NEN(National Entrepreneurship Network) asked Safew to fine a nomination for Participation in the Coolest Startup award organized by them.

Safew is planning to launch “ITInfraPlus”, an IT infrastucture product for SMBs. It includes everything required for a company to start off an IT Infrastucture in almist no time.

In a discussion with Ubuntu, Safew will play a major role in various capacities with them.Mass Installation,configuration and customization of OS,developing custom based solutions for various Industries in various part of India. A long list of Plans between the two Companies,include providing Ubuntu Support to Indian clients,developing customized Solutions over Ubuntu,Onsite deployment and Support for Ubuntu systems.

After the final round of talks between Excalibur Dealer, Siddhula & Co. and Safew Technology Labs, It was decided that Safew will build an ERP solution for them using Tiny ERP which will run on Ubuntu Systems.This will be one of the few companies to apply Tiny ERP in their enterprise and Safew Technology Labs is ready to grab this opportunity to venture into Open Source ERP market, one of the fastest growing markets of our times.

In a yet another achievement by Safew, the Rocket Postcards, a unique project for creative firms will be now completed and enhanced by Safew Technology Labs

As a part of a Strategic Alliance with the canonical,Safew Technology Labs is now the official  Ubuntu Solutions Provider,

only the second company in India to do so.Under this there will be several benefits to the Safew’s clients.

www.safewlabs.com/partners.html.

Although its a bit late for this review,because a new version of Kubuntu has already been released,I will go ahead with it. Well, Kubuntu 7.04 Fiesty Fawn,which we are using as the base OS in our company, for all development is, amazingly powerful and dreadfully easy operating system.

It comes bundled up with some beautiful KDE software in its bundle.A Kubuntu experience is what I can call as truely out of the box.Everything just works very very smoothly.The installation requires even less brain than any version of windows ,click a few next buttons after you start a Live CD and then just let the Kubuntu do the rest.It takes about 30 mins for the full installation after which you restart the system.

Well, what follows is a breathtaking experience.It detects each and every device instantly,configures internet for me without moving a muscle.Package management was never better than this version of Adept manager and its just works as if it is made to end windows once and for all.

I gave it to all my employees who have used windows for all their lives and they decided to use this Kubuntu forever after their experience.They told is it Linux and we always thought it was rocket science and this thing  is simpler than baking a bread.

Thats the reason we have embraced it as the desktop OS our company.Everybody just loves it. We are looking forward to upgrading it to Gutsy Gibbon soon.

I got a small assignment to bang my head into for a couple of days.It was a url snipping application. I was also supposed to add Act_as_authenticated and and open_id authentication to the application.

There are two approaches to this problem:

1. I got this solution,over a discussion in Ruby On Rails spinoffs group in googlegroups.The approach is that, we create two methods in the model. a)initialize b) long_url. We use a before_filter and add it to the url controller ,generate a unique hash like initalizer code.Then we add initializer code to the index url to make a unique url from the given long url.Also, we store the long_url to the database and add a route in route.rb

2. There is a much simpler way to do this .I got it from Robby Russel’s site RobbyonRails , post of ruby url website creation.

We need to create 1 table,2 controllers and 1 model for that

The Model:

class Miniurl < ActiveRecord::Base

def self.gen_random(size=6)
chars = “ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890″
short_url = “”
srand
size.times do
pos = rand(chars.length)
short_url += chars[pos..pos]
end
short_url
end
end

The Go Controller:

class GoController < ApplicationController
def go
end

def index
@url = Miniurl.find_first(["short_url = ?", @params["id"]])
if @url['long_url']
redirect_to @url['long_url']
end
end
end

Miniurl Controller:

def create
@miniurl = Miniurl.new(params[:miniurl])
@miniurl['short_url'] = Miniurl.gen_random(6)
if @miniurl.save
flash[:notice] = ‘Miniurl was successfully created.’
redirect_to :action => ‘list’
else
render :action => ‘new’
end
end

Then I generated the scaffold.Here we generate a random number using the gen_random(6) function of 6 digits.Then we add this to the index url and it works just fine

The bigger challange lies now, as I have to implement this code in RESTful and over edge rails.Will add that in this post soon.

Safew is a technology solutions provider based in India. It works primarily in Ruby On Rails and MySql.We try to bring together the best talents available and the best possible solutions to our customers.

Safew is an avid follower of agile methodology for its development purposes and also promotes it in a big way.Our customer centric approach and employee centric policies makes us one of the best places to work.

We are commited to the use of open source technologies and are passionate to take it to the next level with our services. Indian outsourcing market is full of taboos due to which open source penetration is a bit less here. However, the adoption is growing phenominally as open source technologies open new avenues every now and then.