For a very long time I have been so ignorant about my finances that after gaining some knowledge, I felt like I have been living under a rock. Yes, like any other basic knowledge you need for your day to day life, knowing how to manage your finances is equally important. Very recently did I dive into stuff like these but trust me, I’m finding it very interesting now. Finance management is something that you need to do yourself and not trusted to any other person. So, it is very important that you know what you are doing.

I’m a freelance developer and I was not bothered until recently I found that I could save a lot of taxes by investing a part of my earnings in a few returns based funds. This is a very great thing as you get the returns benefits as well as you save on your taxes. But how well you do that so you get the maximum returns, depends on how well you know about it or research on it. I still don’t have a clear idea about it. I really think that every college student should be taught well regarding this. In my college I remember having accounts classes which I think is crap. Not everyone needs to know accounting and stuff. But finance management is something every citizen needs to know and have good knowledge about.

Lately, I have been reading and researching online about equities, mutual funds, insurance and I have gained considerable knowledge about them. Thanks to the internet! I have found a few well-acclaimed financial websites where I’m bound to be frequently visiting for the rest of my life. Also, a few blogs, some of them even personal ones, have turned out to be a huge help to me because of their explanation of both basic and advance stuff in lucid language. I highly recommend Personal Money which I’m very impressed of for their easy to understand explanations, reviews and advices on making efficient investments and better financial management.

I find that a lot of my friends are still ignorant as I was about this, but I’m sure they would dive into the market paranoia very soon. I suggest you start researching today!

Recently while working on a client project, we had a requirement to enhance the existing fraud detection techniques already in place on the application. That is when, I came across Maxmind’s minFraud service which is basically a service for online fraud detection along with their already famous GeoIP service.

Merchants can use the minFraud service to speed up manual order verification, automate order process by using our risk scores, or develop their own customized scoring system with the information that we provide.

minFraud is a centrally hosted service where all business solutions networked with it connect to it, and the feedback and results received is apparently shared within the network. It uses Maxmind’s GeoIP service to find the user’s location through IP, and hence it helps in a great way to detect fraud. The best part is that it has a simple API where you send the customer’s details (only the non-confidential part) and you receive back a ‘risk score’ which is based out of 100. This risk score depends on various factors how minFraud detects the transaction as fraudulent. You could work up on a strategy so that if the risk score goes up a threshold, the transaction could be put on hold and manually verified.

Trying to find more about minFraud, I luckily came across this ruby gem called maxmind which was exactly what I needed. Only little problem was that it was written to work with HTTParty. HTTParty while being a good alternative over Net::HTTP, I wanted something simpler and similar to what we already have in the existing project. Thanks to Github, forking and making changes to the existing gem was a breeze. I also added a attributes method so if you need all the attributes of the response object for convenience.

So, if you are looking to enhance fraud detection on the transactions on your ruby app, checkout minFraud, and have a look at the original gem if you like to Httparty, or if you need a simple solution with NetHttp, have a look at my forked gem.

To install

Rubygems URL

Ta.

Sometime back I posted an applescript to tweet news items in NetNewsWire to your twitter followers and seems like many people found it useful. I’m really glad that I could find some time today to make a few updates on the script.

New features

• Twitnews now saves your twitter login details to the keychain itself. The old script needed you to save your twitter login credentials to the system keychain manually. Now, it checks for the twitnews key in your keychain and if it does not exist, asks you for them and creates the key for you.
• Growl support.
• Checks character count is within 140 characters.
• Uses Tr.im URL shortener so that you can use Tr.im analytics feature if you use it.

I would however like to use Usable Keychain Scripting by Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software, considering the problems faced by some users, which I blame Apple for their really bad implementation of Keychain Scripting. I tried using Daniel’s scripting definition but could not get it to work, probably it is not updated for Snow Leopard. I’m not sure about this, so if you have suggestions on how I can improve the script, please leave your comments.

Please download it here.

Usage

Unzip and drop it into ~/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire/Scripts. Now you can access the script from the scripts menu on NetNewsWire.

If you would like to assign a keyboard shortcut to the script, check this post.

What else ?

The script has been tested on 10.5 and 10.6, but still if you find it buggy, please let me know in the comments. Otherwise, I hope you find it useful.

The code is available at Github.

UPDATE: If you’d prefer to use Bit.ly URL shortener, the script has been updated by Sean to use Bit.ly for click tracking.

UPDATE: Tr.im has been shut down :( Please see this post for an updated script.

If you are reading this post on my blog using Readability, then you are probably gonna love this. For those, who have not heard about Readability, it is a nifty little tool by Arc90, which transforms a webpage or blog post you are looking at to something very friendly to your eyes, or just increases the ‘readability’ as the name implies. From day one, I’m in love with it. If you haven’t yet, go check it out.

Coming back to the post, I discovered this really nice tip that helps to get Readability installed on NetNewsWire (yeah, your favorite news reader), using Applescript. It is very useful because you probably read all your news subscriptions on your news reader. So here you go!

Hint: I recommend adding a shortcut to the script once you have set it up. See this post if you’d like to know how you can do that.

While following the keynote at Engadget last Wednesday, I was sure that I’m never going to buy it. I thought to myself, that this was never going to be useful for me. But lately I’ve been thinking over it. I’m a freelancer and mostly work from home. I code for the web, read my RSS subscriptions, catchup on emails, read stuff on the internet, all on my MacBook Pro. Apparently, I spend the whole day sitting on my chair in front of my mac. So, why not just get a tablet and separate my work stuff from things I don’t really need my mac for.

I’m starting to break-up! I might get this one when it is in India IF the price is right, which I don’t really hope is Rs.29K ($499).