Category Archives: lifehack

₹ ₹ ₹ Using the new Indian Rupee Symbol (in Word, Excel etc.)

26 Thursday May 2011

Posted by in aide-memoire, lifehack, programming

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Microsoft provides updated fonts in a hotfix which is available from here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2496898. The hotfix works with Office, Excel, Word and most Windows applications, including browsers.

After installing the hotfix, you can enter unicode characters using “charmap.exe”. In Windows, press the WIN and R keys, type charmap and press enter.

image

charmap

Whether you use the official (Microsoft supplied) hotfix or download a font like Foradian, people who you send your document to, may not have the requisite fonts. Word, Excel, PDF allow you to embed your own fonts, but there’s not much you can do for websites (sure you can do a lot of CSS work and embed your own fonts, but it won’t work with a lot of browsers out there). When sharing docs with people, you can also use the older U+20A8 symbol (₨).

Inserting the older symbol is not much different, and you can use charmap.

image

Old Rupee symbol U+20A8 ₨
New Rupee symbol U+20B9 ₹

 

Another side-effect of installing the hot-fix is that Excel’s “currency format” dropdown now has a Rupee format available:

image

Also see: “Three Ways to enter Unicode characters in Windows”

To use Indian formatting for numbers (i.e. Lakh, Crore instead of Millions) see this article: “Indian Currency format in Excel”

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Cloud Storage

19 Wednesday May 2010

Posted by in lifehack, tech, trends

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[EDIT: Update]

Wrote this post thinking about Google Docs. Turns out Google is copying Amazon and has come out with its own “Google Storage for Developers”. Basically identical to Amazon, just that it costs $0.17 per GB per month instead of the $.20 per GB per month that Amazon charges. Data transfer in and out costs a heck of a lot of money, especially to-from APAC ($0.30 / GB)!

Which means running your own storage server (in a well built and well managed data-center) is probably the best bet. A decent server with decent storage say, 2Terabytes of disk (1TB x2) costs about $100 per month which is … $0.1 GB/month with RAID level 1 – Mirroring or $0.5 per GB/month with RAID level 0 – striping. In all practicality there will be no further data-transfer charges.

‘Course you have run your own linux distro, but you can choose whatever super cool filesystem you want. If you use Kimsufi.co.uk you can run Proxmox VE (or VMWare or Hyper-V) + a pre-packaged appliance like Openfiler.

[EDIT: Original Post continues]

Google is nearly an order of magnitude cheaper than Amazon S3 for cloud storage!

  • Google: Max 1GB, Crappy interface for large files, tools ecosystem not as rich as S3.

  • Amazon S3: Max 5Gb per file. Decent tools. Have to pay for good usermode filesystems. EBS allows you to easily store/mount true-crypt encrypted volumes.
    • 80 Gb for $192 p.a (full redundancy)
    • 80 Gb for $96 p.a (reduced redundancy storage)

And Google has no data-transfer charges … which can be very, very substantial! Amazon is free for inbound data till June 2k10 …

I think I’m going to start transitioning my content from S3 to Google. Going to try and store my everyday desktop as a VM image – let’s see how that goes.

BTW: Noticed that Reliance has substantially lower latency than Tata when it comes to international bandwidth. Round-trip times under a 100ms for servers in Paris/London. Which means remote desktop may actually be usable. I remember a senior (and brilliant, though understated) colleague, saying that anything under 200ms is ok for UI tasks … (this is when I was developing embedded devices and we were trying to work out how fast we needed the processor to be …). Methinks Tata goes via SGP => TKY => NYK to reach LDN (they acquired Tyco). Reliance on the other hand owns FLAG and can go via the Middle East. When I’m next on a Tata line, I’ll check out ping times to NYK. Should be about the same either way to NYK (~250ms), but LDN should be 400ms via Tata if I’m right.

I think Amazon has servers in SGP. I think Google is more of HKG play – which will add some 50ms to round-trip times.

Subscribe to email groups/discussions

27 Wednesday Jan 2010

Posted by in lifehack

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Want to subscribe to email groups via RSS? Here’s the problem: I subscribe to all kinds of sites that send me updates via email every so often. For example Facebook sends me email every now and then — someone commented on an status update or photo, someone changed something in their profile etc. Interesting, but not something I want to act on right away. I only want my inbox to contain things that I need to act on right away (or things that do not meet any of my filters).

In the past, I’ve solved this by creating filters in gmail (skip inbox and apply label, when email arrives from ‘x’…), effectively sticking stuff into folders .

Works ok, except that every now and then I have to go and check out all my folders. Email is stuff that is pushed to me (and are kind of like “interrupts”). Feeds are things that I “pull” when I have spare cycles (and are kind of “polling”). The two are very distinct forms of interaction and email lists kind of sit in the middle. They’re mostly pushed to me, though I really want to pull them when I’m free….

Digression:
Why do some sites send emails instead of allowing me subscribe via RSS? Either cuz they’re really old and haven’t switched to using RSS/Atom based feeds or because they need to authenticate (since they have content that is personal to me). Google solves the authentication problem by allowing subscription URLs to have a “magic-cookie”. For example I can subscribe to my Google Calendar using any old RSS feed reader even though my calendar is not public, because Google makes a special URL just for me (the URL contains a magic cookie!). Kewl!

Back to story at hand though, a lot of sites either don’t have RSS feeds because they don’t know about it or because they can’t be bothered to work out a magic cookie based authentication mechanism. So they send me emails with “updates”.

And then I noticed this:
http://decisionstats.wordpress.com/2010/01/27/3787/

Not only is it a pretty brilliant idea (the automati content aggregation bit) but it can also help me convert email discussion list subscriptions into “pull” based feeds!

So whenever I get an update from LinkedIn about some group that I’m a member of, I auto-forward it to magiccookie@updates.posterous.com! That’s it. Subscribe to magiccookie.posterous.com in my feed reader of choice (Google Reader) and its all sorted!