The big appeal Excel is the low learning curve. Data is neatly organized in rows and columns. It’s easy to change fonts, cells’ color, or anything about the looks. But I don’t care how much of a wizard you are in Excel, there’s just no way that you’re going to design a decent user interface. Excel wasn’t designed for it, and the effort to make that round peg fit into a square hole isn’t worth it.

The ease of use is deceptive. Because it’s seemingly easy to work in Excel, things aren’t always well thought out. Most of that’s because of the fundamental nature of Excel: a data siloed into a single file. Sure you can query data from a database, but organizations won’t always put the effort. Excel makes you feel agile, when you’re unwittingly running around in circles. A centralized system makes so many things easier to manage: data backup, data quality, reporting, analytics and information insight, etc.

One last rant: if your data requires one-to-many or many-to-many relationships, stop using Excel immediately. There’s just no good way to handle that in Excel, unless you’re willing to write your own DBMS, but at that point you can use MySQL, PostreSQL, SQL Server, or any other database system. Excel has its limited use in the world, but you gotta think thrice before you want to use it. Many times SharePoint and InfoPath could be your better solution.

I recently bought an iPhone 4S, because it’s finally on Sprint! I’ve owned a 1^st gen iPod touch for a year, but a lot has changed since then. Yet, iOS 5 still has a similar look and feel, but more features have made it way more productive.

Some of the features I like the most about iOS: fast app switching, excellent battery life (I’ve never had problems, despite the bad press Apple has received), plethora of apps, gorgeous screen, and musicality. Yes, other platforms have fast app-switching, but iOS gets it done quicker. A home button double-tap takes no time, and the scrolling list stretches for miles, and includes media playback controls! On other platforms, you have to hold a button for at least a second, and then the switching begins. Even then, it’s not as useful as the iOS way.

I get excellent battery life with my iPhone and with the HTC Trophy. I’ll admit, at times I was afraid to use my Android phone because I didn’t want to eat up battery life and not make it through the day without recharging. Some people have told me that Facebook Android app notifications can really drain the battery. I haven’t been able to confirm this, but I think that it’s ridiculous that installing (or uninstalling) a single app can ruin the experience of the whole phone.

With the plethora of apps, there’s no shortage of what the iPhone can do. The app sandboxing is nice in that I can install whatever app I want without fear of ruining the whole phone. One thing I noticed with Android is that as you install apps and widgets, the system doesn’t run as smoothly, and the phone takes a hit on battery life. The awesome user interface looks amazing on the screen.

The one thing my phone does more than anything else is play music. Playback controls are well integrated with the entire iOS, from the lockscreen to the fast app-switching. iTunes Match (unfortunately delayed) is going to make buying and enjoying music even more awesome.

Even after singing Apple’s praises, there’s plenty that I don’t like about the iPhone. I wish that apps could share data on the phone. When I installed the Google apps, I had to log into my Google account within every app. Though it’s a one-time thing, it’s still annoying that I can’t log in once and use those credentials within different apps. There are security advantages that apps can’t directly share data between each other on the phone. Data sharing will just have to occur over the air.

Overall, iOS is a fantastic mobile operating system. It’s intuitive and easy to use, yet powerful enough to be productive in everyday use.

Android

My first smartphone was a Windows Mobile. After that terrible experience, I moved onto an HTC Evo and then a Samsung Nexus S 4G. Android is a decent mobile OS, and honestly I’m excited about the new features that Google is bringing in Ice Cream Sandwich. With any open system, it’s prone to abuse and insecurity. The burden of security lies primarily on the user: apps are not screened in the Marketplace and you have to confirm the app’s permissions when you install. Seriously, who actually reads what the app requests? Even if the app only asks for “internet permissions”, security was seriously compromised on certain HTC Sense phones.

From a user experience standpoint, some may argue that iOS is too simple. Widgets, custom home-screen launchers, and limited app backgrounding are fully in place on Android. These tweaks might we appropriate for a desktop system with copious resources and screen real estate. On a mobile device, I need to do certain things quickly and efficiently: email, calendar, and music. Most of the time my phone plays music, and I love that the iPhone is built around the iPod. It’s a phenomenal music player. Double tap the home button, and bam, you get playback controls on the lockscreen. Within any app, double tap the home button, swipe to the right, and music controls are ready to roll.

I think it’s terrible that the user experience changes from device to device. It’s quite nice to have an iPhone 4S, and overall it’s as easy to use as my 1^st gen iPod touch. Of course there are tons of awesome new features (amazing camera, Siri, best mobile gaming, etc.), but the day-to-day operation is a seamless transition.

Windows Phone 7

My up-and-coming favorite is WP7. I got an HTC Trophy for my work phone, and it’s a great blend of what’s good about Android and iOS. The recently released Mango update brings a boatload of amazing features. It’s not without its quirks and room for improvement, but it’s a big step in the right direction.

I really enjoy the consistent user experience of all WP7 devices I’ve used. It’s commendable that Microsoft has minimum hardware requirements for devices, so a manufacturer can’t put WP7 on a device willy-nilly. It’s a good way to ensure that crappy devices don’t tarnish the Windows Phone brand and experience. Overall the phone runs silky smooth is fun to use.

Music playback is a key feature which has been drastically improved in Mango. Playback controls are always on the lockscreen when you have media queued up or playing. It’s super easy to switch tracks or pause playback. I’m not a big fan of the Zune software, because it’s more confusing than iTunes. I’ve subscribed to some podcasts on the Trophy, and it’s quite easy to manage downloads and listen.

Mango brought some much needed features, like app fast resuming, though it still needs some more polish. It’s easy to hold down the back button and switch back to the last 5 launched apps, but I don’t always use it. Let’s say that I’m in the Spotify app listening to music, but then I go back to the home screen to check out a live tile or something. With a Mango-ified app, I could hold the back button and get right back into the app. But if I re-launch the app from the home screen, it completely reloads the app instead of the fast resume. I think it would be easy to implement something that checks if the app you’re launching is on the recently ran list. Then you do a fast resume instead of a full start.

I love the social integration in Windows Phone 7. Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, and your contacts are very nicely merged together. Even messaging is integrated between Facebook and texts. Now if only we could get a decent Google chat client for WP7…

There are many apps available for Windows Phone, and they recently passed a significant milestone of 40,000 apps in the Windows Marketplace. Most of the apps I’ve used are very high-quality. Many major apps are available, but it’s still not the caliber of iOS and Android apps. For example, you can search and do many things on the Yelp app, but you can’t check-in with the WP7 version for some reason. There still isn’t a Mint.com app yet.

These are a small selection of my experience with all three platforms. Because of maturity and selection of apps, I’d rank iOS #1 in my book. Windows Phone is super slick, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone considering a new smartphone. Next year dual-core and LTE is coming to WP7, which will make it more competitive within the industry. Android still has a lot of maturing to do. The overall system isn’t well integrated and runs sluggish many times, even on my stock “official Android” Nexus S. We’ll see what happens in a couple of years when Gartner and IDC predict that Windows Phone will become the 2^nd most popular mobile OS (and I hope it comes true).

I think it has to do with abstraction and personalization. Traditionally, people had usernames and handles to identify themselves on the web. When you see “sk8er_dude”, you don’t immediately think, “That’s my friend from school, Timmy.” That online identity is closely tied to their online actions. Somehow, Facebook has made us comfortable with disclosing our full names online, and thus personalizing the way we communicate online.

When I pull up Facebook, I see the names of people I know and what they’re posting online. Sometimes when I see them around campus, I remember seeing something that they posted (pictures, a link, a status update, etc.), and it can be something for us to talk about. By removing the username abstraction, Facebook has enabled us to connect through the web on a more personal level and change the face of modern communication.

Prerequsites

First, I’m going to assume that you already have WinEdt 6 and MiKTeX already installed and working. I’m doing this on a Windows 7 x64 machine, but this process would work on any other Windows computer, regardless of x86 or x64.

Install Gnuplot

Gnuplot doesn’t have an automated installer, but if you download the latest version (4.4.3 as of writing), you can extract the file contents. I downloaded “gp443win32.zip” from SourceForge and extracted the folder contents. Copy the “gnuplot” folder to your “C:\Program Files\” directory. Afterwards, you should have a structure like

C:\Program Files\gnuplot>
├───binary
│   ├───etc
│   │   └───fonts
│   └───share
│       └───gnuplot
│           └───4.4
│               ├───js
│               ├───lua
│               └───PostScript
├───contrib
│   └───pm3d
├───demo
├───docs
│   ├───postscript-terminal
│   └───tutorial
└───license
    ├───cairo
    ├───expat
    ├───fontconfig
    ├───freetype
    ├───gd
    ├───jpeg
    ├───libpng
    ├───lua
    ├───MinGW
    ├───pango
    ├───tiff
    ├───win-iconv
    ├───wxWidgets
    └───zlib

Add Gnuplot to path

Next go to the System control panel -> Advanced system settings -> “Advanced” tab -> Environment variables. In the “System variables” section, scroll down to the “Path” variable and edit it. In the “Variable value” box, append a semi-colon and the path to Gnuplot binaries:

Editing path

For example, you want to add

;C:\Program Files\gnuplot\binary

to the end of the Path variable. To test and make sure that this works, open up a command prompt or from the Run menu, type “gnuplot” without the quotes and you should see a Gnuplot prompt.

Enable Gnuplot in WinEdt

Now launch WinEdt, and from the Options menu, select “Execution Modes.” In the Accessories list on the left, select “PDFLaTeX”, and in the Switches text box, add

--enable-write18

to allow pdflatex.exe to execute external programs.

Execution options

I found a code example using TikZ at TeXample.net, copied and pasted it into a new TeX document in WinEdt, clicked the PDFLaTeX button, and voila! I got a nice graph from Gnuplot:

Final output

First off, I have an Elite Xbox 360 (Zephyr motherboard) that’s about two years old. I’ve installed the latest Xbox Dashboard with ESPN streaming, which is freaking awesome. I have some large high definition video files larger than 4GB I want to play. I recently bought a 2TB Samsung hard drive from NewEgg, and since I need support for large files, I can’t use FAT32.

I Googled and found that the Xbox supports HFS+, the MacOS extended file system. Perfect! I formatted the drive with Disk Utility on my Mac, and I thought I was good to go. I copied some files over to the new drive and plugged the USB drive into my Xbox, but the Xbox didn’t recognize the drive. Nothing showed up on the Xbox as a connected portable device.

It turns out that Disk Utility partitioned the drive with GPT (GUID Partition Table, the successor to the old MBR (Master Boot Record). So I had to changed how the new drive was partitioned. The usual warning applies: you will lose all data on your drive when you repartition the drive this way!!

Click "Options" in Disk Utility after choosing the volume schema

Select "Master Boot Record" for partitioning options

I guess the Xbox isn’t compatible with GPT. So I repartitioned the drive with MBR, formatted it to MacOS Extended (not journaled). Hooked it up to the Xbox, and bam! Everything works fine.

EDIT: Some other caveats: Even though HFS+ has support for files larger than 4GB, the Xbox is still limited opening files less than 4GB in size. A dumb limitation, IMO, but I can still use the drive for other large files on my Mac.

First, the environment:

• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard x64
• 4.0GB of RAM
• Java 1.6.0_21 64-bit edition
• MySQL 5.1.51 for Win64 Community Edition
• Opentaps 1.5M1

This guide assumes that the environment for our small scale project, we’re running everything on one machine. One could use one computer for an application server running Ofbiz connecting to a dedicated MySQL database server hosted somewhere else.

We’ll start by downloading Opentaps. Extract it to C:\opentaps-1.5M1

Download Apache Ant binary distributions. As of this writing, version 1.8.1 is the current release. Extract its contents to C:\apache-ant-1.8.1

Follow the following steps on the Opentaps Wiki for setting up MySQL. Install MySQL, create the user, create the database, and configure Opentaps to use MySQL for storing data. Do not run the ant command at the end of the guide yet! For reference, the “localmysql” entry in my entityengine.xml file looks like the following:

    <datasource name="localmysql"
            helper-class="org.ofbiz.entity.datasource.GenericHelperDAO"
            field-type-name="mysql"
            check-on-start="true"
            add-missing-on-start="true"
            check-pks-on-start="false"
            use-foreign-keys="true"
            join-style="ansi-no-parenthesis"
            alias-view-columns="false"
            drop-fk-use-foreign-key-keyword="true"
            table-type="InnoDB"
            character-set="utf8"
            collate="utf8_general_ci">
        <read-data reader-name="seed"/>
        <read-data reader-name="seed-initial"/>
        <read-data reader-name="demo"/>
        <read-data reader-name="ext"/>
        <inline-jdbc
                jdbc-driver="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"
                jdbc-uri="jdbc:mysql://127.0.0.1/opentaps?autoReconnect=true&amp;useOldAliasMetadataBehavior=true"
                jdbc-username="opentaps"
                jdbc-password="opentaps_password"
                isolation-level="ReadCommitted"
                pool-minsize="2"
                pool-maxsize="250"/>
        <!-- <jndi-jdbc jndi-server-name="localjndi" jndi-name="java:/MySqlDataSource" isolation-level="Serializable"/> -->
    </datasource>

One tip for setting up the Java. I would recommend setting up a system environment variable, so every time you open the command prompt or PowerShell, you’ll always have %JAVA_HOME% locked and loaded to go.

So now we’re getting ready to put things all together. Open up a command prompt or PowerShell. Type the following commands:

cd \opentaps-1.5M1
C:\apache-ant-1.8.1\bin\ant run-install-seed
C:\apache-ant-1.8.1\bin\ant create-admin-user-login

At this point it will prompt you for a username. For this demo, we’ll use ‘administrator’. The default password will be ‘ofbiz’. When we ant build with the ‘run-install-seed’ option, we’re populating the database with the skeleton of the ERP system (HR, accounting, inventory, catalogs, etc.), but without the demo dummy data.

This last part is a hackish workaround. If you try to log in with the ‘administrator’ account that you created, Opentaps should redirect you to a page to change the password, but there’s a bug or something’s broken. So from the Start Menu, open up the “MySQL Command Line Client”. It will prompt you for the root password that you used in the setup. Type the following commands:

use opentaps
update user_login set require_password_change='Y', enabled='Y' where user_login_id='administrator';

Now you’re ready to start! Open the command prompt, and type ‘\opentaps-1.5M1\startofbiz.bat’. After about a minute, you can pull up a web browser, go to http://localhost:8080/opentaps and log in with your administrator account!

Stay tuned because there’s more to come about migrating data and custom entities!

Why? The first thing I did was check my Gmail, and I was greeted by this:

I use Google Chat all the time, and I need it to work. I thought that the problem might be a security setting (something like IE9 prevents displaying mixed content of secure and insecure stuff). I turned that off, but it didn’t fix the the problem. I don’t want to keep wrestling with IE9 and try to make it work. So I’m back to using Chrome.

I’ll come back to IE9 again when there’s an updated beta that properly works with Gmail.

Remember AOL keywords back in the day? Everyone and their dog advertised, “Use the AOL keyword: aolsucks.” This magic keyword made it easy for anyone to navigate the World Wide Web. Yesterday after class, I went to Carl’s Jr. with a friend. Every tray cover had “http://www.facebook.com/carlsjr” <—- (notice the Facebook keyword?) It’s an easy way for companies to keep tabs on people and collect personal information about your interests and habits. Lesson learned: Facebook will be the next AOL.

This happened to me in California the other week. I was there for a friend’s wedding, and I rented a car to get around for the weekend. The rental was supposed to last 24 hours, so I needed to return the car at 8:30p on a Friday night. The wedding reception started at 7pm. I could have cut it short and leave early, so I could have returned the car late. The reception was super fun with tons of dancing, so I stayed late.

The airport wasn’t far away from the church, but I didn’t end up getting there until about 10:00pm. I pulled up to return the car to Alamo. Since I just came from the reception, I was still dressed in my suit and wearing a boutonnière. Feeling pretty good, I got out of the car and genuinely asked the guy how he was doing that night. He said he was doing fine. The guy checked in my car, and he told me that they had to charge me $30 for 2 extra hours. I was feeling good, so I said that was fine to charge it to my Amex. I apologized to the attendant, and told him that my friend’s wedding reception ran late. I don’t know if the guy felt sorry for me or maybe he thought I was nice. He said that he was going to wave the 2-hour charge! I saved $30 just because I was nice to the guy.

Lesson learned: you never know what you’re going to get just by being nice.