There are some pieces of technology that are so horrible that they quickly become ubiquitous. why is that? PHP, Java, Javascript and MongoDB come readily to mind. Another member of this list is ActiveRecord. That it was developed is not really surprising - that it has gained such widespread popularity…
So I just started using the wonderful service from Postmark which makes processing inbound emails absolutely a breeze, but I was a little concerned with how much it was costing me to send notification emails to the admins on the site, along with exception notifications. Even though Postmark is a…
Hello and welcome to the next episode of the thread that started as “Towards an Architecture for Microfinance MIS”. One of the main learnings from our time spent building Mostfit is that MIS is but a special case of what can be termed as Lending and so our…
If you are using paperclip and find that thumbnails are not being generated for pdf files and you have checked that identify and convert are on your path, then perhaps the answer is to specify a format in the styles hash. If this is not specified, pdfs remain as pds.…
Introduction Since January of 2009, I and various colleagues, most notably Piyush Ranjan and Cies Breijs, have been working on an open source MIS for Microfinance, specifically JLG or Grameen type MFIs. The system is called Mostfit and is available under the Gnu Affero Public Licence (AGPL) and can be…
After years of pandering to the inner geek and running various short-lived blogs using first blurb and later octopress, I finally decided to bite the bullet and move to tumblr. Heck, all my data belongs to major corporations in any case and of late I’ve been feeling more…
The return of the blogger. Since the last time I posted - new (and better) job (pays poorly though), new (and better) house, new (and much better) programming language - prospects still bleak. So I’m now a resident of Ruby land. If you are a programmer and have not…
Yes, I cannot tell a lie - I saw both these movies back to back. Yes, voluntarily. No, you may not ask why. Anyways, on with the reviews. JT…YJN is an insufferable bore of a movie. The story is cliched beyond belief and thanda like kulfi. You can see…
This post is for all you people in Linuxland who stare enviously (and furtively) at Mac users with their TextMate. I know you’ve seen all the screencasts with some geek with a MacBook and TextMate doing their nifty snippet things and going clickety clack on their white keyboards.…
As you may have noticed, Aamir is getting a lot of buzz in the press. For example, Taran Adarsh writes Films like Aamir are more for the discerning audience, for the thinking viewer. It’s a film that attacks your mind, rather than your heart. It’s a film that…