I guess a lot of folk don’t realise just how many creative and energetic startups are born in South Africa (there’s a lot in that for another story some day, bit not today) and one of the more recent ones is personera.com.

Aside from the energy these guys have been feeding off and into the world wide social web, the brainchild Sheraan Amod certainly seems to have done all the right homework. Particularly useful was this quick piece on marketing innovation.

Why? We spent a lot of money, time, energy dealing with an international body responsible for managing the game played with a round ball while they were in our country for the tournament where a whole bunch of international teams came and played against each other; they call it the “beautiful game” and it was played on our doorstep. Make no mistake, the event for us was phenomenal for a whole bunch of completely unrelated reasons. Sure, for the footy fans it was about footy. For the rest of us who puzzled over a round ball that bounces straight- it was something else magic entirely.

But it came with a price. Bans on anything and everything related to world cup, 2010 = protecting copyright$. And some clever advertising scored even bigger when they were challenged and forced to come up with something else better.

But it’s not just a souf efrican thing:

Blocked

The technology behind iTrainedToday is a nice mix. In fact, the chosen technology has enabled it to finally come to life.

For a web application with persistence, you need basic moving parts: UI, backend persistence (ie. database), server-side middleware to translate the communication between the UI and the persistence. Straightforward for the most part except that things are really straightforward once you dive into the belly- except of course if you live in belly in which case everything’s straightforward but just takes time.

UI: html standards, css standards, javascript and all the various frameworks available and then there’s browser issues. iTrainedToday chose jQuery with jQueryUI as much as possible to lift all the UI interaction. Simile is the only other major JavaScript component but a crucial one. It’s what displays your recent data in one consolidated view.

Server: this is where things can get expensive. ASP.NET, Rails, Django, PHP and more all need to be hosted *somewhere*. And hosting costs money. In addition to the hosting costs there are bandwidth limitations/costs involved. A minefield (unless of course, you play in minefields all day long in which case it’s just a field). Hello, Google AppEngine. Love it or hate it; it’s still pretty sweet to get going with. And whenever someone says “it’s pretty sweet to get going with” they mean “it’s great for prototyping”. I don’t mean that. It’s serving athletes nicely (and simply) and ticking along… prime-time? I’ll let you know when it starts paying for itself in a big way.

Persistence: Google AppEngine handles that for me too. I don’t really need to grok the ins and outs of what that tech is in the tiniest detail. It’s interesting to know, but it’s more important for me to know that: a) it works and b) how to work with it. Storage techies get their hands dirty in the detail ‘cos well, that’s what they do. It’s not really what I do (most of the time).

And then beyond all the moving parts is the brain behind it. Can the brain handle mixing strongly typed dynamic scripting languages with the weakly typed variety and hurdle UI intricacies with usability issues while keeping an eye on security, optimizing the bottleneck (database calls) all the while focusing on the problem domain at hand? Mostly

What started out as a simple utility project soon turned into geek nectar. bodyFit for the BlackBerry is born to the world of software.

Now, body fat percentages and body mass indices along with waist-hip ratios and daily “am-i-getting-fat” questions in general tend to irritate me. Just get on with training hard and having fun doing what you do and the results will be there; don’t major in the minors. At least, that’s my attitude. That said, there still *is* space for trending/tracking your body shape and that’s where >_bodyFit comes in.

iTrainedToday has a vision to make tracking your training as simple and as unobtrusive as possible- sticking to the basics, without falling for the hype of fashionable health trends which really don’t last more than a 3-4 months. For example, back in the 70′s experts were advocating a balanced diet of carbs, protein and greens (70/20/10- or thereabouts) and guess what: it’s still the simplest, healthiest and least complicated way forward. But this is not a health blog….

Body fat percentage equations is where this geek got curious and stayed motivated in producing >_bodyFit.

Besides the all-famous Jackson-Pollock equations, I soon discovered equations for the young, the old, the plump, the athletic, the sedentary and the normal (whatever that means). They all use different combinations of skinfold measurements, tape measurements, weight, height and age and are all varingly (in)accurate. The goal of >_bodyFit was to use as many of the equations as is possible and applicable based on the data input. Then, according to my reasoning, you have at least 3 different results which should correlate closely with one another in order to provide you with a more comfortable picture than just a single absolute number based on one formula that’s also being used on someone with a completely different profile to you.

And it’s not the actual number that matters so much as the trend in that same process, with the same tools using the same technique. By consistently recording your measurements using the same calipers, by the same person at the same time of day you get a more accurate reflection of progress. Weigh yourself in the morning after waking up and then just after lunch. Don’t be too shocked if you picked up a kilo or even 2. It doesn’t mean you need to go on a diet straightaway. Tomorrow morning, you’ll be right back down again. Point is, the body fluctuates- a lot. Again, don’t major on the minor changes- but keep your focus on the bigger picture *over time* in order to create an authentic strategy. >_bodyFit will help you do exactly that.

Today is a good day ™ iTrainedToday has been released for early adoption and community testing/feedback. Built on Google’s app-engine, iTrainedToday is a free service for athletes wanting a simple yet informative site to record their training data. It uses Simile for displaying your training data in a easy-to-peruse fashion which, hopefully, encourages you to keep training when you start seeing massive blanks in your efforts

iTrainedToday is useful for part-time athletes, experienced athletes who just need to keep the recording habit up, weekend gym warriors and even the more dedicated fitness enthusiast. This is alpha, but your data will be preserved as we move the application into newer versions so feel free to start using and giving feedback.

There is the popular coding challenge whereby the developer/hacker/gunslinger/coder has to create a piece of usable software in less than N hours (usually 24). You may have heard about it, read about it or actually even done it. There’s usually pizza, coke, coffee, energy drink and loud music involved and also cleverly disguised as an all-night party for binary miners. Nonetheless, if hosted to your linking, the challenge is a great way to flex some brain and skill. And it’s exactly how >_catchit was born.

The mission: create a usable, as shelf-ready-as-possible BlackBerry application within one working day: typically 6-8 hours of productive coding. The only absolute minimum requirements are: source control and an automated build process. Mission accomplished.

Remember when cellphones first came out and they suffered multiple personality order? Couldn’t decide if it was a mobile phone for communicating, an anti-mugging personal protection unit or a military grade close-quarter offensive device (I’m referring of course to it’s 2 foot aerial and 4kg of rugged manufacture). Yes, they’ve come a long way since then. But the thing I most remember about the early days of mobile phones was how they nurtured and flourished your rudeness.

You’d be talking live, face-to-face, in person when all of a sudden a phone would ring. No matter how deep the conversation or how mid-sentence you were, that was it. Conversation abandoned. Code Red! Pick up the phone! Yes, we’ve come a long way too since then (well, some of us at least). So >_catchit has been designed to help you catch those badly-timed calls when you don’t have to leave your caller hanging and you also don’t want to interrupt the “now”.

When activated, if you choose to ignore an incoming call, a screen will present you with an option to send a pre-populated text back to the caller immediately. You can alter the standard text if you like, or just send as is. Neat. In automagic mode, it’s even less obtrusive. Your caller automatically gets a text. Deactivate it, and there’s no more >_catchit. It also works with missed calls, if you want it to.

>_catchit workflow

And that’s >_catchit complete. One full working day, one working product including user documentation (this post). And yes, you can safely download it from here by pointing your BlackBerry at this link.

zaFinTools has been updated with a new function: the statistics calculator. Given a dataset, zaFinTools will give you a descriptive breakdown of the numbers, statistically speaking, by working out and displaying the following information in one go:

Length, Median, Mean, Sum, Sum of Squares, Minimum, Maximum, Range, Variance, Standard Deviation, Co-variance, Mean Absolute Variation, and then the 3 quartile positions and values.

Shew.

Download zaFin for BlackBerry.

At last, a version for the BlackBerry has been released and ready for general public consumption. Make some good decisions this year- based on numbers and data- not just emotional “got-to-have-x” or even more dangerous hype-based “woohoo-the-recession-is-over-we-can-spend-now” motivations. take the time to think it over a little… or use zaFin.

ZaFin is the finally born with the first feature arrived: PAYE. (Hey. It’s a start and a natural one at that given it’s history). Now, ZaFin is a long-term project and has been a goal to get going for a long time now. Essentially, it’s the place to post tools which help you reach numbers you need to make informed decisions for yourselves. Given the state of the world economics at the moment, give me one good reason why would I want to get financial advice from “the system”? It’s track record speaks for itself. Neh. Have the courage to think for yourself, right?

So ZaFin is supposed to be that kind of place. A spot where you can, armed with a bunch of quick little nifty calculators, reach and juggle numbers to come up with a reasonable conclusion. You don’t need an advisor for that. I believe, armed with the right information (ie. numbers) most reasonable folk can come make up their own minds. And make pretty good decisions on their own too (and maybe also check in with an honest friend to bounce some ideas off).

There will be more to come, slowly, over time, as time allows; baby steps. Hope you find the first tool useful, and more importantly, simple to use and to the point giving all you need, and only what you need.

The playground has got a new update: stats-related. We covered the sections where you can uncover a bunch of numerical descriptions on a dataset, which is useful for a quick overall summary of the data. I’ve used this tool a couple of times myself preparing for exams and checking manual calculations (yes, sometimes i need to do this type of thing manually) and of course, it’s much easier than using my Sharp or Casio calculator.
And then there are times when you need to examine the relationship between two variables…

The “Applied” Stats Calculator helps with that quite a bit by giving you a fairly (or so i’d like to think) easy way of inputting your data and then calculating and displaying the relationship through a least-squares attempt on the data provided. There are two motivations for this development:
a) linear relationships are more meaningful than just describing a dataset on its own
b) a showcase in extending the javascript library, complete, as always, with tests.