FireAnts provides you with information regarding traffic flow information on streets in Jakarta. The idea is that if you know where the traffic jams are, you will be able to avoid them.  And how do we get the information ?  Well, the information is gathered from real cars on the roads.  These cars act like moving sensors and report traffic condtion to us.  We then process this information and make it readable by people like ourselves who need the information.

Well, you know the saying, A picture is worth a thousand words (or in this case a video).  We had to prepare a video for the Mobile Monday Peer Awards 2009 that we are entering (A contest for mobile applications which will be judged by the audience, and not by formal judges). Since we’ve already made it, I thought I’d share it here as well with all of you.

Let me know what you think.. (Some of you may have already seen it, since it was posted on facebook as well a while back..)

Please join http://bebasmacet.ning.com to help each other out in coping with the traffic in Jakarta as well as to learn more about our FireAnts solution.

I have been using my MacBook now for about one month and I still tag my PC along when I go to the office.  I’ve found that moving my Outlook to Mac isn’t quite as easy.  I have expected this but not to the extent that I’m going through now.

Initially I thought that Entourage (part of MS Office for Mac)  will be my ticket to freedom. Since it is a replacement for Outlook that was built by Microsoft for the Mac I presume that there will be no issues once I got it installed on my Mac.

Turns out I was wrong.  The first issue was the edition of MS Office for Mac that I should be using.  I had gone to a mac store and almost got the MS Office Home and Student Edition, which was reasonably priced.  Looking at the comparison table on the back of the packaging, though, I found out that that edition did not support exchange server.

I didn’t know exactly what that means but just to be safe, I proceeded to look for the standard edition of MS Office which has the exchange server support.  Well, I found it, but it costs me three times the home and student edition.

Ok, so I got my Entourage with Exchange Server Support, so everything should be hunky dory, right ? Wrong.  For the life of me, I can’t seem to find how to synchronize my tasks and categories.  I searched and searched and searched and finally realized that Entourage does NOT synchronize tasks and categories. Well that blew a big hole in my plan to migrate completely to Mac.  I need the tasks and categories and Entourage apparently is not going to be the answer.  Isn’t it weird that Microsoft creates an exchange client that does not support tasks and categories ? Or is this part of an evil twisted plan for sabotaging the Mac platform ?

Since I can’t use Entourage, I have to find another way of getting my calendars, contacts, tasks, emails, and categories into my mac.

I have two choices now from where I sit: Find out how to synchronize exchange with the Apple applications (calendars, tasks, etc), and/or install parallels and run windows within my Mac OS.

The quest continues…

I’ve asked the readers themselves about what they want or need.  This results in several suggestions which are quite good and will be implemented soon.  However, the number of suggestions is not nearly enough and I need more.

Why the problem with finding good content to deliver ? After a little introspection, I think my problem stems from the fact that I’m not clear who my target audience is, my target persona. In order to be clear about what content you should deliver, the first thing you have to do is to define what persona you are after. In hindsight, this seems obvious.  However, it didn’t click until recently.

Persona for me means a representation of a particular segment of a market.  Thus, after doing your segmentation with whatever method, you would then define the persona.  You would make this representation come alive by giving it a name, a somewhat detailed description of what they do, where they live, what habits they have, etc.

This step of defining persona is crucial before you even think about what content to serve because different personas require different things and the content should be tailored to your target personas.  Once the target personas (I think it is possible to have more than one target personas) are defined, then it should be a lot easier to think about what they value and thus to think about what content to serve them.

Time for me to get going on my personas!

Apparently traffic jams can be created out of thin air, and I presume this is what happen most of the time:  Check out this video I found on YouTube.

I suppose the only solution is to have all the cars controlled centrally… don’t let humans drive it…

I recently received an instant message from one of my messenger buddies asking me to check out some pictures… (duh… this should’ve been clue #1).  I would normally be extra cautious when I get these kinds of messages through emails. This time, however, the message comes from an instant message from a messenger buddy and I didn’t know you could get phished this way.

I didn’t think twice and clicked on the link.  It asks me for my username and password, and like an obedient servant I did, only to realize that I’ve been phished once I found random pictures on the site.

Below is the what little information I can gather by doing a whois on the phishing site:

WHOIS information for: cefcell.com:

[whois.enom.com]
=-=-=-=
Visit AboutUs.org for more information about cefcell.com
AboutUs: cefcell.com

Registration Service Provided By: NameCheap.com
Contact: support@NameCheap.com
Visit: http://www.namecheap.com/

Domain name: cefcell.com

Registrant Contact:
   TST Management, Inc
   Jeff Fisher ()

   Fax:
   Edificio Magna Corp.  5th Floor, Office 511
   Ave. Manuel Maria Icaza y Calle 51
   Panama City, Panama 0000
   PA

Administrative Contact:
   TST Management, Inc
   Jeff Fisher (tstmanagement@gmail.com)
   +507.2021577
   Fax: +1.
   Edificio Magna Corp.  5th Floor, Office 511
   Ave. Manuel Maria Icaza y Calle 51
   Panama City, Panama 0000
   PA

Technical Contact:
   TST Management, Inc
   Jeff Fisher (tstmanagement@gmail.com)
   +507.2021577
   Fax: +1.
   Edificio Magna Corp.  5th Floor, Office 511
   Ave. Manuel Maria Icaza y Calle 51
   Panama City, Panama 0000
   PA

In any case, please be extra careful with your passwords and always double check with the source, especially when the message seems generic and lacking specific information.

When in doubt, you can also check if a site is a phishing site by visiting https://www.phishtank.com/.  If the site is found there, then it is a phishing site. If not, then it may or may not be a phishing site.  In my case it didn’t show up because apparently they created a new page for each potential victim by using the victim’s first name as a subdomain.

Crossing over to Mac (Courtesy of laptopmag.com)

With the release of the new MacBook, I finally decided to bite the bullet and go all mac.  I wasn’t sure that all the things that I used to be able to do can be replicated fully in the mac environment, but I got a little fed up with going back and forth using Mac and Windows. So here’s the story of me switching completely to mac, the problems I encounter, and whatever solutions I found to fix them.

I had been on two platforms (Mac and Windows) for as long as I can remember.  I use Mac at home and Windows at the office.

Here are the list of things that I do on the mac:

• FireFox for web browsing
• iPhoto for all the pictures I’ve taken
• iTunes for all music/audiobook related stuff
• Pages, mostly in layout mode, to create documents
• Photoshop, for all the graphic tweaking stuff
• iMindMap, for all mindmap creations
• Dictionary and unit converter widgets

Here are the list of things that I do on my PC:

• Word, for all the document editing stuff related to work
• Excel, for all the number crunching stuff related to work
• Outlook, as a Personal Information Manager, and to connect to exchange server at the office
• Firefox, for all web browsing activities
• MindManager, for all mindmapping activities
• KlikBCA (with the VPN dialer) for all my banking needs.
• Blackberry sync to sync all PIM info into my blackberry

As you can see, prior to the switch, I had mostly segregated my office work from the rest of the things that I do in my life.  Bit by bit, however, I started to use the mac more and more even for my work related stuff, and so I started wondering how bad it would be if I completely switch to Mac.

Things that I thought I’d be able to switch completely to Mac with little or no worry:

• Word
• Excel
• Firefox
• MindManager

Things that I was a little worried about:

• Outlook
• KlikBCA
• Blackberry sync

Well, like I mentioned above, I bit the bullet and made the switch, even though I haven’t really found good answers for the things I was worried about.

On the next post in this series I’ll share the problems that I encountered when I first switched to Mac.  Hopefully these experiences are similar to others who are contemplating a switch and can provide a little help in making the transition a little smoother.

Well, you can stop trying. I did

Here’s the reason:  a pages document is not actually a regular file. It’s actually a “package”, a special kind of folder that appears as a single file when you look at it in finder. You can verify this by right clicking the pages document and then selecting “show package content” from the menu. It will show you the actual content of the pages “file”.
Since you can’t actually send a folder structure, or at least I haven’t seen an email client that can do that other than Apple Mail, then sending the pages “package” camouflaged as a file will not work.

If you use Apple Mail, it will automatically zip the files and send it, which is why attaching a pages document through Apple Mail works.

For all other clients a simple workaround is to compress the file into a zip file (right click the file and choose compress in leopard) and send the zip files.  This works every time.

Here’s the FAQ that explains this process: Technorati Support: FAQ : Most recent posts not indexed AND “Last Pinged” date IS NOT updating

It is a good idea as well to read through technorati’s Blog Quality Guidelines to understand the expectation of a good blog site from technorati’s point of view.

Updates:

Oct 28, 2008 - As I write this, my blog is not updated yet at the technorati’s site. We’ll see if this is the problem.

Nov 16, 2008 - As of today my postings have not appeared on technorati.  Don’t know if technorati is broken, my blog is considered “unworthy”, or the approval process takes forever…  The wait continues…

Nov 16, 2008 - It turns out it’s not permission/review problem after all.  A very helpful gentleman (you ca see his blog at http://www.arachna.com/roller/page/spidaman/Weblog) who apparently works at technorati pointed out several lines of codes which obscures most of my blog posts from the technorati parser, causing my blog posts to not be indexed properly.  Here’s the offending lines of codes:

<!–[if IE]>\r
<style type=’text/css’>\r
<!–\r
#headerimg{position: absolute;}\r
–></style>\r
<![endif]–>

This code was found in the header.php file located in the themes/esther folder (I am using the esther theme).

Once the code was removed and I pinged my blog from technorati, all my blog posts appear instantly in technorati. All is well now 

I found a blog article which goes over his top recommended wordpress plugins. This article also goes over the 17 steps that you are encouraged to take to setup your self-hosted wordpress blog. It’s a good read for someone just moving over to a self-hosted wordpress blog.

Click here to read the post.

Here are the recommended plugins, excerpted from the blog mentioned above:

• All-in-One SEO Pack - Helps to ensure that every page and blog post is Search Engine Optimized (SEO) to the max.

• Do Follow Activation - Makes all your comment do-follow crawlable links. See the article’s author’s Guide to do follow blog commenting.

• Google Sitemap Generator - Generates an XML sitemap which you will need to submit your site to the Search Engines

• One Click Plugin Updater - Make updating all your plugins much easier and streamlined

• Socialable Zyblog Edition - Puts a custom social networking bar on all your blog posts, so they can be submitted to Digg, Reddit, Facebook, etc.

• Wordpress Related Posts Plugin - Puts a list of related blog posts at the end of your blog entries to encourage readers to check out other parts of the site.

• Wordpress Automated Update Plugin - Automatically upgrades your Wordpress installation follow easy steps.

• Google Analytics Plugin - Installs Google Analytics Tracking sitewide, requires separate Google account.

• WP-Statpress - Internal Wordpress traffic analysis. Adequate but Google Analaytics provides much more data.

To install these plugins, just copy the plugin folders to the wp-content/plugins folder on your web server’s wordpress blog directory

Not so it turns out…  I’m just starting to realize that moving out of wordpress.com mean that I’m no longer part of the wordpress.com community and thus my blog posts are no longer listed with them.

Well, it’s not the end of the world…  To remedy this situation, one way is to perform pings to update services or directly to sites like technorati. By doing this you are letting the site know that you have updated your blog and to index your blog and include it in their listings.

I’ll update this post as I find out more about this.