THE WAREBLOG

I write this post to pay my respectful and glowing tributes to the art of website designing (here, the lack of it) and share your grief in having to sit through each of these links.

So, here goes…

10. DPS BOKARO & LIFE IN BHOPAL
To start with, I pay homage to the spirit of developing these two sites (especially because of my association to these two cities) –

9. I KISS YOU
There were worthy competitors to this – but with my admiration for Turkish cuisine, music & locales; here’s something that became the most popular thing back in 1999 and would later inspire Borat et al.

8. HIGH ON FIRE
What happens when you sleep under a rock & still surface – after over ten years!

7. ROD C DAVIS
What was that? I thought it had to do with supernatural healing… I already feel a paranormal experience.

6. YALE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF ART
It would be just another migraine-ingrained site if not for the Yale part of it. Seriously, is this one of USA’s premier art schools?

5. GEORGE HUTCHINS
I won’t exactly gift such a personal portal to even the worst of my enemies!

4. TIMECUBE
So, what are we trying to do here?

3. ALMIGHTY WIND
Ok… so what exactly is this wind, people??

2. HURR-DURR
Please… Why? PeTA… Alpha, Beta and Theta… Somebody!!

1. DOKIMOS
This is epic.
If Jesus’ site actually looked like this – Christianity would not exist today!

Although I am not averse to Gill Sans, nor hold any personal grudge against Times New Roman; I rarely find myself being satisfied with a presentation or document set in the same. Make no mistake, I still respect the Tahomas & Verdanas of our time – not to forget the Couriers, our first big break into the world of digital typefaces!

But if I were to sit through a session of hand-picking my best bets to live the rest of my life with, I would choose the following ten of a kind -

When I walked into my new workplace last week with no customary laptops being doled out, it meant two things –

• Probably, no work from home (“this works both ways ”)
• And a question mark on Outlook sync from outside my workplace

Having known how to setup an exchange server account on Outlook, it took parts of online help and tid-bits of permutation and combination to set the ball rolling.

As for the steps, here goes –

1. Open the Mail option in Control Panel – if you’re running 64-bit, please go to Additional Options and select “View 32-bit Control Panel Items” to uncover the Mail option.

2. Click on E-mail Accounts and then click on “New” to kickstart the account creation process.

3. Select “Email Account” and proceed.

4. In the resulting screen, click on “Manually Configure Server Settings or Additional Server Types”.

5. You will now be presented with four options for your server type, select the second one – Microsoft Exchange or compatible service.

6. Enter the Exchange Server Name relevant to you. For instance, for Hyderabad users, the same is – ctsinhydsxug (You can obtain your server name from your workstation Outlook settings, it is the server name for your account sans the trailing cts.com part).

7. Enter your Employee ID in place of the User Name field.

8. Click on More Settings to setup the server name resolution.

9. Head to the Connection tab, in Exchange over Internet, select the Connect to my Exchange Mailbox using HTTP check-box.

10. Click on Exchange Proxy Settings.

11. Therein, under Connection Settings, enter the following information –
a. Against Use this URL to connect to my proxy server for Exchange field, please enter mail.cognizant.com
b. Select the Connect using SSL only check-box.
c. Select the Mutually authenticate the session when connecting with SSL check-box.
d. Enter msstd:mail.cognizant.com against the Principle Name in the proxy server box.
e. In the Exchange Proxy Settings dialog box, in the Proxy authentication settings window, in the Use this authentication when connecting to my proxy server for Exchange drop-down, select Basic Authentication.

12. Click OK.

13. Click on Check Name against your entered user name (in this case, employee id) and you will now be prompted to enter your Cognizant network password. Enter the password and press enter.

14. You will be greeted with a confirmation message of resolution of your name and exchange server and upon starting Outlook, the mails will start flowing in

About Adam Hartung –

A brief look-up on any search engine would lead you to impressive essays about the aforestated. I zeroed-in on one that seemed to be one of the popular results.
It was really heartening to know that someone had achieved so much in a span of two decades and remained rather unknown to most circles. One of his most impressive lines read having been the leader of the team that introduced the concept of home delivery at Pizza Hut – all the more impressive when you know that pizzas have been home delivered for over a century now and Domino’s started out with this as their mainstay in the 1960s!
So much about the author though – and if it helps, well he has an MBA with distinction from Harvard and also a stint at Boston Consulting Group.

About Forbes –

Forbes has been a synonym for listing the Czars of Capitalism. However, the organization as such is not in the best shape so to speak – by the COO’s own admission, “On many occasions, we’ve been materially out of sync with the prevailing wisdom of the moment and where the world was,” Tim Forbes continues, “The tide seemed to be going the other way, but we don’t change our fundamental view.”
As for its digital version, Times had this to say in their 2009 report – “one of the top five financial sites by traffic [throwing] off an estimated $70 million to $80 million a year in revenue, [it] never yielded the hoped-for public offering.”

About ‘The Article’ –

We now go through the article that all this background leads us to.
Before I begin, I find it sufficient to state that I am an ex-employee of Microsoft but none of this holds any relation with residual affinities of any sort. Quite simply put, it’s a take on quite a punctured hypothesis – if I can so put it.

The article basically takes you through a classic story-telling weave (which I term ‘S.E.E.’) –

1. A carefully chosen Hard Fact that prevails today (STATEMENT)
2. Statistics; again carefully chosen, transformed & interpreted to justify the hard fact (EVIDENCE)
3. Offer a prospective vision with conscious attempts to sound impartial, yet append bottom-lines that defy it. (EXTRAPOLATION)

This is akin to the most basic form of argument skills. From Judith Glaser to a host of other people, anyone having a brief insight on the structure of story-telling would be able to differentiate between a discussion and a hypothesis.

Let us look at each of the SEE elements in isolation –

1. The statement is based on the fact that Apple has overtaken Microsoft by quite a significant margin when it comes to Market Capitalisation – quite an achievement, but Microsoft has always been a company operating in a steady ‘top five’ band and it last lead the technology market-cap space in 2003. In a similar comparison, one could take the pretext of overall revenues and suggest Apple needs a lot of catching up to do; however, in essence, we acknowledge the fact that Apple has done well over the last one year (finally, after having been around for close to Microsoft’s agile & impressive lifetime!)

2. With a valid statement, the general idea is to select graphs & figures that drive home a message, in this article for instance, we make the following observations –

• Microsoft invests more than one-and-a-half times its nearest R&D rivals towards its own research and development – something, that the author uses as a tool to show where Microsoft is leaking money. What makes it more interesting is that he had to use MS-Office to generate that graph with the default Calibri font in place and still a convenient yet muddled remark for Office 2010.
• He then goes on to compare Smartphone market shares, whilst conveniently not choosing to cite projections from credible sources for Android, Windows Phone 7 and iPhone in the coming couple of quarters.
• The third graph probably gives away the bias in flashlights – with an app-pool comparison being a top-tier metric.
• He then meanders around Jack & Jill before concluding why Apple is the future.

3. The extrapolations, as we look at them, are pretty optimistic about Apple’s performance in the days to come while being equally critical of Microsoft’s strategy – why not, if you have as high an awareness level to leave out the fastest selling gadget of all time (Xbox Kinect), you can be pardoned to at least question Microsoft’s strategy.

I am assuming here that awareness is a precursor to strategy – something that we thought was the author’s true forte.

Here’s a small round-up of Cloud Computing, SAAS that I wrote out while comparing its advent with the traditional industry setting.
___________________________________

Cloud Computing, more so than a buzzword, is here to change the way business models operate in terms of not just IT services but consequences far-reaching such as ownership and risk associated with capital itself.
SAAS – or software as a service, one of the three primary facets of emerging cloud computing platforms, specifically allows users to use features of softwares to their advantage without requiring them to have the infrastructure to host the software nor the associated cost of ownership. We take a progressive view of SAAS and its impact on the traditional business landscape in the next three sections.

i. The contrasts of business models

Traditionally, a business model has had four distinct phases attached to assets or processes involved in value creation. These are outlined in the overlapping vein diagram shown below–

Figure 1: Traditional business model phases

Quite evidently, a typical ERP implementation at a big corporate house would then involve ownership of robust hardware infrastructure, associated cost of ownership of the ERP software, the operator and scheduled maintenance and patch fixes until the next big thing emerges on the horizon – which is a matter of less than five years in the field of computer science.

With the arrival of SAAS, this total cost of ownership takes a big slash with the firms only paying as they use – rather only paying for the operating part and do away with all other phases of the traditional value creation model. The resulting diagram is now pretty simple –

Figure 2: SAAS impacted business model phases

To put things in the right perspective, the phases of value creation remain much the same – with a SAAS provider owning, maintaining and disposing the associated infrastructure & soaking in the total cost of ownership; but hundreds of other organizations can now benefit by only paying as they use – changing the entire product-based chain to a service-oriented approach. The risks and costs now lie exclusively with the SAAS provider while organizations are happy to use the services offered at an extremely tiny fraction of costs.

ii. The crossover chromosomes

The more poignant question then is how do we go about assimilating an upcoming trend like SAAS into the time-tested processes? Will it make things significantly better or merely fade into obsolescence with the ‘next-big-thing’?

It would be worthwhile here to note that SAAS is merely an extension of the cloud computing model that has been around for over two decades now. Most websites, since inception, have been hosted on servers available on rentals/subscriptions and also registered via domain registrars/resellers offering such a service. Thus, having a third-party host has been an industry trend for most concerns operating on the internet for quite some time now – the term assigned being IAAS or infrastructure as a service or PAAS (platform as a service) in some other cases.

With SAAS, we take the next logical step of bridging the gap between traditional ways of carrying out business processes and the way things have been done over the internet for years now. Although not without associated risks and privacy concerns, SAAS offers a great deal in its service-oriented way.
A generic approach to adopting SAAS for say, a firm looking to move from a traditional office applications suite, would primarily involve the following flow –

Figure 3: Steps to assimilate SAAS into traditional processes

For any organization, a pilot project or initial analysis of which fronts to approach SAAS for would be essential. Once the results from the same have been assessed, and weighed for organizational & operational fit, the specific wing or process line can migrate to a SAAS adoption strategy.

iii. The need for meiosis over mitosis

Before we conclude, it would be in the best interest to identify the best practices from the traditional setting as well as the most favourable offerings from SAAS. The competitive landscape has always been about evolving and not simply replicating from past experiences – let us take note of the same with respect to SAAS while incorporating it into the traditional organizational setting. We focus on retention factors (those that need to be carried forward from traditional settings) and adoption factors (those needing incorporation going forward).

Retention Factors –
• Risk Analysis – Traditionally, risk analysis, with respect to ascertaining which party owns how much of what and in what respects is accountable for recovery and business continuity, has been of great importance. Going forward, we find, the same would be equally important – even with increasing reliance on SAAS.

• Business Continuity Planning – BCP has been another important aspect of traditional business settings. With the infrastructural ownership lying outside organizational domain, a denial of service by SAAS provider could render processes arriving at a grinding halt. In order to ensure continuity, fallback plans assume critical importance going forward.

• Total Cost Benefit Analysis– Although SAAS appears to be a cost-effective service offering, there can be cases where an organization may possess enough skill and infrastructure to support an in-house deployment more economically than taking up SAAS. A critical evaluation of total cost benefits derived is therefore still relevant, especially in the light of a nascent SAAS industry.

Adoption Factors –
• Discarding extensive ownership – By definition, an adoption of SAAS would provide organizations the advantage of doing away with most of the costs related to owning and operating of facilities that augment software usage.

• Focussing on result-oriented approach – With a paradigm shift from product-oriented to service-oriented offering, the criticality of defining the results desired from an application/software assume high importance. Since the costs are now tied to such metrics as CPU cycles and usage time clocking, one cannot allow peripheral tasks to take lead and end up defeating the whole purpose of SAAS. It is therefore essential to identify the precise results we seek to derive from the application rather than focussing on supplementary tasks.

• Driving a service-oriented culture – With an increasing emphasis on concentrating on core competencies and value creation, most supplementing processes will continue to face outsourcing or in broader terms, a service-oriented approach – whereby, the focus would be on driving processes for executing an organization’s core tasks while getting as much of peripheral tasks executed by a service-oriented culture as possible.

After cooling my heels for a pretty long time – mostly devoid of any interaction with IDEs and semicolons and more, I was made to sit through a four day task of customizing and deploying an Elgg based portal for my current institute.
So I got myself a new copy each of XAMPPLite & Elgg to kick-start the proceedings
Anyways, here goes the patches that I found in my notebook after the completion-

1. “The database backend you have installed doesn’t meet the basic requirements to run Elgg”

This issue generally arises as early as at the time of installation itself.
Here’s my quickfix : 

• Remove the line in your root install.php file that checks for MySQL5, i.e.: validate_platform();

• Now upload this to your Elgg folder at the host and open the installation page in your browser, fill out the forms with the requested information and most probably – all should be fine!

2. “Object is a misconfigured plugin”

If you enable a plugin and then see the error message “<plugin name> is a misconfigured plugin”, this implies there is probably no start.php file in the plugin’s directory. If you are installing a plugin called “test”, there will be a test directory under mod. In that test directory there needs to be a start.php – file: /mod/test/start.php.

You have three options for fixing this:

• Repair the problem (If permissions issues are found, fix permissions. If no start.php is found, put an empty start.php there.)

• Create an empty file called disabled in the /mod directory. This will allow you to disable the plugin through the Tools Administration page.

• If all else fails, remove the problematic directory from /mod.

3. Extending the external pages plugin to include more static pages
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Say, we need to add a FAQ page to the list of standard external pages.
You may follow the following sequence of activities for this-

Download external pages pluginand open the downloaded plugin.
  

a. Search for the file en.php and seek the following line-

‘expages:privacy’ => “Privacy”, 

Add the following code after this line- 

‘expages:faq’ => “Faq”,

b. Search for the file footer_menu.php and seek the following line- 

<a href=”<?php echo $vars['url']; ?>pg/expages/read/Privacy/”><?php echo elgg_echo(‘expages:privacy’); ?></a> | 

Add the following code after this line- 

<a href=”<?php echo $vars['url']; ?>pg/expages/read/Faq/”><?php echo elgg_echo(‘expages:faq’); ?></a> |

c. Search for the file menu.php and seek the following line- 

  <li <?php if($type == ‘privacy’) echo “class = ‘selected’”; ?>><a href=”<?php echo $url; ?>privacy”><?php echo elgg_echo(‘expages:privacy’); ?></a></li> 

Add the following code after this line- 

<li <?php if($type == ‘faq’) echo “class = ‘selected’”; ?>><a href=”<?php echo $url; ?>faq”><?php echo elgg_echo(‘expages:faq’); ?></a></li>

d. Search for the file edit.php and seek the following line- 

else if($type == ‘privacy’) {

  $external_page_title = elgg_echo(‘expages:privacy’);  

  } 

Add the following code after this line- 

 else if($type == ‘faq’) {

  $external_page_title = elgg_echo(‘expages:faq’);  

  }

 Save all files and upload the modified plugin. 

4. Remove “Friends” option (From Profile)

We might need to do away with the friend feature on a network wherein we want all folks to be able to contact other members easily and without such tasks as adding and deleting of friends. For this, we can proceed as follows-

a. Removing Add/Remove Friend option - 

Edit the relevant code action lines in profilelinks.php at - 

C:\XAMPP_Folder\htdocs\live\mod\profile\views\default\profile

b. Removing Friends/View Friends of option - 

Edit the relevant line of rendering code in links.php and linksownpage.php at - 

C:\XAMPP_Folder\htdocs\live\mod\profile\views\default\profile\menu

5. Miscellaneous customization points –

a. Extending the Top Menu bar

Edit elgg_topbar.php at -

C:\XAMPP_Folder\htdocs\live\views\default\page_elements

b. Editing the footer-

Edit footer.php at-

C:\XAMPP_Folder\htdocs\live\views\default\page_elements

c. Editing Custom Login Page (Index Page)

Download the mod called custom index (not the one available by default) and edit the index page in the root of the mod’s folder to suit your requirements

d. Editing the Spotlight area content-

This involves editing the default.php at -

C:\XAMPP_Folder\htdocs\live\views\default\spotlight

e. Customizing tabs in the river dashboard activity-

This involves editing nav.php at –

C:\XAMPP_Folder\htdocs\live\mod\riverdashboard\views\default\riverdashboard

f. Customizing Bookmarks -

Edit the start.php filed under the root of plugin folder of bookmarks

g. Remove/Add Drop Down menu (Top Navigation -> Tools) items

  Edit the parameters for the particular item in topbar_tools.php at-

  C:\XAMPP_Folder\htdocs\live\views\default\navigation

Since I have been transitioning from my ‘tech’ blog to consolidate all of it here, here’s one from the stuff I did last year at my b-school.. well, some of it!

I’d been lately involved in a few crash-time development scenarios.
Not that they’ve been nifty hu-ha ones but then reasonably good to do is what I would term them.
While one involved customizing a WordPress installation, the other was a table-less template written in XHTML and CSS.

Here are the screenshots and links (you can click on the respective image area to open the associated portals) -

I experienced this peculiar problem today when trying to activate the Power notification icon after it mysteriously disappeared from my system tray. To my amazement, the Power checkbox had become frozen and therefore I could not select and get my icon back.

When I opened the Customize Notification Icons dialog box, I found plenty of other icons lying there for applications I had removed long back – but no signs of my dearie dear Power..!

The reason behind this is the Explorer caches a list of every icon that appears through its interface and over a period of time this list could go up to hundreds or more.

The other issue is that Explorer keeps these items in memory somewhere, so it also causes bloat, but we can reset this list through the registry and by restarting Explorer. Note that this will remove any settings you had set for the icons.

To get to the dialog we are talking about, right-click on the notification icon tray and select Customize Notification Icons or go to the same through the Taskbar properties -

Run regedit.exe through the Start Menu -> Run command, and then browse down to this registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\LocalSettings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\TrayNotify

Now you will see two entries in the list: IconStreams and PastIconsStream. Select both of them and delete. (You may want to take a backup with the export function before doing this) -

That’s it, done..!

All we need to do now is to restart Explorer.exe through Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc).

In order to do so, we select explorer.exe from the list and choose End Process and subsequently click on the File menu (Alt+F) and click on New Task to specify explorer.exe in the same and then press OK.

Now your Customize Notification Icons dialog box should show you a very clean list of items, but note that any settings you had will be reset to default. 

Please note that some icons might disappear entirely until you reboot your computer.

I have always loved this browser and will never forget falling back on the same to get me there – faster & safer..!

Here’s a snapshot though of what the current build has rolled out in the language we’re all tied together with-

Apple & Microsoft (not necessarily in that order!) undoubtedly have some of the best brains working in their innovation labs. It is therefore no wonder that when they go ahead and toss up concepts and perceptions of how the future of computing would be like – it is often unbelievably awesome..!!

Microsoft Office Labs showcase their prophecies in this short-n-slick clip.