3 things...

• I am migrating all stuff on this blog to www.rajiniravi.com/ravi/blog.


• This blog will continue to exist with a copy of all weblogs posted there.


• Reverting back to basic layout and hiding comments as spam comments on this blog are not to my liking.

The Arthemia Template I use for this blog has the background images on Photobucket and looks like that account has expired.

Will move to a new web site by end of the month.

Last year, I had rigged up a OLAP cube in MS SQL Analysis server with sales data for the channel team I am part of. The front end was Dundas data viz software. The interface itself wasn't fast but I could build some nice visual dashboards. Then realized that for quick slicing and dicing of voluminous data, I could connect to the server thru MS-Excel (how-to here). The resultant pivot in XL amazing flexibility to analyze the data.

The logon credentials was done thru windows authentication. Starting last week, I couldn't connect to the cube and I just couldn't figure out what the problem was! All I could think was that this was probably because I had changed my windows password at about the same time.

The IT guys after a few days of trial and error found a simple solution, remove my 'Document and Setting' folder and let Windows create a new profile! This is a dirty quick-fix. I am still looking for the correct answer to this problem. So far the best explanation and discussion I got is in the expert exchange forum.

Since morning, I have been getting "Out of Memory" errors when accessing the VBA Editor in MS Excel 2007 .

I created/edited a macro that cleaned up and formatted about 1500 rows of purchase order data downloaded from Walmart's Retail Link/Orbit site. The macro ran fine and the final sheet had about 300 rows and 16 columns of data that I needed. The problem started when I tried to open this sheet. The sheet takes a long time to load with a 'not enough system resource' message at the end and 'out of memory' message when I tried to open VBA editor to edit the macro.

After a frustrating half day trying to figure why this happened, I simply took this tip and recreated the workbook thru a simple copy-paste. I guess, I should suspect my macro modules. After all, I spent a lot of time editing the module, and they probably became corrupt over time. (This has been a known problem for some time in VBA.)

Also noticed how the file with the same data shrunk from 6MB file went down to 171kb on doing this. Guess this works for the time being and will figure out the cause when I have enough time.

A good discussion on memory problems with Excel can be found at these pages:
http://www.decisionmodels.com/memlimitsc.htm
http://www.decisionmodels.com/memlimitsd.htm

Yesterday one of my colleague came up with a peculiar problem... She was unable to open Orkut/YouTube on both Chrome & IE. Every time she typed either of the URL, she would get the message, "ORKUT/youtube IS BANNED, Orkut is banned you fool,The administrators didnt write this program guess who did?? MUHAHAHA!! ". Then the browser would close. IE was quick, almost as if it crashed while Chrome took some time to close.

I first happened to see this on Chrome. So thought, some intelligent friend of hers put a nice piece of add-on code (javascript!) into her browser to check URLs and close on finding Orkut/Youtube in the address bar. After 10 minutes of futile search on her comp, realized that this wasn't a friendly add-on prank. It turned out to be a worm (W32.USB) that spreads thru USB drives and was detected almost a year back. Microsoft forefront client security (with virus definition: 1.67.470.0), the virus software my company uses, didn't detect it. My conspiracy theory is that its a deliberate choice by M$ to exclude this worm from virus defection. After all it targets Google sites and Firefox browser.

Its fairly easy to remove this annoying code. The link above should give the instructions. If you are interested to see the code, its here.

Trying to keep up with blogging with all the work... So, from today, will starting a series called 'problem for today' which will have some problems & solutions if I manage to crack the problem or get a solution from the net.

Last month (August) was when India sort of panicked on Swine flu. As of today, in India, more deaths happen due to H1N1 than same time last month and no one seems to bother as much.

Almost every company worth its salt with any product remotely related to health care wanted to benefit from this panic and had ads associating their products preventing flu infections. While this is true in all countries, in India, due to the lax advertising standards, the ads were a little over the top. And almost every one did booming business.

Here are a few ads, that according to me, are quite a bit over the top!

Rediff site @ 10.42 pm on 2nd sep 09

Finally got my machine up and running with Ubuntu Juanty and got the mac4lin theme up and running.



Just a bit of work left on getting all settings for my partition right and then its full time on Linux again.

While reading on the DDoS attack on Twitter yesterday, I landed upon a page at cnet. The first thing that I noticed while there, is not the article or its heading, but this ad of Olympus. I later realized that this was a regular TVCs adapted for online! Hence the YouTube link below and not the original ad.

An attractive looking lady in slow motion plus one of my favorite hobbies, photography. It was catchy! I clicked on it to find out what PEN was all about only to land at this really stupid page. It just had a product shot and didn't tell me what PEN was. Which was on the last frame of the ad and the reason why I clicked. Didn't have any inclination to explore further and Olympus lost a little more money on this ad (either for the impression or the click).

I am sure that Olympus would be checking how this ad performed but what was interesting was the CBS feedback page on this ad. It set me thinking on how much research goes on, on online marketing & banners anyway. Firstly, what advertisers think is effective might itself be incorrect (difference of opinion between advertisers and audiences on ad effectiveness). Also, my take is that advertising measures for online ads need to be a lot more different from conventional media considering what consumers think of online ads (chart 2 below). And the fact that consumers are very frustrated by many of today’s popular types of internet ads. The feedback being sought by CBS was very much like for an TV ad. It reminded me of an article on number of marketers testing an email campaign.

A few charts below courtesy marketing charts.

I am having trouble with my passport renewal.

Have already done a few rounds of the the passport office and the nearest police station. This entire process is getting onto my nerves. Am wasting half a day again today, for the second time, to clarify the 'objection' (what this objection is, is a complete mystery) they have on my application. Am completely pained with the entire process and the snooty people (almost everyone, security to office boys to officials) there.

Will live tweet the proceedings, want to see how hilarious the entire process and my agony sounds!

Of late every website wants you to spend more time on their site. Realizing the current craze of people is of posting 140 characters or less, every social media site worth its salt has put in a similar feature and asks you a question to type in something.

Here's the sites that I am on, want me to say...

- Twitter: What are you doing?

- Google Reader: Have some thoughts to share?
- Orkut: Set your status here
- GTalk Status: Availability and Status
- Blogger: Post Articles & Status updates
- FriendFeed: Posts and Updates

- Facebook: What's on your mind?

- Linkedin: What are you working on now?

- Yahoo! Mail / Y! Messenger: What are you doing right now?
- Flickr: Status updates
- Yahoo! 360: What are you doing now?

Depending on the region you are in, I am sure there are a number of other social sites that you might be on. A few popular ones that I could think of - MySpace, Wordpress, Typepad, Delicious, LiveJournal, AIM, hi5, myYearbook, Friendster and Photobucket...

Now, that's a lot of sites asking you to be on them and keep updating!

A few days back, I saw Hans Rosling visualize HIV data in this presentation at TED talks. I was looking for (to purchase or create) such a graphing tool for quite some time (incidentally, my requirement is a combo of heat map, bar/pie chart & motion chart). A little research revealed that Google purchased Trendalyzer, the graphing tool used in this presentation, from his company Gapminder in March 2006. A version of it has been integrated into Google Spreasheets as Motion Chart.

Luckily, I found some Indian Mobile-GSM subscriber data during the same time, cleaned it a bit, added some data and here's how the trend looks...

Gave this question a long thought during the rains a few days back and realized I had answered this question in the B School interview I gave during my Engineering!

Not in any particular order...

• Infrastructure
  
• Education
  
• Health Care

These are the 3 fields I would like to be in long term. And, regarding my interest in Technology? I guess, it would be the "basic" and "differentiating" enabler to whatever I do in any of these fields.

Managed to get a download of all travels I did using my Amex. It makes for an interesting analysis.

Chennai was my favorite destination (for software trouble shooting), Delhi (for business) and Hyderabad (surprise! for personal work)

The first week is spent planning. Then, I slog a lot during mid month and do end of the month target achievement trips.

Again mid week is when I travel the most.

And overall costs have been fairly stable I should say except for the occasional foreign visits.
With the overall costs / trip coming down.

Ever since status messages gained popularity to communicate thoughts and messages, I was looking for an option to sync my statuses across all social networks I was on.

First tried this...
Then realized that Ping already offered a nice service...
After a few days, realized that not every message is apt for everyone (across networks). Now trying for a better way to manage my updates based on classification of users. And I still have a few sites to integrate.

Update 30th July 2009:

• This page gives you info on how to link Google Reader & Twitter using Friendfeed. But, didn't find the options working for India.
  
• Twitter Feed has since upgraded and now offers better control of posting from Google Reader.

10th of June was a very hectic day for me! Started work at 8:45 AM and went on non-stop till 11 PM. At 8:00 PM, my computer gave up and crashed after spawning up innumerable windows! Tried closing as many as I could, gave up and had to finally reboot.



Unable to fathom why this happened. I guess its because of the updates that my company runs, but not sure. Any explanation of why this happened is welcome.

Then, a couple of hours later, this happened on Facebook! I guess this had something to do with the username setting opening up at that time.



Luckily, no errors occurred during work :)

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Having handled complaints and now experiencing trouble with a few service and product providers, made me think of the entire Complaint management cycle that a company should have...

A few basic thought starters in random order
- Are you selling a product or service?
- What is the value of this product or service? And what is the premium you are charging?
- Who is the complainant? Internal or External? If external, Customer or Consumer?
- How critical is complaint resolution and management to the brand equity of the product?
- What types of complaints will be your liability and to what extent will they be entertained?
- Till when (time) should you take the liability (and extent) of ensuring the quality of the offering?
- What is the resolution process? Internal and Externally visible processes. Time between processes?
- Is the treatment the same for both internal and external people?
- How long should the final response time be?
- How much of information on the complaint will be shared with the consumer?
- How do you measure satisfaction of the entire complaint resolution process?

Sunspots anyone. BTW, summer's over, take that ad out!