Got an android phone for myself!

I had a SE W810i for a long time and lost it few months back while riding my bike. I am conservative in spending on gadgets, comparing with same segment of people like me. Especially I don't go out and spend whenever there is a new gadget out with a new technology. So losing the phone was a good excuse to buy a better phone. But I was confused with too many options with a budget of INR 15,000.

My budget was around - 15,000 INR. iPhone, Motorola Milestone and HTC HD,Hero,Xperia X10 all were out!

I wanted a compact touch screen phone - Almost all Nokia phones were ruled out due to the size factor!

I wanted an Android phone - Samsung Jet was out

Finally had a choice of Samsung I7500 Galaxy, I5700 Spica and HTC Tattoo on the radar. When I had gone to the shop, I could not find I5700 Spica and the salesperson discouraged me from buying I7500 as there were too many complaints and many consumers have returned the phone back. I didn't personally like HTC Tattoo and I was left out with no choice again.

So I decided to buy a stop-gap phone and bought Samsung Metro which was just INR 4,000. I was using it for 3-4 months and was very unhappy especially with the voice clarity.

Last week I came across this phone Sony Xperia X10 mini pro and I was quite impressed with it's specifications,

Android 1.6

600 MHz processor

5 MP Camera with LED Flash

3G, Wi-Fi

Touch & QWERTY

Timescape included

Very compact

I didn't want to think too much this time as I easily get confused with the options. So visited the shop on Sunday and bought it in less than an hour.

I am still searching for a good pouch and scratch resistance screen for my Xperia X10 mini pro before I start using it full time. I tried out accessing GMail and Facebook through the phone and it was fast and I could read the emails and messages without difficulty.

Hope I would find more time to explore the phone in the coming weeks!

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Web Intelligence Table - Hiding a column

The legend Full Client (in 6.5 and earlier versions of BOBJ) and the modern desktop intelligence do support hiding of columns in a table displayed on the report. But the world is moving towards Web Intelligence as it avoids all administrative work to be done on the client machines. You still get the power of offline analysis using Web Intelligence Rich Client (XI 3.1 and above).

I think I am not coming to the point; In Web Intelligence one cannot hide a column in a table. Why would one want to hide a column while it does not need to be displayed? One simple answer that I can think of is SORTing. To sort a table on a particular object, the particular object must be part of the table as a column.

So the feature of hiding a column is not supported in web intelligence as of XI 3.1 SP2. But as always there is a work around to render this function. There could be more work arounds to achieve the same but I want to share the one that I know.

Let us say that you have Obj 1, Obj 2, Obj 3, Obj 4 & Obj 5 available in a data provider and you want to display only Obj 1, Obj 2 & Obj 5 in a table and sort the table based on Obj 4.

Step 1 - Create a table with Obj 1, Obj 2 & Obj 4. Note that I am including only three columns as needed to be diaplyed but excluding Obj 5 and adding Obj 4 instead.

Step 2 - Apply sort on Obj 4

Step 3 - Now comes the twist - Create an alerter on Obj 4 with a condition that would always succeed (like 1=1). In the alerter definition, you would have an option to specify what needs to be diaplyed upon success of the expression. In this case, make the object to be displayed as Obj 5

Step 4 - You would see the table with the Obj 1, Obj 2 & Obj 5 and it is also sorted on Obj 4

We’re done. Isn’t that cool?

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Happy New Year 2010

A very happy new year to everyone. Every year I take some resolutions and I always go away from keeping up to those. Thus I have decided not to take any resolutions that are unrealistic.

I am on a project which keeps me away from connecting to the internet most of the time. Also facebook, twitter and personal life priorities keeping me away from writing my experiences.

With my little son, this whole year is going to be exciting and demanding. I have realized lot more about my abilities and my interests at work. Will try to read one book every month this year. Will try to blog my experiences at work.

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SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 - Webinteligence Prompts

The prompts in webintelligence were the ones which gets the attention of the business users first as they provide input through them to refresh their reports. It is the starting point and prior to XI 3x release, they were very minimalistic in feature.

I was asked for a default value option for so many years and also about leaving one of the prompts as optional. Finally SAP BusinessObjects has delivered these two simple but most wanted features. Take a look at the image. You can do both these things when you define the prompts in the Query Panel.




But cascading prompts is not available yet. Cascading LOV is available but not prompts. It is one of the most sought features in webintelligence for a long time now.

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The Human touch!

Today morning, I went to the railway station to send off few folks. It was 6:00 in the morning and the station was so crowded. The train came at around 6:20, my folks got in and the train started leaving the station in another 2 mins.

When I was walking back to my car on the platform, I saw people waving their hands and shouting to stop the train. What the heck? Then I saw an old lay who just missed to get into the train and people (strangers) were trying to help her. When the train guard in the last coach saw these people shouting and waving their hands to stop the train, SMILED and communicated over radio to his co-worker in the front of the train to stop the train. I saw smiles on almost everyone who were waiting for other trains.

What touched me was - the willingness of people to help a person whom they are not connected with. These kind of willingness to help was very common in the place where I grew up but it has slowly started to subside these days. The fast paced life, running behind the monetary benefits, greediness, etc made us to become more ego-centric.

It takes a little to help but the satisfaction and gratitude goes a long way!

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#TH!NKtweet - 140 bite sized lessons

#TH!NKtweet is a book authored by Rajesh Setty in the style of tweets. The book's detailed caption says it all - "140-bite sized lessons for fast paced world".

I got to read the book. I always get impressed by the ideas and simple thoughts of the author. But an idea about reaching to the world with his ideas using twitter style is terrific. It hardly took 30 mins - 1 hour to read the complete book. As usual his wise thoughts about personal life, business, networking are simple and powerful.


Extras:
The author is well known for his ideas for better life. It is so easy to understand things when he explains it in his style. Read his blog and you will certainly understand what I am saying. I just made announcement about his book Upbeat.

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UPBEAT by Rajesh Setty

It's not very usual to see a post like this in my blog. Thanks to Rajesh Setty who has given me an opportunity to announce about his new book to the world. I have been following his blog for more than a year and I love his writing.

He has decided to make use of the blogs as one of the marketing medium for his recent book Upbeat and requested for volunteers on his site. I was one of the luckier people to get a chance to announce about the book to the world. And Rajesh has not asked for a free service; he has some goodies as gifts for taking part in the Virtual Blog Tour. Thus I am here to make an announcement about his book,

Author Bio:
Rajesh’s mission in life is to bring good ideas to life. With love!
Rajesh is involved in a few companies in some combination as a founder, operating executive, board member and/or an investor. Apart from that, he has written a few books and is working on a number of them. His first book was published at the age of thirteen. While he is not building companies or writing, he enjoys speaking at conferences and company events.
You can read his latest thoughts on his blog Life Beyond Code or on Twitter at UpbeatNow. If you are really curious to know the events that shaped his thinking, you can read his story so far here.
Rajesh lives in the Silicon Valley with his wife Kavitha and son Sumukh

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Quick thoughts on the shortcomings of BusinessObjects!

I was reading this comparison between Microstratgey 9 and BusinessObjects XI 3.1 by Microstratgey.

http://www.microstrategy.com/quicktours/businessobjects/index.asp

I understand that this article will not talk about the strengths of BusinessObjects as it was compiled by Microstrategy. But few things that I wish BusinessObjects can bring in are

- The consistency across the different reporting panels for webintelligence
- Reusable components for webintelligence. Like data provider reuse or report reuse.
- Consolidate the number of information delivery tools to two or three.
- The long term wish would be to have one information delivery tool which could be catered to all types of information delivery needs. Like the application should be able to adapt and metamorph it’s interface based on the user :-)

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Respect your rivals and their abilities!

I was reading this news about Shahid Afridi and how he played those crucial innings in the recently completed T20 worls chamipnships. He has attributed his success to his learning on respecting the bowlers. It is a very simple thought but when you give it a thought, it can be applied in every day aspect of life to make it better.

When you start respecting your rivals,
- you start evaluating their strengths and weaknesses
- you start working on improving your weaknesses to overcome their strengths
- you acknowledge the strengths of your rivals which makes the competition healthier
- you accept your losses as the result of your weaknesses and the strengths of your rivals. Thus you mature and become more composed.
- you don't succumb to the losses in life

And respecting not only rivals, but everyone whether it is a junior at office or a servant at home will make us better people. Respect and equality goes hand-on-hand and brings peace and healthy relationships in life.

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