17 Jun 2008 by Chetan Shah.

While parsing last names from SDN watchlist (or any other watchlist for that matter. BOE , OSFI etc.) , make sure that the parsing logic takes care of multiple names in last names.

For example :

Last Name : Giraldo Sarria

In this case the financial entity may have registered this person as having Sarria as their last name, in which case the parsing logic may completely ignore this SDN entry as a potential match because the last name from SDN side is Giraldo Sarria and on the financial entity side it will be Sarria.

On the same lines is the scenario of hyphenated last names like Smith-Johnson

Posted in AML | 1 Comment »

8 Jun 2008 by Chetan Shah.

Recently I bumped into an article in Money magazine (June 2008 - pg. 22) which stated that we are *not* required to show the id on being asked for one by the checkout person at grocery store (for example). Seems like a lot of the merchants don’t know about this but Visa, Mastercard and Discover actually forbid stores from asking for a id from the customer. The merchant is supposed to honor the transaction even if the customer declines to show their id.

Privacy.org has complete details from MasterCard and Visa

Posted in Personal Finance | No Comments »

3 Jun 2008 by Chetan Shah.

There are times when we need to make the data element on an excel columns to all line up in a row.

For example : Transfer the data element in B1 to A2, C1 to A3, D1 to A4, E1 to A5 etc…

Following are the steps to transpose the elements in a particular row to a given column.

1. Select all rows (single column) where you want the elements to be transposed to. So for the above example it will A2, A3, A4, A5.

2. Enter =transpose(b1:e1)

3. Hit Shift + Ctrl + Enter

4. Done!

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

28 May 2008 by Chetan Shah.

Bought a refurbished Blackberry 8820 from Att.com and started having problem from day 1. Following were the issues encountered.

- The phone would reset itself in middle of a phone conversation.

- The phone would lose mobile service and will not get it back until I resetted the phone by taking the batteries out.

- On an average it would reset itself once a day.

Needless to say I returned the phone back and declined to extend the contract.

Additional tips for those considering to buy 8820

- Opera, Yahoo Messenger, Google Apps do not work until you have a data plan. It has nothing to do with ATT but all these apps do not have the capability to recognize a wi-fi connection to the internet. Stupid but it is true.

- Tiggit Mail is the way the go if you want to check your personal emails but do not want to have a data plan. LogicMail is not there yet.

- Setting up Wi-FI was a piece of cake on this device.

- It is a very good device, had I not had the issues I reported earlier, I would have kept it. Maybe the technician who refurbished my handset did not know what s/he was doing.

- Web Surfing was SUPER! Blackberry browser does its job pretty good.

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

25 Apr 2008 by Chetan Shah.

Received the IRS Determination Letter for my non-profit. It took a while but finally got it. I had applied for it in August ‘07. The only question IRS had was for the number of directors (see my other blog entry for this). The whole process was quite smooth. Now that I look back, I am glad that I made the right decision of applying for 501(c)(3) myself rather than giving it to a lawyer to handle it for me. The book which helped me thru this whole process is also mentioned on my earlier blog entry.

Please send me an email (by entering your request in the comment box) if you have any questions regarding the setup process. Now onto the next step, getting my accounting software lined up for the non-profit. As you would have noticed the foundation website is not that appealing, i.e : I have to work on that too.

Posted in Foundation | No Comments »

18 Apr 2008 by Chetan Shah.

I got hooked to Thunderbird because it is an awesome email client. Nothing like it and we have a portable version too so that you can carry the client on the usb flash drive whereever you go. Needless to say the next step was to install Lightning and make it one step closer to Outlook. My goal is to have a completely portable Email, calender, contacts and tasks (which thunderbird enables me to achieve it)

The ideal situation will be to have Blackberry’s desktop manager directly talk to thunderbird ( I am not smoking anything ) but I know it is not possible yet and may be a while before we reach that level of maturity.

After searching I bumped into www.ScheduleWorld.com (for the real hardcore go getters, you can start with www.funambol.com, install that server and so on so forth). An excellant product and kudos to the guys who maintain this thing. This product is what I would consider as the holy grail of synchronization ( I did not steal this word from one other blog which also coins it the same but it was an immediate mind response the moment I browsed the site). It certainly is the holy grail of synchronization.

Installed Outlook Plugin, Thunderbird plugin and blackberry plugin as mentioned on that site.

Before going full production live (i.e : full synchronization between outlook, thunderbird and blackberry) I wanted to test whether outlook, schedule world and thunderbird can collarborate accurately. Started running in problems one after another, recurring events like an event which occurs every tuesday and thursday in outlook do not get updated properly in Scheduleworld. Just lots of problems in general that I ended up putting atleast 20 hours over a period of a week when finally I decided that even if I get this working, I will not be sure that I can rely on the sync software. Point to note, I did not add blackberry to this mix yet, blackberry being a very “closed” device I am sure will not be easy to tackle too.

There are lot of things to take care of before you can get this machinary well oiled and working for you.

- Make sure that the date and time zone settings on Schedule World are same as your outlook and thunderbird.
- Make sure that you have the correct plugin version.
- Even synch has lots of different options by which you sync your data. This can easily confuse any user.
- Sunbird is also not 1.0 i.e : it might have bugs of its own which might create issues with regards to synch.

I do not want to undermine the developer’s tremendous efforts in creating funambol, scheduleworld and all other plugins but I think this whole technology is not ready for prime time yet. Certainly not at production level when a normal computer user can embrace it and trust it to work like a champ.

Bottomline :

1. I will wait another year (see for my test results in April 2009) as it is too time consuming and cumbersome.
2. Thunderbird as an email client is powerful and production level.
3. Do not venture to research whether Thunderbird (Lighting extension), Outlook, ScheduleWorld and Blackberry will work harmoniously together yet unless you just have loads of time at hand. And if you do find out, uninstall and all reinstall plugins, create a new schedule world account and test it again. If you can get it to working properly post the steps you took on your blog so that others can leverage it.

Posted in Technology | 2 Comments »