vsbabu.org

Buchanan reveals Australian secrets

2009-06-30T19:47:38+05:00

I provided (Flower) with some of my thoughts. I've been keeping a bit of a gaze on the Ashes build-up from a far and passed on a few things I've picked up as an observer now removed from the team

My advise to England. You want to win Ashes, just ignore secrets from that particular source. Still in doubt? Just ask Kolkata Knightriders.

Outlook 2003 + Flags = todo list

2009-06-15T16:20:03+05:00

Microsoft Outlook 2003 has a very irritating system for adding reminders to messages. For example, I want to add a flag to remind me about the mail next day, it involves right clicking and choosing reminder options. Also, this never works on a selection of mails. You have to do it one at a time. Newer versions of Outlook apparently handles this fairly well. I searched the web for ideas on how to ease the pain and got some VB macros. Got those, modified them to suite my needs (original source information is available within the code) and now life is fun.

I needed ability to quickly mark one or more mails for action. Action could be within 2 hours, next day or within 2 days. Similarly, some of the mails are what I sent to my team for followup. Again that is within 2 hours, next day or within 2 days. When things are getting into waiting mode, I need to quickly defer action or followup by a week, 2 weeks or a month. Here's how my custom toolbar looks now!

Sample Source : Watij and easyb

2009-06-14T18:37:32+05:00

Watij is a slick automation library to automate Internet Explorer. easyb is a good tool for behaviour driven development - BDD. Didn't feel like going out on Sunday afternoon - decided to explore both.

Download a sample project that illustrates how to use both of these to automate testing of web sites. It has testing code as both easyb and junit tests. Unzip the file into a folder and read README.txt on how to use it. The project opens Google, searches for my name and verifies the search results.

Prime Minister sends a greeting card to Pak Prez

2009-01-14T06:55:39+05:00

News item on rediff.com. Here is my take on news items that may appear in the next two weeks - these are heavily influenced by the news since 26/11 attacks on Mumbai.

2009.01.14 - Pakistan denies receiving any card.
2009.01.16 - Pakistan acknowledges receipt of a card and says a formal reply will be sent.
2009.01.18 - Formal reply concludes that the graphic of the dove in the card is inconclusive evidence. It also raises suspicions of the bird being a non-state actor of India. If a correct dove is available and if there is proof of New Year, will surely act on it.
2009.01.19 - Pakistan Army assures readiness to counter any pressure in enforcing New Year.
2009.01.20 - Unconfirmed reports from NWFP and Swat regions about several banned outfits trying to eliminate all doves.
2009.01.21 - Pakistan Foreign Minister proposes celebrating New Year by a joint team.
2009.01.22 - An Indian minister who claims impeccable secular credentials demands probe on whether the graphic is that of a dove or of a eagle (called "garud" around here!). Quickly some other so called secularists jump to support him.
2009.01.23 - Bunch of artists and ornithologists study the card and certify it is a dove. The said minister claims he is happy that the confusion is over and looks relieved that he is still a minister.
2009.01.24 - US confirms new aid of $1 billion to Pakistan so that they can focus back on US' war on terror. Pakistan acknowledges this but still raises concerns about mounting tensions over the dove with India.
2009.01.25 - Things go into relatively calm mode...

What will happen on next New Year? Anybody's guess. Only thing I can be sure is that majority of Indian citizens between ages 20 and 40 would've become more cynical.

It is not funny anymore!

2008-12-30T20:24:24+05:00

Peter English opines that following Australia's series defeat today, rebuilding is not funny anymore. However, since I've already spent a good part of my week long vacation watching the test match on TV, I think it is way too funny - no need to explain why, but just read the opening paragraph of the article!

To shamelessly quote a famous ad, watching Ricky Ponting's expression during the post-match ceremonies - priceless. Even better, his claims of still being No. 1! In India, Ponting chose not to bowl Brett Lee (overrate is better than loosing a series?), but in this test, even his deputy couldn't explain why a limping Lee was bowling when Johnson was not.

Annotating photos with date

2008-12-27T18:48:20+05:00

With Imagemagick, you can easily annotate your digital photographs with the date. This assumes that the date information is captured within the photograph - most digital cameras do this (and most common mistake I do is to remember to set the date when I insert the battery back after charging!). Here is a small shell script to do this. Save it as an executable file and then run it with all files you want to convert. The annotated files have a prefix of ts_.

Leo script to generate environment setters

2008-04-16T22:39:45+05:00

Leo Outliner is a fantastic outliner that can be used as a plain outliner or as a literate programming editor. If you are into Python scripting, you can easily extend it to make quick utilities. Here is one such silly script.

Often, I will need to set environment variables in DOS, Unix/Cygwin environments. I end up creating scripts to do this. However, it is quite painful to have one script with commands starting with export (for bash) and set (for DOS). Most of the time I would rather like to have a simple property file - like key=value in each line - that I can use to set the environment variables.

Download this Leo file. It has a script in one of the nodes. You put your property file in child nodes with @url node types. Then, when you run the script, each such child node is taken and written out as batch file or shell script as identified by the node header text. A silly little solution that took 5 minutes and has already taken lot of pains out for me!

Stuff yet to be fixed

2008-03-30T20:53:11+05:00

For a while, the site was down. This was because I was using PHP code as server-side-include module to draw the header and footer and the breadcrumbs. My ISP, csoft.net moved to a CGI based PHP execution and this doesn't work with my scheme of things. Note : so far, csoft guys has been just great; I guess they'll have valid reasons for this change.

I've fixed few of those things by moving to normal HTML mode, ignoring all SSI elements. The cross-reference between other parts of my site with the blog is not yet there and the breadcrumbs navigation on my blog is also not there yet. Both these were also using PHP and that needs to be worked on. Perhaps I should also look into switching from MovableType to WordPress now.

Managing notes and todos

2008-01-03T08:00:49+05:00

We all write notes while working. There are plenty of software available to maintain your notes or todo lists. Some are fancy desktop decorators like sticky notes, calendars or todo-list in side bar. I’ve been looking for a solution that lets me manage my notes and todo-lists. Many of the items out there does either notes or todo-lists; not both. Ideally, I would prefer just writing notes and todo’s automatically extracted from it. I zeroed in on six main contenders – explained in the order I used them.

So, what is the pick?

Scrum for Self : V2

2008-01-01T13:07:52+05:00

Last year, I wrote about Scrum for Self, an Excel sheet that I use to plan my week. An updated version is now available below.

Enhancements:

Projects, contexts and statuses can be setup now - motivated by GTD.
A nice dashboard that gives you idea about your remaining tasks.
Better embedded documentation.
A 5 week calendar to help you plan your due-dates

If you are interested, you can download the zip file (43KB) that has the Excel file. Extract the zip file. Open the Excel file and look at Dashboard sheet. The Excel has some sample data that you can use as a starter.

Excel to record expenses

2008-01-01T12:40:24+05:00

I tried various tools to keep track of my expenses. Tried free and non-free software tools out there. Found most of them to be very rigid and too much time consuming. For more than a year, I've been using an Excel sheet I developed to track expenses. I found it pretty handy.

Main features are listed below:

Configure your accounts as you wish
Configure categories of expenses
For categories you want to monitor, set monthly budget and track against it
At any given point of time, you can see how much money you've with you!
Expenses by categories are reported on a monthly basis and on YTD basis
Quick check to see your monthly net flow (earnings - expenses)
It takes about 3 seconds to record one transaction :-)

If you are interested, you can download the zip file (108KB) that has the Excel file. It has couple of macros - that is only for sorting data. Excel will still work without the macros - you just have to do sorting once in a while. Extract the zip file. Open the Excel file and look at Instructions sheet. The Excel has some sample data that you can use as a starter.

Scripting Outlook Journal

2007-06-26T22:39:39+05:00

I maintain information about my tasks, meetings etc. in Outlook Journal. Here's a simple JScript script that exports this information into a delimited format. Yes, Outlook itself can export data like this, but if you want to automate stuff and get it to the next level, this script might help you.

If you save this as sample.js, you can run it like cscript /nologo sample.js

ADD and antipatterns

2007-06-22T10:22:29+05:00

I did nod quite a bit while reading these. Now, next step is to make sure that I don't do these things whenever I manage stuff :-)

Lean Pivot Tables

2007-06-13T20:34:51+05:00

Pivot tables in Microsoft Excel are really great in summarizing data. These are usually used for charting also. Most of us just select the columns we need to pivot on while building a pivot table. This can cause an abnormally large file size, unnecessarily using up memory and painfully slow to transmit to others.

One easy solution is to just select only the range that has the data, as opposed to full columns, while choosing the input to pivot. What it means is that just select the rows and columns in the grid, but not using the header bar. One drawback with this approach is that when the data changes or more rows are added to it, you will need to redefine the input to the pivot table. Read on to see how to get around this problem using dynamic ranges.

Can you spot the difference?

2007-06-13T10:18:31+05:00

For the past few weeks, my Outlook 2003 doesn't start when I am offline. While trying to troubleshoot this, I was given the following dialogue box.