How did Rack Middleware saved us?

Have more Ideas, but less Resources? Exactly, it forced us to find an alternative to the traditional application development. We found ourselves repeating same features across multiple applications. One natural thought came to us, is to avoid repeating same features, which is cumbersome and time consuming. We needed a solution in which the common functionalities should be made available to multiple applications with less effort and less maintenance.
Problems duplicating same functionalities:
Let's take contact us page as an example. All our applications, eServicePlace.com, PairWorks.com, eduHelp.in and our company website absolut-e.com need to have contact us page. Contact us is a simple page with a form, which users can use to contact us with their question. Well its a pretty simple that need a page, model, email notification, view the list of users and their questions.
How we did it?

1. develop the contact us functionality in eduHelp.in
2. test it and deploy to production
3. copy the controller, model, migrations to hiringopen.com
4. configure the necessary components
5. test it thoroughly and deploy to production

Using Rails Plugin:

1. develop the contact us functionality in eduHelp.in
2. test it and deploy to production
3. package it into a rails plugin
4. install it in hiringopen.com
5. test it
6. deploy and configure in production

As you have noticed, rails plugin helped us but not much to the extend we expected

Rack Middleware:

1. develop contact us functionality in a standalone application
2. test it
3. deploy and configure in a standalone production environment
4. create a rack layer for this application
5. add the rack layer to application like eduhelp.in and hiringopen.com that needed this functionality

Yes, no testing and configuration required in this case that saved us time and freed some resources. We just started using rack middleware couple of months ago and glad, we found it.

There are tonnes of rack middleware resources found in the web, please google it and let me know if you find any
interesting article.

Have you used Rack Middleware and how do you feel?

Painless Checkout with Folcia.com

As each day pass by, buying products online is becoming easy and painless. One such experience was with folcia.com. They have completely eliminated the registration process for one time buyer and the fact is I didn't even realize I am an unregistered user.

1. Add product to the cart
2. Secure checkout
3. Enter your shipping address
4. Enter you billing address if different from shipping address
5. Enter credit card information
6. Presented with confirmation page.
7. Create an account by entering just the password (optional)

How I removed "Spyware Protect 2009" from my Windows XP?

I panicked, when a small popup appeared at the right bottom of my computer screen, that read, "Your computer was infected with virus". I clicked on the message and it opened "Spyware Protect 2009". I am doomed.
I googled for fixes,but to my frustration, all the fixes suggested to download some software, that can remove this spyware. What if they were another spyware, so, I am not ready for that.
So, I decided to do it on my own. Below are the steps that worked for me.

Steps to remove Spyware

1. go to taskmanager >> processes
2. kill any one process starting at the top and check the system tray at the right bottom, to see if the spyware is gone
3. repeat the step 2 until the spyware icon is gone from the system tray
4. When its gone, note the name of the process you deleted just before that (in my case it was sysguard.exe)
5. open windows explorer and search for "sysguard.exe"
6. Delete the files found in the search (in my case there were two files sysguard.exe & SYSGUARD.exe-SOME_NUMBER.pf)
7. Restart the computer

I hope this will save some frustration for you. Above steps should work fine for any spyware.
Have any experience with Spyware, please post a comment.

Self Publishing Your Book Made Easy

One fine day, I was listening to a podcast, in which the lulu.com founder was discussing the reasons behind lulu. They were thought provoking and here they are

1. Will you be motivated enough to write a review for a book, when there are thousands of reviews already in Amazon. What if you can write a review for your friends, will that be enough to motivate you.
2. Publishing companies allows your book only if they are sure they can sell more than 200000 copies.
3. where will the potential and promising new writers go
   
4. Right now in lulu, writers are more in numbers than readers. For lulu to succeed they need more readers than writers.
   
5. discover good authors using various techniques / statistics
   
6. market to social networking
7. one have to read and recommend it to his friends

Is your service or business addressing a specific problem?. Are you clear about the problem you are solving. If so, you have more chance to succeed.

Below are our products and the problem they are trying to solve.
eServicePlace - No easy way to compare and buy services online
HiringOpen - Searching multiple job sites is tedious
eduhelp.in - No easy way to choose the right college
CheetSheet - Everyone need their own cheatsheet.

Certainly, LuLu is not the only player in this market(self publishing book).
Do you know any other players in this field?

Tips to Pick the Right Domain Name

You got a great website for selling your product/service. Now you need a domain name that goes with it.
An easy to remember domain, that follows one of the below rules will help you and your customers.

1. your company name
2. your product name
3. benefits from your product/service
4. action taken by your users

There are billions of websites, with thousands coming everyday. If you think of a name and most probably they might have already taken by someone. If you are ready to pay for
good domain, then you can do that. But if you are not, then following tips will help you save lot of time.
1. Build keyword list
  First important step in picking the domain name is to find the keywords related to your business.
  Google keyword analyzer, will come handy, in building keywords, which you can use later to form a domain name. When you enter your product related keywords to the keyword analyzer or your competitor website, it will analyze and give you a list of keyword suggestions. Pick the ones that has most search volume, not the ones you like most. There are many other tools to help you build the keyword list.
  Google Sets is another tool that will give predict other keywords based on the specified keywords.
  Keywords can be names, verbs, nouns, action, benefits, mean users etc. When you have the list of keywords ready, go to next step

2. Check Domain Availability
  Domain name tools will help you to find out if a domain name is available. Some tools are more flexible, meaning, they even combine the words specified by you and check their availability. One such tool is www.bustaname.com, in which you can specify multiple keywords and it will mix and match the words and will spit out the available combination's. This will be a huge time saver. The best feature is for each word added, you can view and add the similar words.

3. Register Domain Name
  When you found the domain, that suits your purpose, you can register it with most hosting providers. godaddy and networksolutions are examples of web hosting provider, where you can register your domain.

I hope this article will help you to find your dream domain.
Good luck

Load Data with Rails using ActiveWarehouseETL

So, you want to load data from one database to another
and
do some transformations during the loading process?
and
you want to do this using super cool rails

No more worries, ActiveWarehouse, rails plugin, will help you to do just that.This documentation will help you to get started on ActiveWarehouse. Here is an simple example and steps involved to achieve that.

You want to move people from canada_database to us_database and change their country to "us". Don't change if the country is different from canada.

canada_database
people (table)
first_name, last_name, country (columns)
Bob, Smith,canada
John, Stewart, canada

Below is our final expected output

us_database
people (table)
first_name, last_name, country (columns)
Bob, Smith,us
John, Stewart, us

Let's get started

1. Create Rails Project
2. Configure databases:
You need to have these 3 entries in your database.yml

etl_execution:
adapter: mysql
encoding: utf8
database: etl_execution
username: test
password: test
host: localhost

datawarehouse:
adapter: mysql
encoding: utf8
database: us_database
username: test
password: test
host: localhost

operational:
adapter: mysql
encoding: utf8
database: canada_database
username: test
password: test
host: localhost

Run "rake db:create:all" to create these databases
3. create folder "etl" under RAILS_ROOT or wherever you desire.
You will be working in this follder for all your data related tasks.
4. create a file etl\people.etl (naming standard for the file is destination table name) with below contents

source :in, {
:database => "canada_database",
:target => :operational,
:table => "people"
},
[
:first_name,
:last_name,
:country
]
transform :first_name, :default, :default_value => "No First Name" #transformations will be applied to each row before writing to destination
transform :last_name, :default, :default_value => "No Last Name"
transform(:country){|name,value,row| value=="canada"?"us":value }
destination :out, {
:database => "us_database",
:target => :datawarehouse,
:table => "peoples"
}, {
:order => [:first_name, :last_name, :country, :updated_at],
:virtual => {
:updated_at => Time.now
},
}

5. Create a model and run the migration
"people" with columns first_name,last_name,country,created_at,updated_at
6. Run the etl process (data loading process)
Open command prompt and go to etl folder
Run

etl people.etl

This will load the data and will give you the number of rows processed.

Creativity doesn't need a special Gene

This year's PodCamp Toronto, a two day blogger event, had many sessions geared towards expanding and exploring your social networks. But one particular session, that caught my attention, was "Fostering Creativity" by Michael Mistretta, in which, he discussed how passion, creativity and a little hard work can take an idea from conception to execution.
Most of us believe "Creativity needs a special gene" and refuse to take on tasks that, we believe, needs that gene. According to Michael, its just an excuse for being lazy.
A Sculptor who create an amazing statue does it after his uncountable hours of practicing and frustration. What differentiates an ordinary man from a creator is passion and hard work.
So, Free yourself and don't let your belief limit you.
Another notable presentation, "Stalking Your Audience for Fun & Profit.." by Sean Power, helped us understand different ways of monitoring, stalking our Audiences.

Tools for listening, stalking, monitoring our audiences:

1. radiant6
2. backtype
3. boardreader
4. mon.itor.us
5. google sets
6. google trends
7. google alerts
8. twemes
9. buzzfeed
10. tinyurl
11. trendrr

Though tools help us a lot, its merely a transmission channel for our messages. Message is the critical ingredient for our social networking success.

click here to view all the PodCamp Toronto presentations