's taken a while to go
over each issue from an organizational and business perspective, and
align on the correct next step. Therefore, please take the time to
read all of the detail here carefully. We'll discuss our strategy
first, and then the decisions and changes to our policies and
processes that implement that strategy.

Solaris Strategy
----------------------

Solaris is the #1 Enterprise Operating System. We have the leading
share of business applications on Solaris today, including both SPARC
and x64. We have more than twice the application base of AIX and HP-
UX combined. We have a brand that stands for innovation, quality,
security, and trust, built on our 20-year investment in Solaris
operating system engineering.

From a business perspective, the purpose of our investment in Solaris
engineering is to drive our overall server business, including both
SPARC and x64, and to drive business advantages resulting from
integration of multiple components in the Oracle portfolio. This
includes combining our servers with our storage, our servers with our
switches, Oracle applications with Solaris, and the effectiveness of
the service experience resulting from these combinations. All
together, Solaris drives aggregate business measured in many billions
of dollars, with significant growth potential.

We are increasing investment in Solaris, including hiring operating
system expertise from throughout the industry, as a sign of our
commitment to these goals. Solaris is not something we outsource to
others, it is not the assembly of someone else's technology, and it is
not a sustaining-only product. We expect the top operating systems
engineers in the industry, i.e. all of you, to be creating and
delivering innovations that continue to make Solaris unique,
differentiated, and valuable to our customers, and a unique asset of
our business.

Solaris must stand alone as a best-of-breed technology for Oracle's
enterprise customers. We want all of them to think "If this has to
work, then it runs on Solaris." That's the Solaris brand. That is
where our scalability to more than a few sockets of CPU and gigabytes
of DRAM matters. That is why we reliably deliver millions of IOPS of
storage, networking, and Infiniband. That is why we have unique
properties around file and data management, security and namespace
isolation, fault management, and observability. And we also want our
customers to know that Solaris is and continues to be a source of new
ideas and new technologies-- ones that simplify their business and
optimize their applications. That's what made Solaris 10 the most
innovative operating system release ever. And that is the same focus
that will drive a new set of innovations in Solaris 11.

For Solaris to stand alone as the best-of-breed operating system in
Oracle's complete and open portfolio, it must run well on other server
hardware and execute everyone's applications, while delivering unique
optimizations for our hardware and our applications. That is the
central value proposition of Oracle's complete, open, and integrated
strategy. And these are complementary and not contradictory goals
that we will achieve through proper design and engineering.

The growth opportunity for Solaris has never been greater. As one
example, Solaris is used by about 40% of Oracle's enterprise
customers, which means we have a 60% growth opportunity in our top
customers alone. In absolute numbers, there are 130,000 Oracle
customers in North America alone who don't use our servers and storage
yet, and a global customer base of 350,000 (the prior Sun base was
~35,000). That's a huge opportunity we can go attack as a combined
company that will increase Solaris adoption and the overall Hardware
server revenue. Our success will also increase the amount of effort
ISVs exert optimizing their applications for Solaris.

We will continue to grow a vibrant developer and system administrator
community for Solaris. Delivery of binary releases, delivery of APIs
in source or binary form, delivery of open source code, delivery of
technical documentation, and engineering of upstream contributions to
common industry technologies (such as Apache, Perl, OFED, and many,
many others) will be part of that activity. But we will also make
specific decisions about why and when we do those things, following
two core principles: (1) We can't do everything. The limiting factor
is our engineering bandwidth measured in people and time. So we have
to ensure our top priority is driving delivery of the #1 Enterprise
Operating System, Solaris 11, to grow our systems business; and (2) We
want the adoption of our technology and intellectual property to
accelerate our overall goals, yet not permit competitors to derive
business advantage (or FUD) from our innovations before we do.

We are using our investment in core Solaris innovation and engineering
to drive multiple businesses, through multiple product lines. This
already includes our Solaris operating system for Enterprise, and our
ZFS Storage product line, and will soon include other Oracle
products. This strategy is all about creating more value from a set
of common software investments: it makes everything you do more
valuable and used by more people worldwide. It also means you as an
individual engineer or manager have an even greater responsibility to
understand the broader business and technical contexts in which your
engineering is deployed.

Solaris Decisions
------------------------

We will continue to use the CDDL license statement in nearly all
Solaris source code files. We will not remove the CDDL from any files
in Solaris to which it already applies, and new source code files that
are created will follow the current policy regarding applying the CDDL
(simply, that usr/src files will have the CDDL, and the very small
minority of files in usr/closed might not have it). Use of other open
licenses in non-ON consolidations (e.g. GPL in the Desktop area) will
also continue. As before, requests to change the license associated
with source code are case-by-case decisions.

We will distribute updates to approved CDDL or other open source-
licensed code following full releases of our enterprise Solaris
operating system. In this manner, new technology innovations will
show up in our releases before anywhere else. We will no longer
distribute source code for the entirety of the Solaris operating
system in real-time while it is developed, on a nightly basis.

Anyone who is consuming Solaris code using the CDDL, whether in pieces
or as a part of the OpenSolaris source distribution or a derivative
thereof, would therefore be able to consume any updates we release at
that time, under the terms of the CDDL, LGPL, or whatever license
applies.

We will have a technology partner program to permit our industry
partners full access to the in-development Solaris source code through
the Oracle Technology Network (OTN). This will include both early
access to code and binaries, as well as contributions to us where that
is appropriate. All such partnerships will be evaluated on a case-by-
case basis, but certainly our core, existing technology partnerships,
such as the one with Intel, are examples of valued participation.

We will encourage and listen to any and all license requests for
Solaris technology, either in part or in whole. All such requests
will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, but we believe there are
many complementary areas where new partnership opportunities exist to
expand use of our IP.

We will continue active open development, including upstream
contributions, in specific areas that accelerate our overall Solaris
goals. Examples include our activities around Gnome and X11, IPS
packaging, and our work to optimize ecosystems like Apache, OpenSSL,
and Perl on Solaris.

We will deliver technical design information, in the form of
documentation, design documents, and source code descriptions, through
our OTN presence for Solaris. We will no longer post advance
technical descriptions of every single ARC case by default, indicating
what technical innovations might be present in future Solaris
releases. We can at any time make a specific decision to post advance
technical information for any project, when it serves a particular
useful need to do so.

We will have a Solaris 11 binary distribution, called Solaris 11
Express, that will have a free developer RTU license, and an optional
support plan. Solaris 11 Express will debut by the end of this
calendar year, and we will issue updates to it, leading to the full
release of Solaris 11 in 2011.

All of Oracle's efforts on binary distributions of Solaris technology
will be focused on Solaris 11. We will not release any other binary
distributions, such as nightly or bi-weekly builds of Solaris
binaries, or an OpenSolaris 2010.05 or later distribution. We will
determine a simple, cost-effective means of getting enterprise users
of prior OpenSolaris binary releases to migrate to S11 Express.

We will have a Solaris 11 Platinum Customer Program, including direct
engineering involvement and feedback, for customers using our Solaris
11 technology. We will be asking all of you to participate in this
endeavor, bringing with us the benefit of previous Sun Platinum
programs, while utilizing the much larger megaphone that is available
to us now as a combined company.

We look forward to everyone's continued work on Solaris 11. Our goal
is simply to make it the best and most important release of Solaris
ever.

-Mike Shapiro, Bill Nesheim, Chris Armes

test

2010-08-12T13:52:00.001+05:30

test

Buggy software: Why do we put up with it?

2010-08-11T10:57:00.003+05:30

Buggy software: Why do we put up with it?

This is a guest post by Michael Kassner via TechRepublic's IT Leadership blog.

During one of the breakout sessions at TechRepublic's Live 2010 Conference this past week, I was questioning why we put up with software that has bugs and vulnerabilities. To IT-security types like me, it's a concern. Eliminate bugs and you shut the door on most malware.

After that particular breakout session, Toni Bowers, Head Blogs Editor for TR, and I talked about my concerns. She suggested that I pass what I learned on to you. So, here goes. I cajoled the "software savvy" TR writers into answering the following question:

Consumers would never accept a car or other traditional goods that are flawed, yet they are willing to buy software that is. Why do you think that is?

Here are their answers. I hope you find them as interesting as I do:

Chad Perrin

The question of why software vendors produce buggy software and why consumers accept it has no simple answer. The reasons vary from incompetence plus overconfidence to being the dominant business model at the other extreme. Here are some of my thoughts:

The dominant business model in the software industry is one that creates and relies on otherwise unnecessary complexity. That complexity both creates bugs and hides them from view. Paraphrasing C. A. R. Hoare, there are two ways to build software: Make it so simple that there are obviously no bugs, or make it so complex that there are no obvious bugs. The former is much more difficult and does not lend itself well to enticing people to upgrade to the next version.
People are so focused on feature marketing that they do not stop to think about bugs until it is too late. After generations of this, and of the problem getting worse all the time, end users have developed a sort of Stockholm Syndrome with regard to buggy software. They believe it is normal, expected, and inescapable.
Features and bugs act very similarly a lot of the time once software exceeds a particular level of complexity. They do things that are surprising, or at least unexpected. People grow used to this until they become inured to surprise without the surprising behavior being reduced at all — in fact, it only gets worse. "It's a feature, not a bug" starts to sound reasonable and believable.

Chip Camden

Having worked in auto parts for several years, I can tell you that very few cars roll off the assembly line without any flaws. That's why they have a thing called recalls.

Furthermore, a serious flaw in an automobile can cost someone's life. That usually isn't the case with software, and where it is the case (medical, missile guidance, aircraft navigation), then the extra expense of a higher attention to flawlessness is considered worthwhile.

Ultimately, it's market-driven. We could make software that performed to much more exacting tolerances, but it would be much more costly. The buying public is content to pay a near-zero cost for "good enough" rather than putting a dent in their wallets for "flawless." [Editor's note: you can read more from Chip Camden in TechRepublic's IT Consultant blog.]

Erik Eckel

I think the software industry is very different from most any other. Vendors must try writing software that will work on multiple platforms (Linux, Windows, Mac) and be used by a variety of users with greatly differentiated skill levels at companies working in numerous different industries. That's a pretty tall order.

Imagine trying to make a car that could be driven by a 5′4 woman or 6′5″ man that could run on gasoline, diesel, or propane; while also possessing the ability to carry up to eight people or 6,000 pounds of payload. Oh, and it must get 28 miles to the gallon and cost less than $25K and go 100,000 miles between tune-ups.

You couldn't do it!

So, I feel for software manufacturers. The Intuits, Microsofts, Apples, and Symantecs of the world have a wide constituency to satisfy. Someone's always going to be complaining.

I think the 37signals guys may have it best. In their current best-seller ReWork, they note that one of the keys to their success is saying no to customers and limiting the amount of features they include in their software programs.

I think there's a lesson there for all of us. [Editor's note: You can read more from Erik in TechRepublic's Macs in Business blog.]

Jack Wallen

The answer is very simple: Marketing. If you ask the average consumer (those who buy the bulk of computers) if they knew there was an operating system out there far superior, safer, and more reliable than the one they used AND it was free, they would react with surprise. Their first question might be "Why didn't we know about that?" The reason is because Microsoft is a HUGE company with a HUGE PR budget and the ability to shove advertising down the throats of the consumers.

To continue with your analogy:

Tesla has a roadster that is 100% electric, can go over 300 miles on a single charge, can go from 0 to 60 in 3.7 seconds — yet the majority of people don't know about it. Why? Marketing. If one Linux company could start to produce witty, well-done television commercials things would quickly change.

But think about this: Linux has done fairly well for itself without having to spend a penny on advertising (relatively speaking). Word of mouth has been a powerful alley to the Linux operating system. However, in order to raise it to a higher level, PR and marketing will have to be used. [Editor's note: You can read more by Jack Wallen in TechRepublic's Linux and Open Source blog.]

Justin James

Some thoughts that come to mind (as someone struggling with a phone heralded by others and the media as a "miracle phone," but it is plagued with problems):

"No warranty, express or implied" is attached to every piece of software ever made and is enforceable. Consumers know that they have zero rights, so they feel happy when it works.
"Gadget lust" blinds people to issues. People don't want to admit that they bought a piece of junk, so they just deal with the problems and tell everyone how much they love the software/device/etc.
In corporate environments, the people who live with the bad software are often the people who do not pick it. Those who did select it sweep the problems under the rug because it makes them look bad, or they feel it's a question of "stupid users" who "just don't get it."
Too many problems do not appear until whatever initial return period of contract cancellation period is over.
People expect to have problems.
People assume that the problems are their own fault ("I'm too dumb to use this right!").
In corporate environments, many products require a lengthy and expensive integration process; there is no way to accurately judge their quality until that is done, and afterward, it is often not clear if the base product or the integration work is the root cause of problems. To make matters worse, once you dump, say, $150,000 into customizing a $200,000 package that you spent $50,000 on hardware to support, do you really want to say, "gee, it looked good when we started, but this is a dud, let's dump it"?

Overall, it's a combination of people feeling helpless on the user end of things, and the decision makers being unwilling or unable to do anything about it once a commitment is made. [Editor's note: You can read more by Justin James in TechRepublic's Programming and Development blog.]

Patrick Gray

I think there are two factors at work that would cause me to question your premise:

Perceptions of software "flaws" are often based more on market saturation than technical elegance.

Most mainstream technical products (hardware and software) seem to have a higher incidence of flaws because they have a higher user base. This is the classic "Windows is buggy versus [a more obscure OS]" argument.

I don't think Windows is inferior, it's just a mass-market product and thus gets used and abused by the highest percentage of the population. Because Mac OS X has gained traction, it's now getting hit with malware as more people use the software rather than due to some inherent flaw.

There are considerations that outweigh flawed products, mostly getting valuable features early.

I think technical elegance often becomes second fiddle to other concerns at both a corporate and personal level. Why? We want new features and are willing to put up with partially baked software. This extends to your automotive analogy as well.

I bought a new motorcycle from BMW in its first model year (ever hear the old bromide never to buy the first model year vehicle?). The bike has had four recalls, including replacing the front axle (a front axle failure at 80 mph would be bad). Despite this product having flaws, the trade-off of having an extra year's riding was worth it to me.

If we all wanted perfect and bug-free code, first and foremost, we'd probably all be running MS DOS or a text-based Linux that hadn't had any features added in a decade. [Editor's note: You can read more by Patrick Gray in TechRepublic's IT Leadership blog.]

Rick Vanover

While software quality should be the first priority in whether or not we implement something, many times IT customers have their hands tied. Simply forgoing a piece of software if all offerings will not meet their needs will not be an option.

The natural alternative is to develop something in-house, but that too, may be cost prohibitive. This is an age-old battle of having our hands tied in a way to get pushed along to new products, and history has done nothing but continually confirm this for us.

One example is the file server market, Novell NetWare is still a superior file server product to Windows NT, 2000, 2003, or 2008; yet we all know which way the market and broader supported configurations went. There is no simple answer on how we can address this, in my opinion. [Editor's note: You can read more by Rick in TechRepublic's Network Administrator blog.]

Final thoughts

It seems we the users want the latest and greatest software, even if it means accepting buggy code. Do you agree with the TR gurus? I know we all are anxious to learn your opinions, so let them fly.

Chad Perrin wanted me to mention that he has a lot more to say about this subject. Please look for his article in the IT Security blog of TechRepublic.

Excerpted from Buggy software: Why do we put up with it? ZDNet

Parent Child Relationships in VBCs - BC User Property : "Populate Child Data"

2010-08-02T15:44:00.001+05:30

Virtual Business Components provide for a nice way of presenting data via WebServices. Each time the VBC is loaded/refreshed in the UI, the integration is triggered behind it, and resulting response appears in the UI. But what if there is a parent child relationship in the data being returned and the requirement is to present each set of the hierarchy in a separate applet ? In normal BCs, the data is pulled from the tables, and if links are provided, the child BC gets refreshed when the parent BC is changed. How can we achieve the same in VBCs ? There is a little unknown BC userproperty “Populate Child Data”, which can be used to achieve this nice effect, without scripting, or repeatedly invoking the webservice. Here is what you do.

· Create the two VBCs and the two applets for them. Also created the BO and View based on the BO.

· Both the VBCs must refer the same IO,either via the BC userpoperty “Outgoing Integration Object Name”, or the IO name gets hardcoded in the WF.

· The IO should have two ICs, one for parent level and one for child level in response data. The external names must be correctly populated with the BC names created.

· Link must be created between parent and child BCs. This BC has to be added in the BO.

Now if everything is correctly configured, compile everything and fire up the client application. Navigating to the view will bring the data correctly in the two applets, correctly maintaining the parent child relationship between them. Moving to the next record at parent level will refresh the child level data, as the link is in context.

Now go ahead and check out the integration logs for this integration. There is a nice tutorial here.

You will find that the webservice integration was actually triggered twice, once for each level of hierarchy. The same request goes out and the same response comes back, so it means double the work. Now :

· Go to the child BC you created. Add a new BC userproperty :

· In the name column, provide : “Populate Child Data”

· In the value column, provide : “Y”

Compile the BC and load the view again. Data still comes as expected in the UI alright, but if you check the integration logs, you will see that the web service was invoked only once.

BC user property “Populate Child Data” doesn’t look documented in bookshelf or supportweb. If you are not happy with this approach, there is a scripting alternative suggested on supportweb here.

Nice process, but what about the engineering bits?

2010-08-01T11:13:00.003+05:30

Nice process, but what about the engineering bits?

via http://ayende.com/Blog/Default.aspx by Ayende Rahien on 2/19/10

Software processes has always been a popular topic of discussion in our industry. Those can get quite heated, with advocates of the "stable / stale" Waterfall method pointing fingers toward "rapid / rabid" Agile methods, with the CMMI people throwing documents around and Lean people standing on the sidelines muttering about Waste.

This isn't a post about a specific software process, I'll defer that to another day. Instead, I want to focus on a flaw in the basic building blocks in many* software building processes.

They ignore the actual building the software.

That may sound ridiculous on the face of it, after all, how can a software process ignore the act of building software. But take a look at the following diagrams:

If you'll pay attention, you'll notice that those processes talk about everything except how to actually build software. They talk about people, about requirements, about managing customers, about a whole lot of things, but not about the part where you have people sitting down and writing code. In most of those, in fact, that part is usually defined as one of those:

Why is that a problem? After all, isn't there a big distinction between software engineering (we know what to do, now let us do it) and project management (getting to know what we need to do, and verifying that we did it right). Those processes deal primarily with project management and leave the engineering part to be defined in a way that fit that particular project. Surely that is better, right? In theory, it might be. But there is a big problem when you have a software process that ignore the software engineering aspects of building software.

The problem is that that in many cases, there are hidden assumptions that are going to hammer you down the road if you use a certain process with engineering practices that doesn't fit it. Take a look at the following chart, showing a team velocity over time, does this look familiar?

The term I heard used for this is Scrum Wall, but I have seen similar results in other processes as well. The best description for that is Allan Kelly's:

You hit the Scrum wall when you adopt Scrum and everything goes well, then, after a few Sprints things don't work any more - to use an English expression, they go pear shaped. You can't keep your commitments, you can't release software, your customers get annoyed and angry, it looks like Scrum is broken.
This is what happens when you adopt Scrum without technical practices such as Test Driven Development, continuous integration and refectoring. When teams adopt the Scrum process, they go faster, show progress, things look good... and then the quality becomes a problem. Now the team are fighting through quick sand.
The code quality is poor and developers are expected to continue to make progress. Maybe the Scrum Master/Project Manager reverts to past behavior and demands overtime and weekend working. Maybe the team start busting a gut to keep their commitments. Either way the team is heading for burn-out.

The major issue is in focusing so much effort and time on project management with what amounts to willful ignorance of the technical and engineering practices will inevitably leads to disaster. The process of building software is intractably linked to the engineering practices involved in building the software. Moreover, some technical practices are actively harmful in some scenarios and life savers in others.

Many Agile and post-Agile processes focus on short cycles, each of them producing something with a distinct value to the customer. That may be an iteration, a commit or a feature, where the goal is to increase the velocity over time so we can provide as much value to the customer in as short a time as possible. What those processes ignore are things like technical debt, large scale refactoring and non functional efforts. Oh, you see those things mentioned on the edge, but they aren't something that is dealt with heads on, as a core issue to consider.

There is a bit more to that, actually. The software engineering practices and the project management strategies are linked and of paramount importance when the time comes to decide how the software should actually be built. No, this is not tautology. We just need to take into account Conway's law and expand on it a bit.

Any organization that designs a system will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.

Part of the design process of a project should include design the team(s) structure, the project management strategy and the software engineering practices in order to align the end result with what is desired. Ignoring this leads to imbalance in the project, and if that imbalance is big enough, and goes on for long enough, the project is going to rip itself apart.

* Nitpicker corner: I said many, not all. Don't bother to list me software process that deals with it. I had a reason to explicitly list the processes that I did.

Javascript trick to quickly navigate views.

2010-07-23T16:16:00.000+05:30

Siebel’s hierarchical way of organizing views under sitemap is a useful feature, everything is arranged under screens as per context. But sometimes the only way to access a certain view is to go via the sitemap, and specially for administrators, this means sifting through pages of links to find the correct view. Being an Seibel EAI integration developer, I find myself frequently visiting three main views in Siebel application, on my local as well as the thin client. Most of my work can be done on tools, but Datamapper Administration View, Workflow process instance and webservice administration views are my mostly visited views. Inorder to make navigation easier, I used to create bookmarks in the browser using the GotoView command to quickly take me to a view.

But this meant and different set of bookmarks for local client, and a different set for every server/environment. So I ended up using javascript to do the navigation for me.

Create a bookmark in your internet explorer, then enter the text below for Business Service Simulator view

javascript:var url = new String(window.location);var p = url.substring(url.search('start.swe?') ,url.length);p=p + 'start.swe?SWECmd=GotoView&SWEView=Business Service Test View' ;window.location(p);

Once you have logged into your siebel application (local/server), just select this bookmark , and you should be taken to that view.

Here is the bookmark for Datamapper Adminstration View

javascript:var url = new String(window.location);var p = url.substring(url.search('start.swe?') ,url.length);p=p + 'start.swe?SWECmd=GotoView&SWEView=EAI DTE Data Map Editor' ;window.location(p);

Code junkies can edit the code and add any view wanted.

Just discovered John Mayer

2010-07-19T10:54:00.000+05:30

Just discovered John Mayer. Nice soft care free style.

Toy Story 3 - best movie of this year.

2010-07-12T13:57:00.000+05:30

We have been through half of this year, and the only movie which stands out clearly is Toy Story 3. I have always loved animation. I love the way animators are able to make people laugh. But I am even more intrigued when they are able to turn people emotional, or even make us cry. The first time I saw this was in Disney Pixar’s Up! There is a complete sequence of storytelling with moving images and soothing background music, but not even a single bit of dialogue, but it turns the viewer emotional. The only that stopped me from sobbing was that I was watching it at home, and not in the theatre. And now , I had a similar feeling of nostalgia when I watched Toy Story, specially the ending. Again, there is no piece of dialogue meant for the viewer, it’s just animated sequences of last looks, and silent goodbyes. And music. Beautiful music.

At home, I still have some of my old toys, salvaged and preserved in the drawing room show case. It’s a bit of younger me. And old monkey my dad brought from Germany. A toy dog which still barks if batteries are inserted. The movie made me think, how did I feel when I outgrew my toys..sigh, don’t remember.

If you haven’t watched Toy Story 3- you are missing the best movie of this year……at least, so far.

sql update insert space before caps and capitalize first charachter

2010-06-24T16:38:00.000+05:30

I was loading up EAILoolup Values for use in a interation module I had. The external values where strings without spaces and first letter of each word was capitalized.

Like this

reopenedOnClientRequest.

Its equivalent Siebel value to be show was

Reopened On Client Request.

So I figured all I needed was an SQL update statement to replace a space before each capitalized letter and make the first letter caps…

select initcap(regexp_replace(EXT_VALUE,'([^^])([A-Z])','\1 \2')) from S_EAI_LOOKUPMAP where LOOKUP_TYPE = 'ClaimStatus’

This did the trick !

4th Generation CRM system

2010-06-24T14:34:00.000+05:30

I found this page on the net….it attempts to define a 4^th generation CRM system.

Today's Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System

It's impossible to state precisely what customer relationship management (CRM) means to everyone. The term has been applied to almost every element of business that even remotely interacts with a customer.

In its infancy, CRM systems were a series of mainframe or server-based applications specific to sales, marketing and support business functions.

The applications were lightweight by today's standards and did little more than capture and file critical data. But as cultural boundaries within organizations weakened, individual collections of information gave way to sophisticated applications that could span business functions. By doing so, these applications created the vision of a single view of the customer.

For the first time, organizations could track and analyze shifting customer needs, link marketing campaigns to sales results, and monitor sales activities for improved forecasting accuracy and manufacturing demand.

CRM's Evolution
CRM has evolved since its earliest incarnation, originally driven by an inside-out focus, through three phases of evolution: technology, integration and process. Recently have we seen a major leap forward to a fourth phase: customer-driven CRM —an outside-in approach that has intriguing financial promise.

1. Technology: In its earliest incarnation, CRM meant applying automation to existing sales, marketing, support and channel processes as organizations attempted to improve communications, planning, opportunity and campaign management, forecasting, problem solving, and to share best practices. To some degree, it worked. However, automating poorly performing activities or processes rarely improves the quality of the outcome. So, for the most part, the quality of the return on investment (ROI) was meager—if measurable at all. The promise of the technology was there, but few organizations were realizing the pinnacle of performance. The metric of success was increased efficiency in sales, marketing, support and channel processes.

2. Integration: By developing cross-functional integration, supported by data warehousing and shared roles and responsibilities, organizations began to create a customized view of the customer. Support issues, Web hits, sales calls and marketing inquiries started building a deeper understanding of each customer and allowed aggressive organizations to adapt their tactics to fit individual needs. Integration focused around two primary components:

Make it easier to do business with the seller: Expected benefits are to improve customer retention and lower support costs.
Predictive modeling: Data mining of an aggregate of corporate knowledge and the customer contact experience was used to improve operational and sales performance. By applying complex algorithms to a history of purchasing or inquiry characteristics, it became practical to predict the demands of individual customers. Up-selling, cross-selling, even the ability to preempt potential problems, was now possible for all customer-facing representatives. Expected benefits are to have better cross-selling/up-selling and improved product offerings or delivery.

3. Process: By rethinking the quality and effectiveness of customer-related processes, many organizations began to eliminate unnecessary activities, improve outdated processes, and redesign activities that had failed to deliver the desired outcomes. Then, by re-creating the process through an understanding of the capabilities of the technology, the outcomes were more predictable and the promises for a meaningful ROI more substantial and realistic. The metric of success became the improved effectiveness in serving the customer.

Thus far, almost everything about CRM has focused on improving the effectiveness and efficiency of the seller's organization.

Organizations have evolved from sales representatives working from paper notebooks, or a card system, to a tightly integrated network that sees movement in sales activity, predicts product demand on manufacturing, and manages the logistics of complex teams to serve the buyer and seller.

Marketing, support services, channel management, revenue management, resource allocation/management, forecasting, manufacturing, logistics and even research and development have all seen the benefits of a well-designed CRM strategy.

However, the past decade of CRM and its associated improvements have been based on three assumptions:

1. The past would be a logical foundation to predict future customer needs and profitability.

2. Demand for traditional value propositions would remain constant.

3. Better customer relationships would deter attrition.

All three of these assumptions have failed—or at least become unstable—in a post-September 11 environment.

Today we know that:

1. Historical purchases or inquiries are not a clear indication of future needs as buyers are rapidly redefining requirements to satisfy their current business, market or shareholder demands.

2. Value propositions are changing in highly competitive markets as sellers are working aggressively to reestablish structural bonds.

3. Driven by sensitive financial markets, buyers move to whichever supplier can provide the best aligned, most cost effective solution that promises to stabilize, or improve, their business performance.

These factors are driving CRM into a fourth phase.

Customer-Driven CRM—The Fourth Phase
Today, revenue performance has become the central theme for CRM as organizations seek to achieve and maintain expected financial results. Leading executives are asking:

Which of my customers have the potential for a high-profit, sustainable relationship?
What defines profitable and unprofitable customer segments?
What must change to realize that optimal potential?
Where's my opportunity for growth?
Where's my risk for loss?
Am I making the right decisions related to balancing acquisition, cross-selling and upselling—and for the right customer groups?

The epiphany isn't in the questions themselves, but in the fact that we're asking them after a decade of CRM investments—investments intended to provide just those very answers.

It is important to understand that a disruptive change has occurred causing large segments of customer organizations to reassess many of their basic needs, values and assumptions.

Research indicates that this event was triggered by the uncertain complexities of the post-September 11th world. Organizations are now challenging everything from how they create value, to how they serve their markets, to how they meet shareholder expectations. It is the answers to these questions that create the framework for phase four CRM.

Without a deep understanding of what's going on in the customer's head—specifically what will influence buying behavior—it is difficult to establish customer strategies that mutually serve the needs and expectations of the buyer and seller communities.

Understanding the Difference

In the past, CRM has followed a basic balanced scorecard technique involving four categories: customer, financial, operations, and people.

From an inside-out perspective, organizations first analyzed the needs and capabilities of operations and their people to determine what could be delivered to the customer.

From that, they drew conclusions and predictions to determine the impact on the financial category.

As this has changed, so have the priorities. Now the focus is first on the customers:

What will they buy, when, why and for how much?
What creates value for them, and does this create a structural bond?
What services can we perform that merit premium margins?
Can we establish a new market segmentation strategy focused on potential profitability and willingness to purchase?
Do we understand their business drivers, financial metrics, buying process and decision criteria?

Customer driven CRM means that organizations first understand the customer, then move inward to operations.

Within the context of the customer, the systems and infrastructure capabilities needed to serve those customers and segmentation-based requirements must be reassessed.

Next, it's imperative to explore the skills and competency requirements for the people component of the CRM design.

A decade of CRM has taught us that nothing happens until your people interact with the customer in a manner consistent with new CRM customer strategies and systems.

And, finally, you should be well positioned to apply predictive modeling algorithms to establish a financial model with exceptional accuracy.

Not an easy task, but case studies are proving financial predictions that can demonstrate account-level forecasting with over 80 percent accuracy.

Summary

Developing a CRM strategy isn't an easy task. Complex organizational design, comprehensive technologies and ever-changing customer demands are just the beginning. The lessons learned are monumental but we know that the promises of customer driven CRM are worth the journey.

Here's a simple framework for fourth-generation CRM:

Focus on financial results: Learn how to identify existing profitable customer segments and determine what will establish a profit-based profile for moving forward. Then develop the business requirements to support sustained, and structurally bonded, relationships.
Find cost effective alternatives for nonbuyers or low-margin customers: Not all customer relationships are profitable and very few companies can afford to pay to deliver an equal level of services. Control costs and save your best resources for premium accounts—while working to bring low performers into an acceptable profit portfolio.

Testing Webservices outside Siebel / Testing Inbound Siebel Webservices - using WGET

2010-06-15T13:51:00.000+05:30

I am a Siebel EAI developer. But sometimes I feel that Siebel does not provide the freedom to properly play around with webservice settings, or to test them properly. In most projects, we use a third party tool like SOAP UI or XML SPY to test inbound Siebel webservices. Sometimes when an outbound webservice call from Siebel fails, we try to reproduce the error from SOAP UI to try and find out if there is something wrong in the Siebel configuration. While most developers love the fact that SOAP UI is free and can consume WSDLS and generate SOAP files, I find it terribly slow. Also, when working on client machines via an RDP/MSTSC connection, I need quick results and cannot wait for SOAP UIs resource hungry interface to load up. Altova XML Spy is faster, but its not free.

I set out to find another way to test webservices without using and costly or resource hungry tool. And I found a solution on Unix.

Unix developers are well aware of and have been using a command called wget to test http and soap interfaces. Wget is a powerful unix command which can be used to download content, post Http requests, and now even SOAP requests, as I found out. If you have a valid SOAP request, all you need is to send it across to a webservice/url, you can use Wget to do this. This command has been ported to windows here.I have been using this trick for months now, and it has saved me looaadss of time.

Essentially, a SOAP request contains 3 parts

· SOAP Header

· SOAP Body

· RAW Parameters / SOAP Parameters

The SOAP Header and Body is as name suggests, contains schema information and data. The SOAP parameters contains additional info as to which url is to be hit and what is the format. Also there is one parameter for length, which contains the length of the soap message (header + body) in char counts. So, the length of the soap message has to be sent.

At Siebelunleashed, Neel explains how to trigger outbound webservice from Siebel. I will explain how to do the same thing from outside Siebel. The example here again uses the GeoIPservice.

If you go this link, you will see the actual SOAP request for the service.

POST /geoipservice.asmx HTTP/1.1

Host: www.webservicex.net

Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8

Content-Length: length

SOAPAction: "http://www.webservicex.net/GetGeoIP"

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<soap:Envelope xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">

<soap:Body>

<GetGeoIP xmlns="http://www.webservicex.net">

<IPAddress>string</IPAddress>

</GetGeoIP>

</soap:Body>

</soap:Envelope>

Here, the section in blue is the SOAP/RAW parameter section. And the length highlighted in bold has to contain the length of the soap request. After we frame this entire request, we have to send it across as an HTTP request.

Here is what we do.

1. Create a folder on your desktop. Download wget for windows. Don’t worry, its free and safe J

2. Create three files in your folder

· Req.xml - this will contain the soap message

· url.txt – this will contain the url

· send.bat – we will automate this in a bat file.

3. Open up req.xml in notepad and enter this.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<soap:Envelope xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">

<soap:Body>

<GetGeoIP xmlns="http://www.webservicex.net">

<IPAddress>216.239.51.99</IPAddress>

</GetGeoIP>

</soap:Body>

</soap:Envelope>

The ip here is that of Google. We shall see where google’s servers are located.

4. Open up url.txt and enter this

http://www.webservicex.net/geoipservice.asmx

You will get this address from the WSDL. Open up the WSDL and look for a section called http:address

<wsdl:port name="GeoIPServiceHttpPost" binding="tns:GeoIPServiceHttpPost">

<http:address location="http://www.webservicex.net/geoipservice.asmx" />

5. Open up the send.bat file in notepad and enter this

wget --input-file=url.txt -nv --post-file=req.xml --output-document=resp.xml --header="Content-Type: text/xml" --header="SOAPAction: "http://www.webservicex.net/GetGeoIP"

notepad resp.xml

6. Your folder should now contain 4 files. Execute send.bat, either by double clicking or from run command.

In a moment, the SOAP request will be sent across and the response should open up in notepad.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"><soap:Body><GetGeoIPResponse xmlns="http://www.webservicex.net"><GetGeoIPResult><ReturnCode>1</ReturnCode><IP>216.239.51.99</IP><ReturnCodeDetails>Record Found</ReturnCodeDetails><CountryName>UNITED STATES</CountryName><CountryCode>US</CountryCode></GetGeoIPResult></GetGeoIPResponse></soap:Body></soap:Envelope>

The response shows us that the 216.239.51.99 is in UNITED STATES.

When we run the bat file, wget takes the req.xml file and adds the header parameters we specified.

wget --input-file=url.txt -nv --post-file=req.xml --output-document=resp.xml --header="Content-Type: text/xml" --header="SOAPAction: "http://www.webservicex.net/GetGeoIP"

Here the parameters are Content-Type and SOAPAction. Inaddition, WGET also adds the content length required for the request. WGET provides a debug option to see the complete request going out. Just add –debug in the beginning like this

wget --debug --input-file=url.txt -nv --post-file=req.xml --output-document=resp.xml --header="Content-Type: text/xml" --header="SOAPAction: "http://www.webservicex.net/GetGeoIP"

You will see the response with debug information like this.

C:\test>wget --debug --input-file=url.

txt -nv --post-file=req.xml --output-document=resp.xml --header="Content-Ty

pe: text/xml" --header="SOAPAction: "http://www.webservicex.net/GetGeoIP"

Setting --input-file (input) to url.txt

Setting --no (verbose) to 0

Setting --post-file (postfile) to req.xml

Setting --output-document (outputdocument) to resp.xml

Setting --header (header) to Content-Type: text/xml

Setting --header (header) to SOAPAction: http://www.webservicex.net/GetGeoIP

DEBUG output created by Wget 1.11.4 on Windows-MSVC.

Loaded url.txt (size 44).

seconds 0.00, Caching www.webservicex.net => 209.162.186.60

seconds 0.00, Created socket 1932.

Releasing 0x00985058 (new refcount 1).

---request begin---

POST /geoipservice.asmx HTTP/1.0

User-Agent: Wget/1.11.4

Accept: */*

Host: www.webservicex.net

Connection: Keep-Alive

Content-Type: text/xml

Content-Length: 370

SOAPAction: http://www.webservicex.net/GetGeoIP

---request end---

[writing POST file req.xml ... done]

---response begin---

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Connection: keep-alive

Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2010 08:12:10 GMT

Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0

X-Powered-By: ASP.NET

X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727

Cache-Control: private, max-age=0

Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8

Content-Length: 519

---response end---

Registered socket 1932 for persistent reuse.

2010-06-15 01:12:10 URL:http://www.webservicex.net/geoipservice.asmx [519/519] -

> "resp.xml" [1]

FINISHED --2010-06-15 01:12:10--

Downloaded: 1 files, 519 in 0s (2320 GB/s)

C:\test>notepad resp.xml

Notice the content length (370) added by WGET.

Conclusion : WGET is a powerful tool which can be used to test webservices without using tools like SOAP UI or XML SPY. In fact, this is exactly what SOAP UI does, but in a more fancy way. Similarily, WGET can also be used to test inbound Siebel webservices.

I discovered WGET it only because I wanted a quick and efficient way to testing webservices on windows as well as unix. Now I can test webservices without installing shareware or when I don’t have admin rights to install them. Hope this helps Siebel and non Siebel developers in their work.

May the source be with you.

You cannot execute a query using the % field.(SBL-DAT-00401)

2010-06-11T15:29:00.000+05:30

Found a really annoying oracle limitation today. One requirement involved querying in a BC Field which had a column of type long behind it. I didn’t think twice and implemented this with a little bit of scripting. The script compile and ran fine on my local machine. But once I checked in and got it compiled, it got this error

You cannot execute a query using the %1 field.(SBL-DAT-00401)

And I found this from supportweb:

https://supporthtml.oracle.com/ep/faces/secure/km/DocumentDisplay.jspx?id=539572.1&h=Y

The Oracle RDBMS does not support queries on LONG columns - Siebel Technical Support testing just confirmed that this restriction that is documented for Oracle 8 already still exists in Oracle 10.

http://download-east.oracle.com/docs/cd/A58617_01/server.804/a58241/ch5.htm

Restrictions on LONG and LONG RAW Data
Although LONG (and LONG RAW; see below) columns have many uses, their use has some restrictions:
- Only one LONG column is allowed per table.
- LONG columns cannot be indexed.
- LONG columns cannot appear in integrity constraints.
- LONG columns cannot be used in WHERE, GROUP BY, ORDER BY, or CONNECT BY clauses or with the DISTINCT operator in SELECT statements. ...

But I had a perfect working code on my local db. How could that be ? The next line in supportweb explained this.

The SQLAnywhere Database Engine that is used for the Siebel local database does not have this restrition, so the query is working there.

Great !! Now I have to find another way out. Any suggestions ?

How deep was deepwater horizon drilling ?

2010-06-11T11:04:00.001+05:30

This infographic shows how deep Deepware Horizon was drilling for oil.

Finally, I created an artwork - with IOgraph

2010-06-08T10:36:00.001+05:30

IOGraphica is a small application which creates a graph map of your mouse movements. You just have to start the app and let it run, and its ouput is PNG file. Here is mine after one day of running.

See all developer logins in Siebel

2010-06-04T16:35:00.001+05:30

I wanted to see all users who had localdbs on our server.

select * from user_role_privs

..will list all the users roles. The user with SSE_ROLE permissions are registered developers, and they could have local dbs.

'Transaction Updated' is a required field. Please enter a value for the field.(SBL-DAT-00498)(SBL-EAI-04389)

2010-06-01T10:31:00.000+05:30

'Transaction Updated' is a required field. Please enter a value for the field.(SBL-DAT-00498)(SBL-EAI-04389)

This error occurs if there are system fields explicitly specified in the Business Component used to insert data into Siebel tables. Find the BC behind the integration object, and check if fields like Created or Updated are mentioned there. Inactivate them and it should work fine.

Lost....last season...watching it now on Star World

2010-06-01T10:20:00.000+05:30

Many years ago, while still in college, I got to know about the television series LOST. Apparently, the first season had finished airing in the US and he had downloaded the episodes. And I got hooked. It gave a whole new interpretation of the phrase:stranded on an island. I loved the fact that the story was happening in present time, and despite all the advancements in technology, the survivors were stuck with no outside help. I guessed that the whole saga would last 2 seasons at most, because soon they would run out of ideas, and help would come from outside.

Now I am watching the last season of the saga on star world. Somewhere in between , the show lost its focus. There are more questions still waiting to be answered. Looots of extra characters came in from nowhere . And loads of them disappeared. Its not as hooking as the first season was. My favorite character was Charlie, the character played by Dominic Monaghan. I loved his background and how he came to the island. And till date, the story of his death is the one that hurt me most on the show. The episode “Greatest Hits” is my favourite. Charlie writes down the greatest moments of his life, when he realizes that his death is near. There are moments which seem trivial to others, but for Charlie, it has changed something in his life.

If I make a list of my top 5 greatest moments..I dunno what would turn up. Maybe the first time I rode my cycle ? When my sister was born ? When I landed and lost my first job ? Definitely the day I finally got rid of college.

Anyway, I don’t think I will take anything else from LOST except this idea of Greatest Hits.

Testing image uploading HTML

2010-05-28T15:27:00.000+05:30

This is my icon for a SIF file

And here is the map of the internet

When Jobs met Gates.

2010-05-25T08:48:00.001+05:30

Oh Exploitable of the Day: When Jobs met Gates. [moar.]

via The Daily What on 5/18/10

Oh Exploitable of the Day: When Jobs met Gates.

[moar.]

Skype for Symbian OS Rocks !!

2010-04-27T12:32:00.001+05:30

Skype for Symbian OS Rocks !!

Today I made my first skype to skype call on my symbian series 3 phone. And although the call quality was not that good, I couldn't believe that I hadn't thought of this before.

I had started using skype some time back, when I used its free skype to skype calling facility to call home. Wonderful service, simple user iterface and absolutely free. How I wished a similiar service would come to wifi enabled phones.

A couple of weeks back, NOKIA released Skype for Symbian series 3 for free downoad on OVI store. The app could be installed on symbian phones and using wifi or 3G, could connect and make calls just like the desktop version. I ran home, connected and downloaded the installation.

Now I knew for some time that my neighours had WiFi hub, and if I could just get a leeetle bit of that signal, I could test it out.

And today, I asked my friend Az to come online on Skype. Connected to WiFi and launced Skype. It took me some time to find out the optimal signal strength, but it did work beautifully. We spoke for some time to test out the quality. Along with calls, instant messaging also works, and all the bells and whistles are included.

Go ahead, get skype for symbian from here : http://lifehacker.com/5484677/skype-for-symbiannokia-arrives-in-ovi-store

Spotted...vehicel bumper message

2010-04-24T12:55:00.001+05:30

Today I was travelling in an auto, and came across a truck ,with this message for the vehicle behind.

"Jeevikkan anuvadikku..."

Translation from malayalam .... "Let me live.." !

Looks like roads in kerala are not what they used to be.

Wealth Isn’t How Much You Earn

2010-04-21T18:08:00.000+05:30

Wealth Isn't How Much You Earn

via The Simple Dollar by Trent on 3/23/10

At age 25, Jim makes $100,000 a year. He's constantly traveling for business. He has a large home in which he often doesn't visit some rooms for months at a time. He eats out every single night. He drives a leased Lexus, which he updates every few years at the end of the lease. He buys a whole new wardrobe every six months, taking the leftovers to Goodwill. He spends everything he brings in.

At age 25, Bill makes $35,000 a year. He lives in a smaller home and doesn't travel much. He makes most of his own meals at home. He drives a Toyota Corolla, which he owns free and clear. He wears clothes until they're worn, then shops at Goodwill for replacements, often picking up Jim's barely-worn clothes. At the end of the year, he usually has about $5,000 of his income left over, which he sticks into his stock investments which earn 8% a year.

In ten years, Jim's net worth hasn't grown a cent. In those same ten years, Bill has $72,000 in the bank.

At the twenty year mark, Jim's net worth still hasn't grown a cent. In those same twenty years, Bill has built up $228,098 in the bank.

At the thirty year mark, Jim's still breaking even. Bill, on the other hand, has $566,416 in the bank.

At age sixty five, Jim hasn't accumulated a cent and will be working for the man for the rest of his life. At the same age, Bill has $1.3 million in the bank and can do whatever he wants for the rest of his life – and probably already started doing that a few years earlier.

It doesn't matter how much you earn. It matters how much you save.

When I was twenty five, my net worth was negative and heading south rapidly. I spent more than I earned and I didn't really worry about the consequences of it. I figured if I had the money – or the credit – I certainly ought to spend it in whatever way made my life more enjoyable right now.

I'm now thirty one. My net worth is still negative (although it would be positive if I counted the value of my home towards it, which I do not), but it grows every month in a positive direction and will soon become positive even without the house value.

One might immediately think that I must have made my life less enjoyable to make that change. Actually, my life is more enjoyable now.

I have a better grasp on the things that actually make me happy and I don't waste my money on things that don't.

I'm not chained to a desk and a career, fearing the pink slip – I set my own career rules and goals.

I'm not afraid of getting the mail any more and I don't wake up at night worried about how I'm possibly going to make ends meet or pay all of this off in the future.

Perhaps best of all, my financial position is improving every single month and I no longer see the long-term future as some kind of musty cloud that will "work itself out." I know it's getting better and I know that, if I continue on this path, I'll be able to easily have some of the big things I actually want in life, like a beautiful house in the country with some wooded land in the back.

My life now is something I'll happily trade having a shiny new Lexus and an iPhone and a set of high-end golf clubs and eating out every night for. In exchange, I'm not worried about the future and I have career and personal freedom I would never otherwise have.

Wealth has little to do with how much you earn. It's how you spend – or save – it.

HAPPY VISHU

2010-04-15T09:27:00.001+05:30

Nishad's marriage

2010-04-03T19:52:00.000+05:30

Today was a busy day. Of course every day I am in office its a busy day for me. But today, I took the trouble of travelling a long distance to attend a friend's marriage function in Kozhikode, Kerala.

Nishad A V is a room mate of mine from college days. A star player, he is the most athletic, (and one of the popular ones) among us. And he got married today at a small function attended by more friends than relatives. But the fun part was that I got to catch up with a lot of friends I had forgotten even existed.

My observations.

1.Kozhikode city hasnt changed at all, except for the well maintained roads.
2.It's getting hot all over the state. And even we locals cannot adjust to the heat now.
3.This was my first experience of a muslim wedding.
4.The food was awesome!

Its after a long time I said hi to a few of those guys. But please pardon me.Its just that at one point I worked really hard to get this busy. And today,I think I enjoy my work and being busy.

So here's wishing the newly wed couple a happy married life.

And off you remaining bachelors and bachellorettes, what are u waiting for ? Give us some more reasons to travel home and catch up.

Now you can easily add images to your scraps!

2010-04-01T16:35:00.003+05:30

Sent to you by Ranji via Google Reader:

Now you can easily add images to your scraps!

via Orkut Blog by A Googler on 3/26/10

We're always listening to what users have to say about orkut, and we're constantly working to improve your orkut experience. One of the suggestions we've received many times is to bring back to the ability to add photos to your scraps to the new orkut. We're happy to announce that this feature is now available!

To add images to your scraps, first click the text box to write and edit a message. You'll then see customization options, such as font color and emoticons. Click the image icon to add an image to your your scrap:

You can upload images from your computer, add from your Picasa Web Albums, or search for them in Google Images.

As we like to say, a picture is worth a thousand words. So, hopefully this feature will improve the way you share things with your friends on orkut!

Posted by Marco Domingues, orkut operations team

Things you can do from here:

Subscribe to Orkut Blog using Google Reader
Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites

File transfer in orkut and iGoogle chat

2010-04-01T16:35:00.001+05:30

Sent to you by Ranji via Google Reader:

File transfer in orkut and iGoogle chat

via Orkut Blog by A Googler on 3/29/10

Have you ever wanted to quickly send a file to a friend who's online? Now it's easy! We're excited to announce that you can now share pictures, documents, and other files with your friends while chatting in orkut and iGoogle. To give it a try you don't need to install anything, simply start a conversation with a friend and click Send a file... in the 'Actions' menu:

This feature is also compatible with the file transfer functionality in the Google Talk downloadable software, so you can share files directly from the web with folks who use the desktop version.

File transfer is available in orkut and iGoogle only for now. We're working on bringing it to Gmail as well, and we'll keep you posted when that happens!

Posted by Lizhen Wang, software engineer

Things you can do from here:

Subscribe to Orkut Blog using Google Reader
Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites

Fwd: Nice process, but what about the engineering bits?

2010-03-30T17:20:00.001+05:30

Nice process, but what about the engineering bits?

via Ayende @ Rahien by Ayende Rahien on 2/19/10

This isn't a post about a specific software process, I'll defer that to another day. Instead, I want to focus on a flaw in the basic building blocks in many* software building processes.

They ignore the actual building the software.

That may sound ridiculous on the face of it, after all, how can a software process ignore the act of building software. But take a look at the following diagrams:

The term I heard used for this is Scrum Wall, but I have seen similar results in other processes as well. The best description for that is Allan Kelly's:

You hit the Scrum wall when you adopt Scrum and everything goes well, then, after a few Sprints things don't work any more - to use an English expression, they go pear shaped. You can't keep your commitments, you can't release software, your customers get annoyed and angry, it looks like Scrum is broken.

This is what happens when you adopt Scrum without technical practices such as Test Driven Development, continuous integration and refectoring. When teams adopt the Scrum process, they go faster, show progress, things look good... and then the quality becomes a problem. Now the team are fighting through quick sand.

The code quality is poor and developers are expected to continue to make progress. Maybe the Scrum Master/Project Manager reverts to past behavior and demands overtime and weekend working. Maybe the team start busting a gut to keep their commitments. Either way the team is heading for burn-out.

Any organization that designs a system will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.

* Nitpicker corner: I said many, not all. Don't bother to list me software process that deals with it. I had a reason to explicitly list the processes that I did.

Revisiting Finland

2010-03-16T12:12:00.001+05:30

I miss Finland !

Sure, the work was hectic, and I hardly got time to explore the place, but it sure was fun being there.

Finland is now on Google street view which means, now you can see the place too. You can use the mouse inside the controls to zoom around. You need Flash installed to use Google Street View.

For example, here is the place where i was stayin in Finland

View Larger Map

The building on the let was where I was staying and which I nearly set on fire during my cooking experiments.

This is a shot of the of the road to my office.

View Larger Map

This is where I was staying the second time I was in Finland.

View Larger Map

This is the Railway station in Helsinki, Capital of Finland

View Larger Map

And here is the Accenture office in Helsinki, Finland.

View Larger Map

This is not Photoshop: 50 incredible examples of light painting

2010-02-05T10:32:00.001+05:30

This is not Photoshop: 50 incredible examples of light painting

via FrancescoMugnai.com by Francesco Mugnai on 1/31/10

Re: “20 Things that Happen in 1 Minute” Graphic

2010-02-03T09:32:00.000+05:30

anj

"20 Things that Happen in 1 Minute" Graphic

via Sociological Images by gwen on 1/30/10

p.j. sent me this graphic that shows a number of things that happen in 1 minute. She found it at a website that gives insurance quotes, oddly enough, but in general the sources don't appear to me to be ones that would be prone to industry-friendly bias:

NOTE: Readers are making some really interesting points about the representations here in the comments, so check 'em out.

(View original at http://contexts.org/socimages)

Saari umr hum ......

2010-01-31T12:14:00.001+05:30

A friend forwarded this mail to me....and I just had to share it with the world.

Saari umr hum
coding main mar gaye
Ek pal to ab humein jeene do
jeene do

Saari umr hum
coding main mar gaye
Ek pal to ab humein jeene do
jeene do

Na na na….Na na na….Na na na….Na na nana na….

Give me some flight
Give me some train
Give me another chance
I wanna go home once again

Give me some flight
Give me some train
Give me another chance
I wanna go home once again

Kandhon ko laptop
Ke bojh ne jhukaya

Client se jhoot bolna tho khud
Manager ne sikhaya

CRR4 rating laaoge to chhuti, varna kismat futi
Code kar kar ke pada Ungaliyon pe
JAVA, PHP, ORACLE aur MySQL ka chaala

Is Project ne to sala poora..
Poora bheja pakka daala

Career to gaya
GF bhi gayi
Ek pal to ab humein
jeene do jeene do

Career to gaya
GF bhi gayi
Ek pal to ab humein
jeene do jeene do

Saari umru hum
coding main jee liye
Ek pal to ab humein jeene do
jeene do
Na na na….Na na na….Na na na….Na na nana na….
Give me some flight
Give me some train
Give me another chance
I wanna go home once again

Give me some flight
Give me some train
Give me another chance
I wanna go home once again
Na na na….Na na na….Na na na….Na na nana na….
Na na na….Na na na….Na na na….Na na nana na….

Fwd: Coffee makes you dance around like a goat!

2010-01-27T18:15:00.001+05:30

Coffee makes you dance around like a goat!

via Geek In Disguise by stevecla01 on 1/23/10

Hence why I'm cutting down my intake these days I am actually cutting down a lot on my afternoon & evening caffeine and woe does it make a difference to the quality of sleep I get. I know that's obvious but I'm just a bit slow on this stuff

via theoatmeal.com

--

Ranjith Ravindran

http://cleartext.blogspot.com
http://tinyurl.com/ybkdp66

Fwd: Rules for Writing Well (Iain D Campbell)

2010-01-27T17:28:00.001+05:30

Rules for Writing Well (Iain D Campbell)

via Reformation21 Blog on 1/11/10

some basic rule's of grammar to which we would all Do well to adhere, to:

26 Golden Rules for Writing Well

1.Don't abbrev.

2.Check to see if you any words out.

3.Be carefully to use adjectives and adverbs correct.

4.About sentence fragments.

5.When dangling, don't use participles.

6.Don't use no double negatives.

7.Each pronoun agrees with their antecedent.

8.Just between you and I, case is important.

9.Join clauses good, like a conjunction should.

10.Don't use commas, that aren't necessary.

11.Its important to use apostrophe's right.

12.It's better not to unnecessarily split an infinitive.

13.Never leave a transitive verb just lay there without an object.

14.Only Proper Nouns should be capitalized. also a sentence should begin with a capital letter and end with a full stop

15.Use hyphens in compound-words, not just in any two-word phrase.

16.In letters compositions reports and things like that we use commas to keep a string of items apart.

17.Watch out for irregular verbs that have creeped into our language.

18.Verbs has to agree with their subjects.

19.Avoid unnecessary redundancy.

20.A writer mustn't shift your point of view.

21.Don't write a run-on sentence you've got to punctuate it.

22.A preposition isn't a good thing to end a sentence with.

23.Avoid cliches like the plague.

24.1 final thing is to never start a sentence with a number.

25.Always check your work for accuracy and completeness.

--

Ranjith Ravindran

http://cleartext.blogspot.com
http://tinyurl.com/ybkdp66

Fwd: Totally Looks Like

2010-01-12T10:03:00.001+05:30

--

Ranjith Ravindran

http://cleartext.blogspot.com
http://tinyurl.com/ybkdp66

Totally Looks Like

via Abduzeedo | Graphic Design Inspiration and Photoshop Tutorials by amanda on 1/11/10

We had a laugh with this one. Totally Looks Like is a website that makes comparisons between well-known people/things and less well-known people/things. We gathered here a collection of the funniest and most obscure comparisons we found so you guys can start off the week on a good note.

Some of these can get downright ridiculous but all in the name of good fun! I think my favorite is the second to last one, haha. Oh, and scroll all the way to the last one for our very own celebrity lookalike ;)

1940s Farmer Totally Looks Like Robin Williams

Bill Ayers Totally Looks Like Justin Timberlake

John McCain Totally Looks Like Chipmunks

Rivers Cuomo (Weezer) Totally Looks Like Verizon Guy

Jordan Pundik Totally Looks Like Quentin Tarantino

Gordan Freeman Totally Looks Like Dr. House

Ancient Statue Totally Looks Like Michael Jackson

Llama Totally Looks Like David Bowie

The Pope Totally Looks Like Darth Sidious

Bradley Cooper Totally Looks Like Ralph Fiennes

Hetty Lange Totally Looks Like Edna Mode

Ozzy Osbourne Totally Looks Like Penney Marshell

Young Albert Einstein Totally Looks Like Shia Labeouf

Charlemagne Totally Looks Like Burger King

Eddie Murphy Totally Looks Like Cruz e Souza

Hillary Clinton Totally Looks Like The Joker Mask

Joe Jackson Totally Looks Like Ludo from Labyrinth

Michael Phelps Stretching Totally Looks Like Raw Thanksgiving Turkey

Prince Totally Looks Like Jafar

Sting Totally Looks Like President Grant

Susan Boyle Totally Looks Like Bird Lady from Home Alone 2

Tim Burton's Mad Hatter Totally Looks Like Madonna

Whoopi Totally Looks Like Lil Wayne

Zombie Horde Totally Looks Like Twilight Fangirl Horde

And our very own lookalike:

Fabio Sasso Totally Looks Like... James Franco?

That's right, ladies...tweet him up!

About the author

I am Amanda Macedo - a student, photography enthusiast, and lover of life. I eat, sleep and breathe art, and I hope to share with you some of my thoughts and findings here at Abduzeedo as I further my discovery of graphic design. You can also find me on Twitter: @amlight

Scald Your Eyes With Daybreakers' Bloody, Futuristic Vision Of Vampirism [Mo...

2010-01-09T12:47:00.001+05:30

Scald Your Eyes With Daybreakers' Bloody, Futuristic Vision Of Vampirism [Movie Review]

via io9 by Annalee Newitz on 1/8/10

Daybreakers will hook you from the very first scenes, which slam you into a bleak, frenetic near-future where most humans have gone vampire without contemplating the consequences. Like how quickly the world will reach peak blood when everybody drinks it.

Written and directed by the Spierig Brothers, Daybreakers is a welcome reminder that the vampire legend is a versatile one, and overlaps nicely with many themes in contemporary science fiction. The Spierigs have a background in visual effects, and it shows in their careful worldbuilding of a city in 2019 where almost everybody is a night-dweller. Gleaming skyscrapers are connected by webs of covered walkways; the "subwalk" system coils beneath abandoned daylight streets. Cars have been fitted with webcam systems that allow people to drive via roof-mounted cameras with the windows blacked out. Indeed, all mirrors are replaced with webcams so the non-reflecting vamps can check themselves out. It's a cyberpunk vampire scenario, with all the awesomeness and camp that epithet implies.

If you're suffering from Twilight Fatigue Syndrome (TFS), this gritty, unromantic tale will be a welcome break. Our main character is Ed (Ethan Hawke), a top hematologist who is working for megacorporation Bromley Marks. Ed's trek to the office leads him past a grim Starbucks-style stand selling blood-spiked coffee ("Still serving 20 percent real blood!" their slogan promises) and a massive human blood farm where naked, unconscious people hang from a wall of machines that slowly suck their life out. Sam Neill is evilly unctuous as Bromley, the corporate exec who's gotten rich off factory blood farming. And poor, emo Ed, who refuses to drink human blood, is working for Bromley purely for humanitarian reasons: He wants to create a synthetic blood substitute so that they can stop killing humans.

So you've got your stock vamp movie characters: The good vamp who won't eat humans; the evil vamp who wants to rule a vamp-dominated world with his blood-soaked fist; and, of course, filling out the cast is a scrappy ex-vampire with a crossbow named Elvis (Willem Dafoe) who likes fast cars and wants to stop the killing.

The characters may be recognizable, but this movie works because the world they inhabit is completely original. Blood represents a natural resource that's running out, much like oil. But implanting that resource into humans turns a potentially clunky allegory into something much more interesting. We're not killing the planet - we're killing ourselves. We're drinking ourselves in our coffee, and selling ourselves in wine bottles. When the blood runs out, eating becomes so expensive that many of the vamps starve, and the hungriest turn into "subsiders," animalistic creatures with wings and brains of mush. The subsiders are hunted by authorities who roust them from what look like homeless encampments under the subwalks and condemn them to death by sunlight. So we've got a new caste system, with rich vampires on top, poor vamps and subsiders beneath them, and humans all the way at the bottom.

Luckily our heroic scientist Ed runs (literally) into Elvis and dedicates himself to finding out how the guy cured his own vampirism. There are a lot of action-packed, slightly silly scenes where Ed's frantic experiments are contrasted with the rapid degeneration of vampire society as blood runs out. Though the film's conclusion is preposterous and contradictory, it's hard to have too many hard feelings about it because, well, this is a scifi action vampire movie. And Daybreakers packs a punch on so many fronts - original story ideas, creatively gross fight scenes, acting that's hammy in a fun way - that you'll leave the theater feeling soundly entertained.

Explaining The Entire Plot Of Kick-Ass Just Makes Us Want To See It More [Ki...

2010-01-09T12:46:00.001+05:30

Explaining The Entire Plot Of Kick-Ass Just Makes Us Want To See It More [Kick-ass]

via io9 by Charlie Jane Anders on 1/8/10

The new Kick-Ass trailer is out, and it pretty much narrates the entire film — which only makes us more desperate to fill in the ultra-violent, blatantly wrong and nasty blanks. Plus the A-Team trailer has turned up online too.

Here's the new Kick-Ass trailer — you can watch it in high res over at Yahoo! Movies.

And the A-Team trailer turned up online earlier today. Like James Bond and MacGyver, The A-Team takes place in a world of slightly fantastic technologies, but I'm not sure it's quite science-fictional enough for us — on the other hand, as reader Chris Hunt points out, it does have a tank flying through the sky. Anyway, judge for yourself. It's no longer online in an embeddable format, but here's a non-embeddable version on Youtube. (Thanks OMGWTFLOLBBQBYE!)

[Kick-Ass trailer via Collider]

Story behind 2012

2010-01-03T11:23:00.001+05:30

via http://juliasegal.tumblr.com/ on 12/31/09

6 dead in shooting spree at Finnish shopping mall

2010-01-01T12:13:00.001+05:30

Hi guys,

Today I saw a shocking news on a Finland news feed. There was a shooting accident in a shopping mall in Leppavara, Finland last thursday. 6 people were killed. Now why this is really shocking is that Leppavara was the place I was shopping and staying near, all the while I was in Finland.

Leppavara is very near to the NOKIA offices in Karaportti, and I a big train and bus station. I have been shopping in the Prisma mall in Leppavara for the nearly nine months I was in Finland. Cannot imagine the scene described in the news below.

If you know people in Finland, please tell share this with them and tell them to be more careful.

Ranjith

http://cleartext.blogspot.com
http://tinyurl.com/ybkdp66

6 dead in shooting spree at Finnish shopping mall

Another random shooting in little Finland?! And another mass killing at a Helsinki area shopping mall?! Finland is known around the world for snow, Nokia, and now shooting sprees.

Do you still feel safe in Finland?? Of course you do, everyone is white, it must be safe. Ignorance is bliss.

But nevermind today's attack, the shooter has a foreign name, so it's not really a Finnish thing, it's us stupid foreigners.

UPDATE: It appears the shooter is the sixth dead, he appeared to have offed himself. Glad he did justice to his crimes, cause the Finnish courts would never have gave him justice, he'd be pardoned by the President aftter a few years, as is the custom.

A sad day. I feel terrible for all those i nvolved.

Six people have been reported dead on Thursday morning in a shooting incident that took place at the Sello shopping mall in the Leppävaara district of Espoo.
Apparently a man in his early forties, whose identity is known to police, began shooting in the Prisma supermarket with a 9mm handgun at around 10 a.m. Police named the suspect as Ibrahim Shkupolli.

First reports indicated that three men and one woman were killed. A fifth victim was later found at a private apartment in Leppävaara, and is believed to be the gunman's 42-year-old ex-girlfriend.
She was employed at the Prisma supermarket in Sello, and is thought to have been the primary target.
A restraining order had earlier been imposed on Shkupolli with regard to this woman.

The search continued for the gunman, and his body was eventually found a couple of hours later at an apartment in the Suvela district of Espoo. Indications are that he shot himself.
All of the victims at Sello were apparently members of the sales staff. One man was shot twice in the head. A woman was shot in the stomach and two other men were shot on a different floor of the mall complex, one of the largest in the Greater Helsinki area.
The male victims in the mall were born in 1969, 1975, and 1982. The woman was born in 1964.
No further details were given of other casualties.

The mall was emptied and police continued the search for the gunman in the shopping centre and the surrounding area, before extending the net to known addresses, where the man's body was eventually discovered.
Prisma store staff and witnesses were taken to the public library on the premises.
The police held a press conference on the matter at 14:30, after a photograph of the suspect had been released to the media before the man was found dead.
Police had warned Shkupolli was armed and dangerous. He had previous convictions for firearms offences in 2004 and 2007.
Numerous police vehicles and ambulances attended the scene, and for some hours commuter trains were not stopping at Leppävaara station.

Police were not particularly forthcoming with details of the killings, or of whether others were hit by gunfire, but the impression given was that the primary target was the 42-year-old woman, and it is known that those killed in the shopping mall were her colleagues.
Whilst no specific reason has been given for why they were singled out by the gunman, the indications are that this horrible tragedy was not a "shooting-spree" killing of the kind that has made Finland internationally known in the past two years, following school massacres in Jokela and Kauhajoki by disaffected teenage pupils.
Nonetheless, it will inevitably reopen old wounds and will prompt further discussion on the large number of handguns owned in this country and on the tightening of restrictions on access to firearms.

Compact Calendar 2010 - From David Seah's Compact Calendar

2009-12-28T12:12:00.001+05:30

I have been following and occasionnally using David Seah's compact calendar for project activities in the past. This time, I have created an separate version for India. The holildays should hold good in the IT industry, though there are lot of regional variations in other industries.

Download the india version here

Tell me how it was.

Go to http://davidseah.com/blog/comments/compact-calendar/ for the actual concept and US version template

Fwd: Beetle Bailey for Friday December 25, 2009

2009-12-25T16:09:00.001+05:30

Christmas greetings..

2009-12-24T17:18:00.001+05:30

For all engineers....

(1) mystery tweet = M²c²(A/π)(mx+b)-XF(q/t)

And given that:

(1.a) A = πR² (area of a circle)
(1.b) y = mx+b (linear equation)
(1.c) F=MA (from Newton's laws of motion)
(1.d) S=q/t (classical Entropy definition)

Then:

(2) mystery tweet = M²c²R²y-XMAS

2.a) E = Mc² (Einstein's equivalence of mass and energy equations)

Therefore:

(3) mystery tweet = MER²y-XMAS

4) mystery tweet = MERRy-XMAS

and for the fortunate others....

Wish you all a Merry Christmas .....

--

Ranjith Ravindran

http://cleartext.blogspot.com
http://tinyurl.com/ybkdp66

Alumni Meet 2009

2009-12-19T15:56:00.000+05:30

Dan Abel: how to measure the quality of code

2009-12-16T20:11:00.001+05:30

Sent to you by Ranji via Google Reader:

Dan Abel: how to measure the quality of code

via Planet TW by noreply@blogger.com (Dan Abel) on 12/15/09

I've been sharing this for a while, so I thought I should put it up here also, as its the soundest measurement I've found.

(from http://www.osnews.com/story/19266)

Things you can do from here:

Subscribe to Planet TW using Google Reader
Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites

<3 this. Here is the link:...

2009-12-12T21:12:00.001+05:30

Sent to you by Ranji via Google Reader:

<3 this. Here is the link:...

via STFU, Believers on 12/9/09

<3 this. Here is the link: http://www.shof.msrcsites.co.uk/pcxmas.html

(Thanks Jeff)

Things you can do from here:

Subscribe to STFU, Believers using Google Reader
Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites

Check the Current Geographical Location of any Indian Railways Train

2009-12-07T19:20:00.001+05:30

Sent to you by Ranji via Google Reader:

Check the Current Geographical Location of any Indian Railways Train

via Digital Inspiration - Technology Blog by pratham on 11/6/08

IndiaRail Info is an interesting Google Maps mashup that helps you visualize the current geographical location of any train in India. Just type train name or train number and check its exact location on the map.

India Rail Info has a database of all trains and railway stations in India

For example, the Bandra Garib Rath Express (2910) has crossed Kota junction at 8:23pm IST. Unfortunately this site does not extrapolate this data to guess the location between two junctions, so the train is still shown at Kota. Thanks Info-Madness.

Check the Current Geographical Location of any Indian Railways Train - Digital Inspiration

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Subscribe to Digital Inspiration - Technology Blog using Google Reader
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home

2009-07-29T14:44:00.001+05:30

Get this widget!

Gym

2009-07-23T12:22:00.001+05:30

Sent to you by Ranji via Google Reader:

Gym

via Humor Columns by Syndicated Writer Jason Love by noreply@blogger.com (Jason) on 7/22/09

I joined 24-Hour Fitness because the salespeople don't slide notes across the table and say things like, "How 'bout this? Can you live with this number?" My answer to that question is always the same: "If you can't say the cost out loud, it's too much."

Some people avoid the gym for fear of others staring, but that's unrealistic because it means those others would first have to stop staring at themselves. Seriously, you don't want to come between the regulars and their reflections.

When a man falls in love with his own body, it's called an Adonis Complex after the Greek god of protein shakes. These guys develop their upper bodies until, like the Tyrannosaurus rex, they cannot reach their face.

"Hey, Bob. Can you get this itch on my chin? It's drivin' me nuts."

In the weight room they strain so hard, you can actually see their beards grow. I leave when they start making porn sounds -- all that grunting and groaning while the spotter carries on. "Come on, baby; do it. Show me what you've got."

When I bench-press, a machinist named Booker hovers nearby like an incubus, volunteering pointers. "I hope you know you're cheating your pecs with that exercise."

Booker demonstrates more painful ways to lift the weights, which brings us to Gym Rule #1: If you want to know the correct way to perform an exercise, the answer is, "Whatever hurts most." When you yelp involuntarily, you've got it!

I listened to Booker until that day I found him smoking Marlboros in the parking lot. After all the squats we'd been through! Booker averted his eyes the way Elizabeth Taylor might if you caught her giving marriage advice. So it goes.

You wonder why we don't take all this pushing and pulling energy and do something useful -- build a monorail or something. The treadmill extremists could power the whole city, clip-clopping along until management finally steps in.

"Sorry, Kitty; you've become entirely too thin. We're going to have to cut you off."

When did we become obsessed with xylophone ribs anyway? Our current Miss Universe has a size-22 waist, which makes her, technically speaking, a stick figure. Her boyfriend, also a model, reports four percent body fat. Can you see them rubbing around in bed? Talk about your fire hazards.

And why does Miss Universe always come from Earth? It's like the rest of the planets aren't even trying. Unless you count Tyra Banks.

Then you have the Spandex pants with the writing on the rear end. Ladies, what are you thinking? Don't you know how big men are on reading? One girl wore on her butt the Nike swoosh symbol, which in this case does not mean "just do it."

I prefer to jog al fresco. As comedian Daryl Rummens said, "I was going to join the gym but decided to use the ground for free." Maybe we should just build gyms on top of really steep hills. That way, by the time you reach the door, you're done!

I feel for people who frequent the gym but never see results -- men who can still pinch an inch on their forehead, women who could wear five-piece bathing suits. You wish they'd just say, "Screw it. I am in shape, and my shape is round."

I like to hang out in the steam room with the large, furry creatures who grunt but don't say much. It's like Gorillas in the Mist in there. Some brag about their steam-room stamina, which I believe calls for a sweat-off. Judges can stand outside while contestants stagger out and swoon in their little numbered vests. Last one out wins a pack of Marlboros.

For all the teasing, though, I've come to admire the simplicity of gymfolk. One guy wears a shirt that says, "I'm not smart, but I can lift heavy things." That's like one step away from enlightenment.

So I've decided to leave behind philosophy and current events in favor of my own upper body development. I will match wits with neckless men and use my sleeve as a nose rag. I will lounge naked in the locker room and dry my pubes with the bolted-down hair dryer. And if anyone comes near, I'll have them scratch this godforsaken itch on my chin.

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How & What Mobile Phone Services does India use – Report

2009-06-30T15:14:00.001+05:30

Sent to you by Ranji via Google Reader:

How & What Mobile Phone Services does India use – Report

via Trakin' the india business buzz by Arun Prabhudesai on 6/22/09

India is currently the 2nd largest Mobile Market in the world after China, adding nearly 10-12 million subscribers on average monthly.

At the end of April 2009, Indian Mobile subscriber base was pegged at 403.66 million, as per recent TRAI number.

Most of the Metro's and big cities have nearly come to a saturation point, however, the current phase of growth in Indian Mobile Market is in Rural areas that is now accounting for majority of growth in mobile space.

Having said that, I thought it would be interesting for our readers to know how 270 million odd Urban subscribers use their mobile phone

So here you go, some of the numbers may surprise you, while some may disappoint, but it sure makes a good reading.

Which Indian City Uses Social Networking maximum through its mobile phones?

Nearly 10% Delhi Mobile subscribers use Social Networking services on their mobile phones, followed by Mumbai & Chennai. No doubt, I see hoards of Delhites, tweeting from their mobile phones !

Which Social networking site is most favoured by Indian Urban Mobile Subscribers?

Okay, we know Orkut is the king in India be it web or Mobile, but what in the world is "Mycantos", which accounts for nearly 4% of urban India using it?. I am also surprised that twitter does not find any mention here – Isnt it part of a Social Networking Phenomenon?

Which is the most favoured Mobile Search Engine by Indians?

Nearly 18.5 million Indian Urban Mobile subscribers used their mobile phones for searches, with Google taking the numero-uno position with 5.76 million followed by yahoo with 4.58 million.

Which mobile site is used daily by Indian Urban Mobile Subscribers?

Again, no surprised here – the winner is Google followed by Yahoo. Nearly half of Urban India uses Google daily on their mobile phones.

Which IM application does Urban India use on its Mobile phones?

A quarter (25%) of all urban Indians who use IM over their phone do so from an application that came preloaded in the phone.

Pre-Loaded IM Application – 25.7%
Web Browser for IM – 19.1%
Third party downloaded IM app – 16.8%

Which is the most popular IM service used by Urban Indian Mobile Subscribers?

Aha…surprises here – Yahoo! Messenger has narrowly edged Google's Gtalk to become most popular messenger service with urban Indian mobile users, with a 18.3% market share followed closely by Google Talk (17.8%). Nice to see Yahoo beating Google, atleast somewhere :). I am sure though next few months will see Google coming to No.1.

Which Indian Mobile service provider offers the most reasonable prices, Reliable Customer Support and diver range of Products?

The state and Government run companies seem to score well in reasonable offerings column, while MTNL and Vodafone score in the reliable customer support offering. Aircel followed by Airtel top when it comes to offering its subscribers diverse range of mobile products.

Do Indian Mobiles subscribers participate in Mobile Contests?

Offcourse they do, that too in large numbers!

Almost 60% of Females have participated in 1 to3 SMS contests and though this is higher than their male counterparts, in frequency of participation males outshine females.

And what is the source of these SMS Contest? offcourse, it is dominated with TV. all reality TVs, song and dance shows choose their winners via some or the other SMS contest and India just loves it.

have a look

86% of all SMS contest originate from TV, followed by Newspapers and Internet.

Mobile VAS services report

Here are some numbers on how Urban India uses the Mobile Value Added Services offered by Telecom providers.

SMS Based Value Added Services

Nearly 56 Million urban Indians used a VAS related SMS subscription service in March/April 2009 – out of which Reliance Mobile CDMA accounted for a quarter of all subscribers to VAS SMS subscription service, followed by Bharti Airtel (18%) and Vodafone (14%).

Which is the most popular SMS service used by Urban India?

This number actually surprised me – I had thought News and probably Jobs would garner most votes, but NO – it is Jokes that used by 52% of Urban Indian Mobile users followed by Astrology.

Once conclusion I can definitely make from these numbers is that majority of mobile users in India fall into Age group of 16-25 years !

Which are the popular VAS options that Urban India likes?

No surprises here – Unlimited Internet Access & better offers on SMS bundles are the two VAS options that Indian urban mobile phone users look at while deciding on a service.

Which is the most popular M-Commerce Activity for Urban Indian Mobile phone users

Nearly 98 million of all mobile users have used mobile phones to recharge their card or pay their phone bill –The second most popular M-Commerce activity is buying movie tickets (39.67 million)

Which is the most popular VAS service used by Urban Indian Mobile Phone User?

"Finding out who called" and "informing people when busy" are the two other most popular Value added services used by Urban India. Missed call alerts is used by almost 110 million urban Indians while Talk/Voice SMS is used by almost 80 million.

Note: The above graphs / numbers are created by www.vitalanalytics.in. (let us know if you have any questions on these numbers)

Comments

June 23, 2009, Siddhesh writes: Good analysis, Arun. Some interesting figures there. Any particular reason why MTNL is rated so highly? Also, social networking on mobile puts interesting figures too.
June 24, 2009, India doesn't like anything Chinese. But China likes Indian spices | China, India writes: [...] That's not it. BSNL has recently imposed a virtual ban on Chinese equipment manufacturer following the advice of DoT. Huawei and LTE are the leading telecom equipment manufacturers of China and the world and DoT do not want them to be operating in sensitive zones. Sensitive regions are the areas having borders with China, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Pakistan. A major blow for the telecom companies trying to operate in world's fastest growing telecom market. [...]
June 24, 2009, Harpreet writes: Amazing facts ! Great Job.....Would love to read more abt these in future as well.........
June 25, 2009, ghosh writes: Good report! But keeping in mind the total GPRS/data enabled handset users, as per industry reports, total GPRS/data users in the country would 9m across( IMAI report 2008). That essential means if we take the total users in 4 metros- its about 64m and out of which users of Social Network services is about 4.2 m. Which would mean approx 48% of the total GPRS / data handsets enabled users use their handsets to access social networks. Or in other words it means out of every 2 data users approx 1 users user uses their handsets to access social networks. This looks a tad high. Even if we double the data users from 9m in 2008 to 18 m in 2009(not likely) even then it means 29% users using their handsets to access social networks. of data users use their handsets to access social networks. Given the current state of congestion for voice calls on various networks it seems though possible might be unlikely.
June 25, 2009, Arun Prabhudesai writes: Ghosh, you got the maths perfectly I must say. However, if a user has gprs, I am sure most of them will use for 2 things...email & social networking, so 48% although a bit higher is comprehensible. I will put this question across to the surveyor and let me see what he has to say.. Update: Here is the reply from the surveyor
To answer your comments around social networking, Social networking sites can be accessed via sms as well, you dont necessarily need gprs enabled handsets to access the same, the numbers we have take that into account
June 26, 2009, Venkat writes: Can you help me make sense of the "SNs favored by Urban mobile subscribers" number? The number on the graph is not clear - is it 11.4% or 21.4% (31.4%?) for Orkut? Question 1: Hard to believe that Orkut is almost (at least) double Facebook's usage ON MOBILE in URBAN areas? That's an interesting insight if it is true. If the biggest player here is 11 or 21%, does this mean that there is a very long tail of SNs being accessed from mobile? (The graph obviously doesn't cover these 100 or so players with less than 2% share of the mobile SN usage pie.) Venkat
June 26, 2009, Arun Prabhudesai writes: Venkat, Thanks for dropping by..here is your answer
The number is 11.4% for Orkut, facebook though increasing is still behind;( http://tr.im/pQRD ) article on business week, that further solidifies this. Anything under 2% we do not track, due to the low usage we will not be able project the numbers reliably.

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13 year old kid reviews a 30 year old Sony Walkman

2009-06-30T14:51:00.001+05:30

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13 year old kid reviews a 30 year old Sony Walkman

via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow on 6/29/09

BBC Magazine gave 13-year-old Scott Campbell a gen-one Walkman in place of his MP3 player for a week, then gathered his impressions on the device:

It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.
Another notable feature that the iPod has and the Walkman doesn't is "shuffle", where the player selects random tracks to play. Its a function that, on the face of it, the Walkman lacks. But I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down "rewind" and releasing it randomly - effective, if a little laboured.
I told my dad about my clever idea. His words of warning brought home the difference between the portable music players of today, which don't have moving parts, and the mechanical playback of old. In his words, "Walkmans eat tapes". So my clumsy clicking could have ended up ruining my favourite tape, leaving me music-less for the rest of the day

Giving up my iPod for a Walkman (Thanks, John!)

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We had a laugh with this one. Totally Looks Like is a website that makes comparisons between well-known people/things and less well-known people/things. We gathered here a collection of the funniest and most obscure comparisons we found so you guys can start off the week on a good note.

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