27 Feb 2008 by Chetan Shah.

Scenario :
ATT Wireless/Cingular Cell phone device stops working for whatever reason and you need a new cell phone but do not want to renew the contract.

Solution :
AT&T Wireless has a pre paid service called GoPhone. The prepaid service does not require the subscriber to sign up for 1 or 2 year contract which is a norm for the other AT&T wireless plans. You can sign up for a GoPhone Service here and select the phone device which you want. Once you receive the phone, insert your old phone’s SIM card in this new phone and switch it on. That’s it. You got a new phone without signing up for a contract and still keep your old number.

Questions / Comments are always welcome.

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24 Feb 2008 by Chetan Shah.

I primarily use my home computer for internet browsing, emailing and personal document management purposes. Most of the time my computer is powered on when I am home. Once it dawned on me that I should be donating my CPU time when it is just sitting idle doing nothing. After some research on the web I bumped onto World Community Grid which enables you to donate your idle CPU time for research purposes. I know SETI exists but I am not a big fan of finding extra terrestrial life when we have a lot of issues to deal with at our “earth” home.

I have been using their software for more than a year and never has this software been intrusive or hampered my normal work. To its credibility it is sponsored by the IBM. There are lots of interesting details on the website which I will not mention here as I believe that if you are interested you will take the initiative to visit the site.

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19 Feb 2008 by Chetan Shah.

I know it is not one of the coolest thing to do on an ongoing basis but as we are becoming more and more dependent on data, whether it is entering personal finance information, blackberry data sync, outlook data, word documents etc taking regular data backups plays a very critical part in our digital lives. In the event of a hard drive crash if you cannot afford to be dead in water because you lost your personal data you need to have a data backup strategy which is efficient yet simple.

It does not need to very complicated but you need to take care of the following aspects.

- Data should be stored off site.
- Data should be secured.
- It should be easy to get to in the event of a hard drive failure or for whatever reason.

I will handle the security aspect first. Before taking a backup of your data make sure it is encrypted. There are lot of utilities available. I personally like AxCrypt. I have been using this utility for at least 18 months if not more and never have had a problem. It uses 128-bit AES encryption which is more than enough encryption for small people like me. This utility provides you with a capability of generating a pass phrase to encrypt the file. I strongly recommend using this feature as using a random key as a pass phrase just makes life for a thief next to living in hell to decrypt your files. You can store the pass phrase wherever you want. Just make sure that you don’t try to memorize it, because chances you won’t be able to memorize it. Axcrypt has other cool features too but for the curious, supplying with the axcrypt link is all what is needed.

To store data offsite, I use Mozy.com, this is a great utility to take offsite backups. You can schedule your backups and the mozy agent will do the rest for you. It is a free service if your data is less than 2GB. I almost started taking backups using Norton 360, as it does allow you to take off site backups but the next requirement of mine ruled it out.

Mozy.com has a web interface (Norton 360 does not) which allows you to download any/all your files from anywhere. Thus in the event of total loss of your computer, all you have to do is logon to mozy.com and download your files on a different computer and you should be ready to go. Remember you will still have to install axcrypt on that computer to actually start using the data. Also, you should be able to retrieve your pass phrase. Hint : Best place to store your pass phrase is in an email with a proper subject on it.

If you have lots of media/images to be backed up, I would not bother encrypting and storing it off site, the good ‘ol CD burning process works just fine. I give more emphasis to actual data then media/images, so I am sure you may have a better backup strategy for those type of files.

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17 Feb 2008 by Chetan Shah.

For example :
There are total 10 rows in a worksheet (Let’s say : Sheet 1). Only 4 of them are visible. The other 6 are hidden (using the row–>hide feature)

You want to copy only the 4 visible rows to a another excel worksheet.

Following are the steps which will allow you to achieve that :

1. On Sheet 1 which has hidden rows, hit F5.
2. On the “Go To” dialog box which appears, click “Special” button.
3. Select the “Visible Cells Only” radio option.
4. Click “Ok” button.
5. You will notice that all the visible rows are selected.
6. Hit “Ctrl-C” on the Sheet 1.
7. All the visible rows will have the dotted border.
8. Go the sheet (Let’s say : Sheet2) where you want to paste these rows.
9. Hit “Ctrl-V” on Sheet 2.
10. Done!

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14 Feb 2008 by Chetan Shah.

For example :
Set the background color of Row 1 to Blue if the cell value of B1 is 5
Set the background color of Row 1 to Red if the cell value of B1 is 10
Set the background color of Row 1 to Orange if the cell value of B1 is 15

Following are the steps to highlight the entire row based on a cell value.

1. Select the entire Row (Row 1 in our case)
2. Go to Format –> Conditional Formatting
3. In Condition 1, Select “Formula is” from the first select box.
4. Enter “=IF($B1=5,1,0)” in second select box.
5. Click the “Format” button
6. Click on “Patterns” tab.
7. Select blue color.
8. Click ok
9. Click “Add” button
10. Follow steps 3-8, the only change is : in the formula enter 10 instead of 5 and select red color.
11. Click “Add button
12. Follow steps 3-8, the only change is : in the formula enter 15 instead of 5 and select orange color.
13. Done

If you want to apply it all rows in the sheet.

1. Complete the above steps. This will setup first row
2. Select first row
3. Click on “Format Painter” icon from your Standard Toolbar
4. Select all the rows on which you want to apply Step 1’s formatting.
5. Done!

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7 Feb 2008 by Chetan Shah.

While designing a software application from scratch an important point to consider is the underlying database design’s capability of supporting future analytics. Most applications are designed on the basis of user requirements and more often than not the system requirements are overlooked in a rush to meet the delivery deadlines. Requirements such as “Capability to harvest numbers in future” are not explicitly stated nor can be expected to come from the end users.

This is one of the areas where the technology team can influence requirements and make this type of needs as part of the software requirements.

The advantages of having database design which takes care of analytics are as follows :

1. Ability to determine which functions are lightly used. There are times when a complicated piece of functionality is used so
rarely that it is not worth spending maintenance dollars on that functionality, the better option is to just sunset that functionality. It also enables the technical staff to determine which areas to concentrate on to exceed customer expectations by improving the response times/usability of highly used functionality.

2. Ability to determine which business rules are really effective and which are creating more work rather than making end users
efficient.

3. Ability to determine application usage peak times. This will enable the technical staff to schedule batch loads/downtimes in off peak
hours.

4. Ability to audit user actions. In most financial organizations this is a must as part of Compliance requirements.

5. Ability to apply advanced statistical techniques to drive business process improvement.

Capturing application numbers keeping the above advantages in perspective will directly translate into an application which is stable (because we can identify the pain points faster), robust (as it will remain effective as time progresses) and highly maintainable (by capturing and mining performance, usage numbers)

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