Free SMS Reminders for You!

Would you like Google Calendar to SMS you for events and appointments? If you live in the UK or the UAE, and you don't make use of this free service, you might be missing on something important. In fact, there is an entire list of supported countries and carriers here. In the UAE, only Etisalat is supported---bad luck du guys! Unfortunately, this feature is not available to users in Pakistan.

So, how does it work?

Assuming that you are already logged into Google Calendar, you can reach Calendar Settings by first clicking on the little arrow next to you calendar name as highlighted in the screenshot below:

The resulting screen will allow you to change various settings such as calendar name, etc. Yes, you can have more than one active calendar! However, what we are interested in right now is the Notifications link as highlighted below:

The notifications screen lets you specify Email or SMS alert preferences. There is a link on that screen to set up your mobile phone:

You choose your country and enter your mobile phone number. Google will send you a verification code via SMS which you have to enter back on the same page. When done, you can select the checkboxes shown above to get SMS alerts for your appointments and events!

If you live in the US, you can even ask about your next day appointments via texting "nday" to 48368 (GVENT). Unfortunately, this pull service is only available to the folks in the US.

Side by Side MS Word Document Comparison

Many a times, one feels the need to compare the contents at the top of a document with another part within the same document. MS Word 2007 and later versions allow you to do that using the following ribbon options:


Here are the steps to do that:

View -> New Window: this will open a second copy of the same document in a new window
View -> Side by Side: this will align the view so that both windows are visible at the same time (each taking 50% of the screen)
View -> Synch Scrolling: this will setup synchronized scrolling; so if you move up in one Window, the other Window will scroll with it.

Pretty nifty!

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Here are some related tips/ articles on other apps in MS Office:

1. MS Project Tip: Task Drivers


2. MS Project Tip: Linking Task Drivers


3. Programming MS Outlook

Free Personal Finance Software for the Rest of Us

I've been maintaining Excel sheets for my personal finance for quite some time. It's simple but leaves me with some manual maintenance here and there. Having learnt about mint.com, I thought that I should give online free finance tools a try.

So, let me first clarify who the "rest of us" are. The segment I am referring to do not live in the US and can't afford Microsoft Money or Quicken, and hence are primarily interested in "freeware" or open source software. A typical user in my mind has more than one bank account (possibly in different currencies); he has some cash in hand (again, possibly a few notes in any other currency lying in his drawer); he has some liabilities in the form of house loan, etc. The purpose of the tool should be to show the current financial position to the user. Requirements can further be elaborated as follows:

1. The software should be (absolutely) free. So, Microsoft Money, Quicken and Money Dance are out.
2. It should support multiple currencies, and should ideally fetch the exchange rates automatically from some central internet server.
3. It should provide support for opening different kinds of asset accounts (bank account, cash in hand, etc.) as well as liability accounts (such as home loan, car loan, etc.).
4. The bank where any accounts are maintained doesn't provide live access to the account statement to these tools. That is, there should be an option to manually do all kind of entries.

Free Online Finance Tools

Unfortunately, mint.com is only for the US people, and wesabe.com no longer exists. Frustrated, I tried both yodlee.com as well as moneytrackin.com, and found several important features missing.

Yodlee's problem is that it's too much focused on "online integration with your bank and credit card companies." The option to create a manual account is hidden deep down (i.e., the usability is poor as if the feature is of extremely low important). Moreover, when you are about to create a new account the currency options are limited to 7-8 different currencies. It fails the criteria test above, and doesn't fit my purpose.

And MoneyTrackin's problem is that it's overly simplistic---e.g., in order to create a liability account (such as home loan), you have to enter the balance in negative. The nice thing about MoneyTrackin' is that it efficiently handles multiple currencies (automatically fetches the exchange rates and shows your dashboard in the base currency). Another bad thing about MoneyTrackin' is that too much space is being utilized by ads.

Despite its shortcomings, if you want an online free personal finance application, MoneyTrackin' comes close.

Free Desktop Personal Finance Tools

Having no luck with online tools I tried GnuCash, Money Manager Ex and Grisbi. Amongst these, Grisbi crashed several times. So, it's out. Money Manager Ex seemed good but it doesn't have the concept of Liability Accounts (loans, etc.). The usability of Money Manager Ex can be improved quite considerably. So, it works but making posting entries into the accounts is extremely cumbersome.

Finally, GnuCash was tried, and it has quite a few interesting things. It wins hands down amongst in free personal finance tools with a minor caveat: it's more than personal finance; it support complete dual entry accounting system. And hence, there is a learning curve here for a novice user.

Drawbacks of GnuCash

GnuCash does have a few flaws that I would like to have fixed. One of them is the download size. It's 62 MB! Secondly, in order to fetch currency exchange rates (or stock quotes) from the Internet, it is further dependent on a Finance::Quote library of Perl. This in short means that you need to download Active Perl (if you are on Windows, which is a 9MB download in itself) and further install Finance::Quote.

My Verdict

GnuCash! Go for it!

Google Command Line

Words are powerful. A click is no comparison. Consider the recently released Google command line tool (requires Python to work). How easier it is to write

$ google youtube post --category Education killer_robots.avi

as compared to uploading a video after several clicks, and waiting for server round trips page after page. Since it's already known that the command line will be used by the power users only, it makes the life of the programmer easier (instead of assuming the end-user to be infinitely stupid). Consider this second example

$ google calendar add "Lunch with Jason tomorrow at noon"

Did you see that? Did you see? "Tomorrow at noon!" How beautiful is that! The system will itself figure out what you mean by "tomorrow" and "noon." While it's possible to give the same power to graphical users (and I am sure that Google Calendar does), you can't expect all users to understand how this would work, or manage it if it doesn't have the desired affect. Such behavior is the ultimate power tip a user can get with reference to Personal Information Management tools.

But when is a click more powerful? Perhaps only one thing beats words: a picture! And it's only there, clicks make sense. But did I tell you that I love words?

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Backupify!

Today, so much of your data resides online---your blog, the photos you uploaded, your emails, etc. Have you ever thought of taking a backup of these?

Register for a free account at Backupify before 15th February 2010! The site is extremely well integrated. I'll give it a 5 out of 5 on usability.

Outlook Attachment Sniffer

Sometimes you wish working with attachments in Outlook was easier! I specially desist the situation where somebody sends me an email with lots of emails as .msg attachments, each one in turn containing further attachments; I have to open up and save each message separately!

I have tried but have never given enough time to automate MS Office but I could tell that somebody else would have faced similar problems, and created a solution. Some time spent on Google resulted in discovery of a 30-days trial version of Outlook Attachment Sniffer, developed by a German company. It's a real gem!

Pipes!

Sometimes, even RSS is not enough. Being an avid Google Reader user for some time, I frequently thought of having a way to sift through the blog posts/ news items coming in my reading list.

And this is a problem in general, not just limited to RSS: information explosion is eating us out. It takes more time to visit, login, sift through information on a website than to really read/ understand what matters to us. RSS though easy to use, doesn't provide you a means to filter your feed.

So, last night, Yahoo! Pipes flashed in my mind. I had seen the tool, and played with it a while ago but I couldn't think of any application for personal use until recently.

An easy to comprehend example for freelance programmers is given below: You can get a feed from rentacoder.com for new projects available for bidding. You need to login to Yahoo! Pipes and use "Fetch Field" and "Filter" tools to create Pipe output as shown below:



This will give you a list of newly added projects on Rent A Coder with the keyword "PHP" in their description. The nice thing is that you can add the output of this pipe (as another RSS feed) in your Google Reader list. Here is a live running example of the same.

Happy plumbing!

Personal Information Management

Computers are meant to store, process and organize information. Yet, many people don't use computers to store day-to-day information. In fact, organizing day to day information is a pain area in the modern life---thanks to information overload we are suffering from.

Yet, deep down, software developers believe that there is efficient, easy to use way of storing things-to-do, appointments, contact numbers, and other important pieces of information such as recipes, web clippings, etc. Several attempts have been made, the earliest traces going back as far as 1992, to create the killer app for personal information management but almost all failed miserably. The most astonishing effort is Chandler (from Mitch Kapoor, Lotus 123 fame), which I have reviewed here.

All is not bleak; several nice tools do exist; some promoting the ideas behind "Getting Things Done" while others just helping you in brainstorming, consider Free Mind and Mind Meister (both having excellent usability features).

But when it comes to comparison, the Five Best Note Taking Tools at LifeHacker.com tells us that plain-old "pen and paper" wins hands-down. Why is that? Why can't we use software for the simple purpose of taking notes and storing day-to-day information?


Usability
Perhaps, one of the reasons is usability. If it takes several mouse clicks just to write down a phone number, I might not bother at all. With time, software is improving in usability. OneNote 2007 from MS, for example, has some very nice features:

• Instead of providing a tree like structure to arrange notes, OneNote gets its inspiration of notes-taking from regular notebooks---there are "sections" within one notebook, each having a different color and having a collection of pages inside it.
• Again, like a piece of paper, it lets you write anywhere you want on the screen.
• It even provides handwriting recognition---something not for me but who knows.
• There are some pretty good shortcuts: e.g., while typing if you press "TAB" key, it puts the information in a table and creates a new column for you to write more---it doesn't require you to first think about how many rows and columns you need---the software adjusts the page as you go.

In 1992, Mitch Kapoor proposed "Lotus Agenda" to the world. It's ground breaking features included support for mentioning dates in the form of now, today and sunday, next year, etc. In fact, this feature is available in MS Outlook 2003 and later versions as well. Next time you are scheduling an appoint, try writing "tomorrow" in the date box.


Ubiquitous Computing
The other one is the time it takes to load the app---if I have to "start my PC" just to write things to do (or even if I have to start an app for this purpose), I might lose interest. Remember the Milk (for things-to-do) and Ever Note (for note-taking) are web 2.0 apps which handle this aspect to some extent by providing a web based and a hand-held interface simultaneously.

But I still believe we need to more in this area. Something that we can carry with ourselves, and is easy to use, is very important. Something on the lines of Pattie Maes demo of the Sixth Sense is required here.


So, the killer app will have to have a mobile phone based interface/ client as well, which can synch itself with the main application as and when required. The killer app also has lots and lots of usability; in short, Don't Make Me Think. When can we have that killer app? Who knows. For now, I am settling with OneNote 2007; it's the most suitable for me. Too bad that there is no opensource competitor.

Outlook: Forgot to attach the document?

Sometime back, I discussed how you can get notified while sending emails without a subject in Outlook. Below is an improvement which checks for missing attachments when there is a keyword "attach" found in the body of the message before a "From: " string is found.

1Private Sub Application_ItemSend(ByVal Item As Object, Cancel As Boolean)
2    If (Not Item.Class = olMail) Then Exit Sub
3    
4    Dim mailItem As mailItem
5    Set mailItem = Item
6    If (mailItem.Subject = "") Then
7        answer = MsgBox("Do you want to send the message without entering a subject?", 
8   vbYesNo + vbSystemModal)
9        If (answer = vbNo) Then
10            Cancel = True
11        End If
12    End If
13    
14    msgBody = mailItem.Body
15    posAttach = InStr(1, msgBody, "attach", 1)
16    posFrom = InStr(1, msgBody, "From:", 1)
17    If (posAttach <> 0) Then
18        ' word "attached" found
19        wordInOldEmail = False
20        If (posFrom <> 0) Then
21            
22            ' word "from: " found
23            If (posAttach > posFrom) Then
24                wordInOldEmail = True
25            End If
26        End If
27        
28        If (Not wordInOldEmail And mailItem.Attachments.Count < 1) Then
29            answer = MsgBox("Do you really want to send the message without attachment?", 
30    vbYesNo + vbSystemModal)
31            If (answer = vbNo) Then
32                Cancel = True
33            End If
34        End If
35    End If
36End Sub
37

As in the past, this is not a COM add-in. I have tested it with Outlook 2003 only in the VBScript Macro editor.

Yubnub: Command Line for the World Wide Web

If you are a fan of SlickRun, I have a goodie to share with you today. And in case, you don't know what SlickRun is, you are wasting lots of your time in finding programs to execute, opening documents, and doing redundant things on your Windows PC.

The goodie is Yubnub. Possible uses are only limited to the number of websites over the web. I, for one, frequently use xe.com to convert money from one currency to another. However, the whole activity is quite cumbersome when you have to surf from one page to another just to get the required currency. With Yubnub as your default page, you no more need to do that. Just type "xe -amount 1 -from AED -to PKR" in the search box and you can easily the converted amount!

A list of useful commands (aka Golden Eggs) is also available. The world is not short of useful ideas!

Getting Unread Gmail Messages

The trick is simple: just search for "is:unread" in your Gmail account and you'll get all the unread messages.

An alternate is to search for "label:unread" which means that "unread" is a special system label which is not visible to you but exists nevertheless.

MSIZAP and the Case of Ever Shrinking Hard Disk Space

I keep installing patches and removing programs on my Windows XP machine from time to time. I recently noticed that my hard disk kept shrinking after installing (and using) Google Chrome.

So, I fired up WinDirStat (a nice tool which gives you summary of folders and the disk space they are taking) and found out that Google Chrome caching was using 406 MB on my machine (folder: C:\Documents and Settings\<myUserId>\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome). More shocking was the fact that 7 GB of data was residing inside c:\windows\Installer (which is not related to Google Chrome)!

A quick search on the net revealed a tool called MSIZAP from Microsoft which can be used to remove orphaned patches and installation files. Surprisingly, I already had the tool located in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\bin\MsiZap.Exe; thanks to locate32 (another must have utility to get blazingly fast searches for your files).

You run the tool with G! switch to remove orphaned installation packages, as shown below:

MSIZAP G!

This freed up some 5GB space on my machine with apparently no problems since yesterday.

Warning: MSIZAP is dangerous if you don't know what you are doing!

Programming MS Outlook

I always hate when I send somebody an email without a subject; and it happens too often with official emails when I am using MS Outlook.

There are various ways to program Outlook: Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO), COM Addins and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). As far as VSTO is concerned, the idea of programming add-ins in C# or other .NET languages may seem fascinating but the requirements of a heavy runtime, as well as the idiosyncrasies of .NET framework versions (and frequent API changes) will cause you enough trouble to drop the idea.

Then we are left with COM Addins and Visual Basic for Applications. While the preferred way in terms of security and redistribution is COM Addins, VBA isn't bad either. Nevertheless, you need to understand Outlook object model, no matter what paradigm you adhere to. So, here is a very quick solution to trapping blank subject of outgoing emails using VBA. It isn't hard to convert the code to a compiled COM Addin.

Private Sub Application_ItemSend (ByVal Item As Object, 
     Cancel As Boolean)
    If (Not Item.Class = olMail) Then Exit Sub
    
    If (Item.Subject = "") Then
        answer = MsgBox("Do you want to send the message without entering a subject", 
   vbYesNo + vbSystemModal)
        If (answer = vbNo) Then
            Cancel = True
        End If
    End If
End Sub

Where to put in this code? Hit Alt-F11 in MS Outlook to open up the VBA editor, and copy n' paste this code. Make sure that you set the macro security to Medium so that Outlook asks you before enabling/ disabling a macro.

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Programming Outlook 2007 by Ken Slovak from Wrox is a no nonsense book. If you have ever participated in the Outlook newsgroup, you already know who Ken Slovak is. You should get it if you want a head-start in Outlook programming. The only caveat is that the book discusses Outlook 2007, with very few lessons on programming older versions of the office application.