Tag: tech

Direct from Dell (to Hell)

Prasad Ajinkya9 Comments

No its not a complete, “I hate Dell” post.

I was the student representative for IIM Indore, in handling all the IT problems. I loved it, and liked fixing the varied problems that my classmates, juniors and seniors had. Back then, we had a tie up with Dell for laptops. Roughly at any point of time, at least 70 laptops were there from Dell. The warranty on them had lapsed in a years’ time, so … as Murphy would have it, the problems started cropping up only after then. Thus started the telephone calls over Warranty issues, and the constant bartering … over warranty given on paper … then comes the line, read the fine print. I was glad to hand over the ITCom Secretary post to my able junior .. whew!!

Now I do not own a Dell laptop anymore, but two of my colleagues do. Both have malfunctioning laptop batteries and chargers to boot, so the machine refuses to run without AC power and a functioning battery. Ok … easy solution … go to support dot dell dot com and raise a request. One month wait for customer care to respond. Fine, lets raise a sales enquiry of purchasing a new battery and a charger … one month wait for sales to respond. Is the site working anymore?

If you have a website and are making case studies of it in so many b-schools, then can you make sure it works properly; and if it is working properly, then why not respond to the customer, establishing their expectations. No response is a no-no. That has not only resulted in lost sales, but more importantly lost customers. An easier approach would be to sell extended warranty support to them and retain them as customers.

Music Spiral

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I am a last.fm user. Been an active user since March 2nd, 2008. For the uninitiated, what last.fm does is it stores my music plays and tastes and also recommends me music which I might like to listen, based on my tastes … collaborative filtering + social community.

So, they have revamped their site design … added so many widgets (I had sported some on my blog) … now they are allowing this data to be accessed through API!! What this means that the gazillions of programmers out there can come out with their own version of add-ons for this application. What that means … is that there is a big pay load of data to be mined. I saw this music spiral application for instance … it generates my music spiral (dont ask me what it is) … it looks pretty.

If you ask me the exact application .. go figure :-)

Groupware

Prasad Ajinkya6 Comments

So we finally decided that Google Apps is not a sustainable idea without subscribing to their paid service (which costs a LOT by the way!). The only solution – look for alternatives who can give the same kind of service (my Head Ops wants this, thats Manish) and be as easy to administer (I want this) for as less as possible (my finance guy wants this). Yes, we want the BEST :)

So after doing a long due diligence, we decided, that having our very own hosted email server would be better (yeah, the cost-effectiveness hurts since Google Apps was free). Now, my MD wanted an interface where everyone’s schedules and calendars were visible to every other person. So, the need for a calendaring system was apparent, the moment he said that … I realized that we want something like the Google Apps paid version at a cheap cost. Fair enough, we can have that, just buy MS Exchange and enough Office licenses instead of using Gnumeric and Abiword bounded with QMail. My headaches would be resolved. Again, the financing of this exercise looks like a nightmare to me.

So, I have to look the open source way once more. Apple apparently offers CalDav, which works well with Outlook even (Thunderbird needs Lightning extension, or you can use Sunbird). Very good, so I take one derelict machine lying in my office (it’s a P3 you know :-)), and I install Ubuntu 7.1 on it. The installation goes without a hitch, I choose command line and remove the GUI interface, that drastically brings the load on the machine down. Sadly, for some reason CalDav is not installing, I cant compile the @*#@*^ file.

No worries, I look around and then decide to go with eGroupware, which needs not much just apache2, php, mysql and its own binaries. Installation has now begun …

10 minutes later … the file system on the machine has crashed. Some days are just fun days :-)

I am beginning to appreciate Google Apps from a whole new perspective.

GraceNote

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Day before yesterday, I updated my Winamp … and normally I do not saunter around this software, I just listen to songs and be happy with that. That day, I was tinkering around with the Media Library, and saw this awesome AutoTag feature.

Don’t you want to classify your ever growing music collection Artist-wise, Genre-wise, BPM-wise, Year-wise, Album-wise, so on and so forth? Won’t it be great if you could manage that? Believe me, I try but have never managed to do so, so many songs, just 10 fingers. I bet many of you would also face the same problem. ITunes has a facility of tagging the songs, but you need an IStore id, and that aint available in India. Bummer!!

Worry nought!! GraceNote is here … its a firm bought over by Sony Inc. for $260 million sometime back. They have an online CDDB collection, for tagging your songs automatically. Winamp is integrated with that. Wooohooo!!

No more listening to Title – Artist.mp3 :-)