Do you ever get calls telling you “It’s not working” leaving you totally perplexed about what exactly is not working. If it’s not a call it could be a cryptic SMSspeak message “Sir, its nt wrkg” or even worse an email with the entire message in the subject line and only the company disclaimer in the actual body! Part of my job does get me several of these calls, SMSs and emails and I have a really tough time keeping my cool in such situations. Biggest reason for my irritation is that the calls and messages are coming from the on-site engineer. These guys are trained in problem solving, one would expect at least reporting the problem accurately, but no it does not happen. Not only is the problem not reported accurately, absolutely no research is done. God forbid if they came on to a mailing list and asked a question in this manner, they would be electronically whacked till they went home crying to their mommies! We do have Google, Bing and a host of resources to check on before giving up, or taking the lazy way out. When I am in a somewhat kind mood I would just send the complainer to this most wonderful site – http://lmgtfy.com/

Coming back to the real issue, to illustrate let me walk you through a very simple problem. Let us assume for a moment that your Internet connection has gone down. How would you go about checking? I would start at the most obvious of places and first go and check if the router or incoming device is actually plugged in and has power. It really does work better when it’s plugged in. Often over the weekend an over enthusiastic housekeeping staff will come around and clean the rooms and sometimes even the server rooms and in the bargain a few cables may just get pulled a little more than they should and will be dislodged. Monday’s are bad days for SysAds primarily for this reason. Docking stations with no power cables or no network cables, monitors which are disconnected etc.

Good,so now that we have determined that we have power, the next thing to check would be the network cable. Is the network cable plugged in and more importantly if it is plugged in are there any activity and link lights are that glowing? If you cross this point successfully, you would like to do some basic network checks, can I PING my gateway, can I PING my ISP’s DNS, along with PING you may also want to do a TRACEROUTE, sometimes the issue is still within your network and these commands are essential in tracking down where the problem actually lies.

Now while you are doing all of this, please instead of calling me, call the ISPs help-desk and log a complaint. I already know you have a problem because my monitoring system tells me that. Your call of “It’s not working” is totally redundant for me.

Once you have logged a complaint with the service provider, do remember to ask how long it will take for resolution of the problem. Many times I get “Sir the net was not working and I called ‘put the name of your favourite isp here’ and logged a complaint”. Very good is my reply, however, my next question will always be, “How long will they take to fix it?” at which I normally get complete silence, a blank look or a sheepish “I did not ask…”. Not only is it important to get a fix on how long it will take to resolve the issue, but also a good idea to pull out that contract and check the terms on the SLA. And of course the escalation matrix, cause if you don’t get an answer or fix in the committed time, the next step would be to start climbing the complaint ladder.

Great, now that we have the Internet connection restored and the problem successfully resolved, what should we do next? NO you can’t sit easy it is time to document the issue so that if it ever occurs again you have a good starting point. Build a collection of problems into a little knowledge base. If possible run an internal wiki and maintain the issues there. It is of great value when you need to share with your colleagues or handover to another SysAd. While you are at it, write a blog post, tweet about or share on some of the social Q&A sites and earn some serious brownie points.

Seasons Greetings and all the best for the coming year!

Cheers…Kishore

–

Photograph: Wired Magazine

What does one say at a time like this that has not already been said. Between the social media networks and the conventional media a lot has been stated. What comes out strongly is the great respect that everyone had for the man. You may love or hate Apple as a company, but nobody has anything to say against Steve Jobs. Not his arch rivals, competitors nor those who disagreed with his methods. Respect for his genius is universal.

He is right up there with all other geniuses past, present and future. Be it Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Alva Edison or Albert Einstein and everyone in between. Not to mention those who will soon join the fray in the future. While he is considered an icon of the technology industry, touched the music and movie industries in ways that few had imagined, the true genius is the magical effect that his work brings. People laughed when he called the iPad a magical device, yet it transformed the life of a 3 year old autistic boy who uses it to communicate with his world. The 10 year old girl who was at the bottom of her class due to impaired vision, now has a new lease of life because of her iPad. Old age homes where senior citizens are now using several of these devices to keep themselves entertained, communicative and back on the path to recovery are not aspects of the technology that people had even imagined. They mocked it, and yet it is doing just what Steve Jobs had intended it to do. It is being magical and transforming lives. Only a genius would have realised that this could happen.

It is impossible to pay a fitting tribute to such a great man. The Apple website put it so elegantly and simply just like his designs and philosophy. People would have expected Google to make a doodle for the man, yet their tribute was subtle. Amazon was discrete in their tribute. Wired magazine in their tradition of design and excellence has one of the best tribute pages out there. I do believe that the best homage would be subtle and sombre. Steve Jobs was a very private family man and despite being remembered for his achievements and genius, he will always be remembered as a great human being.

The one quote that sums it all up brilliantly –

Steve was among the greatest of American innovators – brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it — President Barack Obama.

May God bless his soul and give his family, friends and the millions of fans, the strength to bear this great loss.

R.I.P. Steve Jobs

Camp – Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), New Delhi (July 6-8,2011)

A large part of this week was spent by me at CSE. Initially setting up for the workshop and then conducting it. While I am no social media expert or consultant, I normally like to show users some of the technology behind the tools they use or would like to use. Of course, I have to do this in such a way that the session does not seem technical but seems rather human and understandable. Not an easy job, I can vouch for that. My plan was actually a very simple one. I would introduce the participants to some of the things happening on the social media scene and then move on to a completely hands-on workshop getting them to develop a simple website using a CMS, using Mediawiki and hence having the ability to contribute to Wikipedia and finally end with some analytics to measure their success or fine tune their online presence. The CSE website had a very impressive course outline explaining what the course would be about and the intended audience.

However, when I landed up to setup my workshop server I found that a sudden burst of interns having descended upon CSE meant that all desktops and spare computers (there’s no such thing as a spare computer) were immediately deployed. This meant that I did not have a machine for the workshop. After a minor struggle, a hard disk swap and some bruised egos I did finally get my machine. For the setup I needed WordPress and Mediawiki. For really quick installs and virtual servers I tend to use Turnkey Linux I already had the WordPress appliance downloaded with me and had it up and running in a few moments. The problem was I needed this installation to work in multi-site mode so that the participants could make sites working in groups or individually as they preferred. In the past, I have used WordPress MU, but for some time now this functionality has been available in the newer versions (3.x) of WordPress and I was keen to try that. I live dangerously, no point doing something if you are not going to try something new and learn in the process. For some strange reason, my initial configuration for multisite did not work and I finally had to scrap the appliance and start afresh. Must go back and investigate what happened but in the meantime work had to be done.

I went back to the trusted old Centos and did a minimal install, this normally takes less than 10 mins. I added the Centos-Testing repo to get the latest version of PHP and with that installed the rest of the process went rather smoothly. The wordpress “network” was ready. I installed a bunch of themes and a few plugins and network enabled them and we were set.

The participants who attended were from all over the world, we had two people from Nepal, two from Sri Lanka, one from the Republic of Congo, one from Nigeria and the rest were from all over India. All the participants were basically from the communications or media departments of their respective oragnisations and had little or no control over their current websites. In fact, they are dependent on either an internal IT team or an outsourced web design firm. They did feel a little trapped beacuse of this and were looking forward to being more in control.

Day 1 was WordPress day, by the end of the day we had seven websites with varying degrees of complexity, lots of nice designs, photos, features etc. Some even embedded videos and slideshows. Was totally great. Around lunchtime, I did overhear some of the participants say it was very technical, but by the end of the day the results were in front of them. I got them to make quick presentations and the rest to critique and they were all happy.

Day 2 was to be Wikipedia. So we started with some background on Wikipedia and how we are all happy consumers but rarely contributors. The problem came when they actually started using the internal Mediawiki server that we had setup to start creating and populating the wiki. The installation was a default install and had the basic editor, while the editor has buttons for some of the markup, it still displays the markup in the editor and that started confusing people tremendously. What seemed like “technical” the day before now seemed to be a breeze and this was way too complex! But the team from CSE worked hard and we finally had everyone back on track, by the end of the day the wiki was looking good, tons of information had been populated. We did have the scare of one of the users nearly wiping everything out, but did not have to deal with that. It ended rather well. Later in the day they got a session on using Photos and Videos for Advocacy from Sanjukta Basu which they all seemed to have enjoyed.

Day 3 was reserved for strategy and analytics. It started with the team from Blogworks featuring Rajesh Lalwani and Rajika Talwar on marketing and online media strategies, very insightful sessions and despite Rajesh’s promise of “boring sessions” the participants seemed to have really enjoyed themselves and found the sessions invaluable. We finally ended with some web analytics, I showed them statistics on the sites they had created and they were reasonably amused with that. Webalizer did a good job of collecting stats on the multi-site wordpress and the internal MediaWiki and it was interesting for them to see how quickly stats can be collated and interpreted. The last section was on Google Analytics and despite the fact that I was dealing with a new/changed interface using the stats from many of the CSE sites, we managed to show how useful looking at this information could be.

I did find some rather interesting stats on mobile usage. SymbianOS showed up as the number one mobile OS, with iPad lagging behind by just ONE hit! The carrier information too was quite fascinating to look at. I had not noticed how much mobile stats had been added to Google Analytics.

In all I would say a great workshop, fantastic time and as always lots of learning. I must also mention that I had some great help form the team at CSE, Kiran Pandey, Bobby, Saroj Sahoo, Gora Mohanty and several others at CSE.

Cheers…Kishore
–

In general, I am a lazy blogger, I’d like to write more and share more, but often the ideas get stuck in my head and never get written out. Every now then I do get the urge to write and sometimes when I am happy with what I have, I post it to my blog. One of the issues I face is being able to write anywhere and anytime and with minimum fuss. For this of course my laptop is the best resource, but sometimes one just needs a little scribble pad.

On a not so recent trip while returning from Mumbai to Delhi, the airlines I was on pissed me off so much that I needed to vent and what better way than to blog. What I had to say would certainly not fit in 140 characters. With the lack of space on our lovely low-cost carriers there is no room to open up a laptop, however, an iPad is certainly usable. So I promptly whipped out my iPad and started writing my saga. My fellow passenger was watching intently and kept egging me on as well. When we finally came to the point of take-off I switched off and waited patiently for the time I could continue my tirade. To my horror, even though I had set the file for local save, when I went back into the app, the text had all vanished. By then so had my anger and the desire to write faded away. The app I was using was WordPress. Turned out to be a bug which got corrected later, but my vent never saw the light of day.

Over the past few weeks, I came across this truly wonderful website which deals with tablet computing. At the moment, most of the articles/posts are related to the iPad and iPad2. But there are sections for RIM and Android, waiting to get off the ground. As more tablets start appearing, I am sure content for them will also start populating the site. Last week there was a post on a blogging app. Not only that, Shane who manages the site was generously giving away three copies of it. His terms were simple, come and read the post, comment and stand a chance to win the app. I am happy to state that with the two comments I made, I actually won! I received my copy of Blogsy yesterday and am raring to have a go at it.

While I will do a more detailed review of the app, for now I am just curious to explore the features it has and what it is capable of doing. Who knows this may be the push I need to get me to blog, with all excuses being taken away.

The photo was essentially a test of Blogsy to see what it does with images. In fact, truth be told, this entire post was just the first time I used Blogsy and I can tell you I already love it.

Now to go and explore Blogsy in more detail, and hopefully blog more often.

Cheers…Kishore
–

Powered by Blogsy.

Business these days demands participation at a global level. This of course poses several challenges least of which is dealing with multiple people across multiple timezones. Corporations found what they assume to be a simple solution, the inevitable “conference call”. Whether you work for a bank, an IT firm, a law firm or any firm for that matter, in order to collaborate with your colleagues you need to join these dreaded calls.

The process of joining the calls is not always simple, the number to dial is typically a toll-free number and therefore long or in many cases just an international number so still long enough. While the number itself can definitely be stored in the address book of the phone, the problem comes with issuing a conference ID and participant or moderator code.

I did not find a easy way of storing those so that it could be sent at the right time. These are DTMF code sequences which ideally need to be dialed and cannot be cut and pasted into the dialer. Besides, once on a call, most phones do not seem to have a method of sending DTMF tones other than bringing up the dial pad and allowing entry on that.

On my Nokia N900 I found a great little app called “conference manager” that allowed me to automate the process. It lets you define the number to be called, the time to pause for the welcome message and then enter the conference id or passcode. It works totally brilliantly. While I could not figure out how it was doing this, it did remind me of days of old, when dialing with a modem all one needed to do was insert a “comma” or a “pause” along with the phone number. A single comma would typically insert a 2 second pause.

Using the same theory, I decided to test this on my current phone a Nokia C7. Interestingly, on the dial pad the *+ key inserts a pause for you. First press gets you a *, second press gets you a +, third press gets you a p and finally a fourth gets you a w. The w used to be a “wait” on the modem and it basically waits till a key is pressed. I have not yet tested that but I guess I will eventually get around to that too.

So heres an example of how I would dial a service (in this case, sabsebolo.com). The New Delhi access number is +911166194444 my conference ID is 1234567 and conference PIN is 1234 to store the entire sequence and have it dial automatically on my phone here is what I did:

+911166194444pppppppppppp1234567#pp1234#

It works like a charm.

I had tweeted about this a while ago, but when I never got a reaction to the tweet I realised that the 140 character limitation did not let me explain what I was doing and hence nobody understood the tweet. This morning Aseem sent me a tweet asking me for the syntax. The answer was this blog post. Hope this helps!

I did discover that on an iPhone there is no *+ key but there is a pause key in the dialpad and that inserts a comma. Would be curious to know what others experience with their phones.

While I don’t expect you to enjoy the calls, at least dialing in and logging on is painless and can be done hands-free!

Cheers…Kishore
–

While I was in Delhi and not far from Lajpat Nagar I decided to visit my parents-in-law and have lunch with them. Had not visited for a long time so was looking forward to it.

At best of times Lajpat Nagar is packed. On a weekend it gets worse, I kept hunting for a good spot to park and eventually landed up parallel parking behind a bunch of cars. Of course, I left the car in “neutral” so it could be pushed around and went off to lunch. At the back of my mind  I did have a niggling feeling that I should check on my car and kept going out to the balcony to see if there was any sign of the parking attendant or if the car had been moved.

That’s when I first noticed it:

A little brown briefcase seemed to have appeared in front of my car out of nowhere! At first I did not pay attention, but the second time I went out to the balcony, I saw the commotion building up. Got a closer look at it:

I went down to see what was going on and started hearing the various stories. “A speeding Indica, passed by and someone threw the case out of the car”. “Oh no you got it all wrong, it was a guy on a motorcycle and his bag just fell off”.

Someone had taken the initiative and called the police, but it seems that several police vans passed by and none of them stopped. Either not their beat area or off-duty! About 20 minutes later some police did start arriving on the scene and had the two ends of the road blocked off.

Almost an hour after the police arrived, someone came looking for me to move my car. Though I was a little worried, I decided to get my car out of the way. One of the policemen actually said to me…”What a fine place to park your car!”. I did tell him that when I parked there was no briefcase there but he wasn’t listening. He just wanted me to clear the area by moving my car.

The commotion started building up now and lots of cars were being stopped on the other side of the road. A little later a single ambulance also arrived on the scene.

It took over thirty minutes of finding all the car owners and finally getting the place cleared of all cars. One of them even had to be pushed out of the place since it was totally dead and the guys pushing came inches within running over the briefcase. But it was finally all clear.

It was over two hours when the bomb disposal squad arrived on the scene. A nonchalant cop in a pink shirt and what looked like a large lens or torch, bravely came up to the briefcase.

He poked around with the large black thingy, looked up at everyone and proudly announced “खाली हैं” as he opened it. The case was totally and completely empty.

Open and shut case or as a friend of mine on Facebook pointed out a “Brief Case”.

Much to everyone’s disappointment, it turned out to be nothing at all. That was actually scarier than anything else. People were expecting something drastic to happen. The police looked totally unprepared, no protection, no helmets nothing. The bomb squad guy, well the pictures say it all.

The end of the drama. Notice that the building under which this briefcase was found has a complete glass front, the opposite building the one in which I was, also has a glass front. Had this really been a bomb I cannot begin to fathom the damage that would have been caused. While the road was blocked for traffic, more and more people kept gathering at the site. All I can say is thank the lord!

My day was not yet over though. I headed out after lunch to a client’s office where we had a rather energetic Independence Day celebration. I do not have photos of the event as yet but there were lots of cameras and I did take many photos so some shall certainly follow soon.

In all I had a full-of-excitement “Friday-the-thirteenth”, how about you?

Cheers…Kishore
–

The upgrade page at Amazon describes the process in very simple and easy to follow steps. The easiest option of course is to just do the over-the-air upgrade, but I was not sure if I wanted the extra charge on my Amazon account. I decided to go the route of downloading the upgrade file instead. The back of the Kindle shows which version you own. It turns out I own a  Global Wireless edition. Downloaded the file and transferred it to the Kindle and started the process.

The process was quite smooth really. The settings menu now showed an “update” option so I just clicked that and it did the rest all on its own.

The upgrade was successful and the device just rebooted itself. Very neat indeed, no tense moments of being “bricked”. Now to explore the new features.

Font: The first thing you notice, is the font, it suddenly looks a lot crisper and sharper and more readable. The font key (Aa) also shows more sizes available so you can go much smaller and much bigger than the earlier options.

Collections: Something I was missing on the Kindle. Since I use Calibre to manage most of my content, having an option to create a collection on the device was a feature I wanted. Easy to use, Menu -> Create Collection once you have a collection, just add the books to it. Select the book to add -> toggle right on book -> add to collection-> select collection -> Done.

The rest of the new stuff seems to be hidden in the “Settings” menu.

Popular Highlights: Turned on by default, this lets you browse what the rest of the Kindle community is saying about the book that you are currently reading. Since I am currently reading “What the Dog Saw: and Other Adventures” by Malcolm Gladwell the popular highlights for this were several and it was fun browsing through them. This feature came under some flak from a lot of users for they did not really want their highlights shared without permission. I don’t recall the last status of this, but with amount of noise on “privacy” issues on the net these days I am sure it will be dealt with appropriately.

Social Networks: Now this had to happen. The Kindle now lets you Twitter or connect with Facebook account. Once you link your accounts, you can highlight a passage from the book you are reading and it share via these networks. Pretty decent I thought.

Some of the features I have not yet bothered to check, but will in the next couple of days:

PDF Pan and zoom: PDFs on the Kindle have been something that has had a lot of people excited. I have not really bothered much with PDFs since I prefer stuff to be in either text, html or mobi formats. Much lighter and easier to read in any case. But now you can pan and zoom on a PDF, allowing you to easily view smaller text, tables or graphics.

Two of the other features from the update include, Annotations Backup and Device Password. As of now I am not interested in locking the device but it could be a useful feature. Annotations on the other hand were being stored in a text file which could be transferred to the PC in any case and edited or backed up there. Not in a hurry to use that either, but will certainly keep it in mind.

Now while Brazil scores two goals, I am back to watching the match and single-tasking. In the meantime, if you have a Kindle, I’d certainly recommend the upgrade. Well worth it.

Cheers…Kishore
–

My recent problem however, is that there are some places where I manage to find myself and not find a LAN or any form of connectivity. Its rare but it does happen. One such place is our little apartment in Goa. No wired broadband in our area, so no wired connectivity. Its for situations like this that I have my data card. I have been using a Reliance Broadband Netconnect for quite a while and have generally been happy with it. The thing I dislike the most about it, is no “unlimited” scheme. At least, not an affordable one. On my last few visits to Goa, I used the older Reliance data card and cried at its performance, but when I was there recently, I was pleasantly surprised to find the new broadband ones working fine and fairly decent speed as well.

But this brings me back to why I have a router in my bag. Hmmm…let me see how many devices do I carry which have WiFi and need access to the Internet? My notebook, one sometimes two phones, a Nokia N810 Tablet and a Palm TX. Now thats just me, when I add Jyoti’s devices — a netbook, a smartphone and an iPod touch, and then add Kabir as well, fortunately at this stage only an iPod touch. It all adds up. A minimum of nine devices all wanting Internet access.

I could very easily share my connection from my notebook, but it creates a dependence on my machine having to be on and the router all the time. Not that it ever gets switched off, but all the same. I started the hunt for a router which would be small, allow a wired connection but more importantly allow a 3g (EVDO) modem to be used as well.

Anindya Roy, ex PC-Quest told me he was using such a device, in fact, he even mentioned that he was able to listen to Internet Radio while driving around. On checking what he had, I found he was using a HAME – HM433R+ I promptly went out looking for it and managed to get one very efficiently delivered home.

EK Wireless seems to have several products that do stuff like what I wanted and dealing with Elliot Stechman has been a real pleasure. Two quick messages exchanged, bank information was provided, money transferred and device delivered. Came in from Mumbai to Gurgaon with no issues at all.

Setup of the device was trivial, took less than 2 minutes to have the device up and running and connected to the Net. Simple web-interface the only additional information it needed was my Reliance number/password. I am yet to test the router out with my Airtel wired broadband.  Sadly, I do know that it is an either or. It will not bond and balance both a wired and 3G connection. However, Elliot did mention that some of the other products they have do support multiple connections. Including, multiple 3G modems.

In the meantime, I know my next holiday in Goa is not going to be a complete holiday! With connectivity easily available its going to be a shift from home base Gurgaon to home base Goa! As a quick test this afternoon I had at least five devices connected and happily using the Net in no time at all.

Happy Surfing!

Cheers…Kishore
–

PS: Did I mention, they shipped a car adapter as well as a USB power adapter.

We ended with some family joining in for a short burst of colour.

Overall, it was fun.

Here are some photos:

http://kishorebhargava.com/v/Friends/holi2009/

Cheers…Kishore