Got bored during landing of a southwest flight and decided to see whether or not the southwest credit card was a good deal or not… Here’s the results of that analysis.

They say you get $25,000 in pts when you apply for the card and that this is a $400 value.  So, from this we can determine what the unpublished ratio of points to dollars is.

25,000 points = $400 (Southwest dollars)
$400/25,000 —> 0.016 $/pt
or 62.5 points/$

This means that 1.6% of what you spend in dollars becomes southwest credit.

Annual Fee

$69 airline fee —> x=69/.016 —> $4,312.5 a year to break even.

However, the above doesn’t take into account you get a free 3000 points a year.
3000 (pts) * 0.016 ($/pt) = $48

So, taking that into account… You need to spend at least:
(69-48)/0.016 = $1,312/yr to recoup your $69 annual fee.

After that you get 1.6%… to me that doesn’t sound like that great of a return.  Maybe next time I fly there will be another credit card ad I can digest for comparison.

Other misc

* Can be redeemed for international travel on 50+ global carriers.
* 3% fee on foreign expenses.
* Note: you get 3.2% back on southwest and partner hotel + rental car purchases.
* Points will expire if you don’t use the card for “flight or Partner earning activity every 24 months”. I don’t know if that means you have to buy southwest flights or if just taking a southwest flight is good enough. In my case I book all southwest using a business credit card.

Getting the font to change from the default Times New Roman can be tricky.

The only way I found to make it work is to use the following:

<font size=”2” face=”Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif”></font>

Edit: Since I posted this I have been unable to make it work in particular postings.  If i copy the exact HTML that does apply the verdana font face in a Washington DC job posting over to a Baltimore Job posting.  The face=”Verdana” part is stripped off the Baltimore one.  So, perhaps they run slightly different versions of the engine.  The supported listing of HTML tags listed on craigslists site doesn’t list the face attribute as supported.  If you’re lucky maybe it’ll work… but If it doesn’t I wouldn’t waste too much time trying on account of this posting. 

Having problems with DTMF tones being recognized?

Our company was having issues where DTMF tones weren’t being recognized on certain IVRs… It was most reproducible trying to join most gotomeetings. We were running Asterisk 1.6.0 and Trixbox 2.8.

We tried pretty much everything possible including talking with our trunk, trying a different trunk, trying the different protocols, debugging with wireshark and nothing really made sense. We have our PBX hosted with lylix and the excellent engineers there upgraded our instance to Asterisk 1.6.2.18 and since then our DTMF issues have gone away. More info on this bug fix can be found here: https://issues.asterisk.org/view.php?id=15642

Update: 1.6.2.18 improved the issue signifigantly… but not completely.  We built asterisk from source upgrading it whatever is current around 1/15/2012 (too lazy to look up version email me if you need it though).

Keywords: GoToMeeting.com, GoToMeeting, DTMF

I got this tip from Less is More.
Create an extension which goes directly to voicemail.  When a solicitor calls up, transfer them to that extension and have a voicemail similar to:

Thank you for calling <Your Company Name>

Please listen to this message.  Due to the high volume of calls received from outside vendors calling to solicitor thier products and services, we must ask that you forward in writing a description of your product or service along with any other information on your organization to:

<address>

This address can also be found on our website.  <Website>

You can be assured that your information will be forwarded to the appropriate staff for review.  If they find your company is of interest to our business, a staff member will contact you directly at a later date.  Thank you for calling <Your Company Name> and thank you for understanding.

Here are my notes I put together when I did the pros and cons of switching to an asterisk based PBX system for my company.  At the time of writing we are using both concurrently.  In a nutshell, if you have someone tech savvy it’s definitely worth it.  You get a lot more features, freedom, and it’s cheaper.  My notes below are unedited from a google doc I kept so please excuse the grammar issues.

The notes on this article were prepared in September of 2010.

Feature Comparison RingCentral Vs Asterisk PBX  

Ring Central Pros:

• The user interface is somewhat easier to use for setting up business hour calling rule type stuff.
• Couldn’t find an option to have an email come through when someone doesn’t answer a call (but caller doesn’t leave a voice mail).
• Ability to send a fax by sending an email (like the Ringcentral FaxOut option) is not built in to Asterisk by default.  There are addons which apparently provide this capability one is called AsterFax but since this functionality if built in to ringcentral it’s a pro for it. 
• Other then that… all other features are matched / exceeded by Asterisk.

Asterisk Advantages:

• Can have unlimited number of extentions and it doesn’t cost us any more a month.  Simplified per minute billing.  This means everyone can have a softphone + deskphone and it doesn’t cost anymore.
• HD Voice capable (for higher quality phone calls)
• Attended Transfer Option (allows you to stay on the line with caller in case the person you’re transfering to doesn’t pick up)
• Caller ID can display contacts from our SugarCRM Database.
• Caller ID can be prefixed with things like “Support:<number>|<contact name>”, “Sales:<number>|<contact name>”
• Ability to define nested IVR hierarchy’s 
• Panel view for when we have a receptionist allows them to transfer with drag and drop + see status of people’s phones.
• Softphone’s dont add any additional cost (since extensions are free…)
• Conference Calls can be done using a special extention… and all people attending call from inside your company don’t eat up your minutes. 
• Interoffice calls are free (they’re handled by the PBX internally).
• We can add direct dial numbers for 1.29 a month. 
• Call Recording capabilities… we can have all sales calls recorded automatically for quality assurance. 
• Call Queues - (people get put on hold until someone is available)
• Call Parking Lots — (from the phone you can press a key sequence to put someone into a “parking lot slot”  then you call over to your buddy and say you have a call on 78.  The user then picks up his phone presses *78 and they’re connected to them.
• Smart features like… If i’m already on a phone call and then I get a new call do not have it ring my cell phone also.  (in other words it skips the Find Me Settings if you’re using your desk phone).

Cost Comparison of RingCentral vs. Asterisk+FlowRoute

 Month of August: 

   Inbound Minutes: 1700
   Outbound Minutes: 2800

Asterisk + FlowRoute Sample Cost for August: 

   Monthly Fee: $35 (hosting fee to have asterisk box hosted by lylix)

   DID Fee: $1.39   (This is for each direct number… so we could have a support number, a local number and 866 number)

   Outbound Minute Cost: $27.44 = 0.0098 * 2793

   Inbound Minute Cost: $32.30 = 0.0190 * 1700 
   Total: $96.13

 
RingCentral Sample Cost for August 

   Digital Line Fees:  74.93 = 9.99 (ext1) + 9.99 (ext2) + 9.99 (ext3) + 4.99 (engineer ext) + 24.99 (sales ext) + 9.99 (ext4) + 4.99 (ext5) 

   RingCentral Power: 49.99 (includes 1000 minutes)

   Not Included Incoming Minutes: 29.4 = 700 * 0.042 

   Total: $154.32 + any minute pool overages

    * - Outbound minutes are assumed to be covered by each persons digital line.  This isn’t really the case since Basic lines don’t come with any minutes and people might go over minutes in standard plan.

* Since the per minute rates are much lower using flowroute the cost savings will go up significantly as you add more lines and use more minutes. 

I extended the idea presented here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOTH3XQGauk for creating a custom salesforce button which creates a followup task for a contact by allowing the user to specify some notes to go along with the task in a fast javascript prompt box.   This is a lot faster then creating a new activity which requires a new page to load and would setting the follow up date..

Follow the directions in the video except for when it comes to defining the custom button specify the following.

Behavior: Execute Javascript
Content Source: OnClick JavaScript

Here’s the code:

For a ‘Contact’ Button

var comments = prompt("Enter follow up details (to jog memory later)", "");
if( comments == null ) {
alert("Task creation canceled");
}
else {
comments = encodeURIComponent(comments); // encodes in url friendly way
window.location = ' /00T/e?followup=1&title=Call&retURL=%2F{!Lead.Id}&who_id={!Lead.Id}&what_id={!Lead.Id}&tsk6_fu='+comments+'&tsk5_fu=Follow+Up+w+{!Lead.Name}+[{!Lead.Name}]&tsk4_fu={!TODAY()+2}&save=x';
}

For a ‘Lead’ Button

var comments = prompt("Enter follow up details (to jog memory later)", "");
if( comments == null ) {
alert("Task creation canceled");
}
else {
comments = encodeURIComponent(comments); // encodes in url friendly way
window.location = ' /00T/e?followup=1&title=Call&retURL=%2F{!Contact.Id}&who_id={!Contact.Id}&what_id={!Account.Id}&tsk6_fu='+comments+'&tsk5_fu=Follow+Up+w+{!Contact.Name}+[{!Account.Name}]&tsk4_fu={!TODAY()+2}&save=x';
}

Usage Suggestion

The way we use this at our organization is we made several buttons: FU_1d, FU_2d, FU_1w, FU_3mo. Each button is a different length of time. Just copy the code above and change the +2 after TODAY() to +1, +2, +7, and +90 respectively.

Reference

Finally, here’s a reference of some of the GET parameters. I didn’t find the official documentation just a post on salesforce community so there are probably others.

tsk1=Assigned To
tsk2=Name
tsk3=Related To
tsk4=Due Date
tsk5=Subject
tsk6=Comments
tsk9=Activity Currency
tsk10=Type

At my company, the sales guys wanted a way to click on a phone number on a webpage and have it connect them automatically.   In our case the application was for a Salesforce CRM but this solution would work for any webpage which has phone numbers on it. 

What makes this possible is a RingCentral feature called “RingOut”.  What it does is it calls you on your phone number and then connects you to the number you want to call.  The software provided by ring central can do this automatically in applications like Microsoft Outlook.  But, didn’t have a way of simply clicking a link in a webpage. 

Here’s a quick solution for FireFox users.

1) Get the firefox addon: Telify

2) Open the Telify preferences and configure it to use a “Custom URL”.

3) Edit the GET params appropriately in the URL below and paste it into the Custom URL field.  (See this page for more on this: http://service.ringcentral.com/ringoutapi/ for a detailed description of what each field is if you can’t figure it out.)

https://service.ringcentral.com/ringout.asp?cmd=call&username=8889363711&ext=101&password=1234&to=$0&from=6505551231&clid=8889363711&prompt=1

Notice that we set the “to” field to $0.  This is a variable that will be replaced with the phone number that you clicked on automatically by Telify.

Nice article which articulates the reason why meeting’s are so painful for developers.
http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

My company has it’s svn server on a windows box which makes things like 30x more of a pain.  We use svnsync to synchronize a local repo with a repo one. 

Adding a post-commit.bat to call svnsync failed because it would hang waiting for user input to accept the SSL Certificate.

Error validating server certificate for 'https://someserver.com:443': 
- The certificate is not issued by a trusted authority. 
Use the fingerprint to validate the certificate manually! 
Certificate information: 
  - Hostname: someserver.com 
  - Valid: from Tue, 09 Dec 2008 01:49:41 GMT until Sun, 09 Jan 2011 01:49:41 GMT 
  - Issuer: Equifax Secure Inc., US 
  - Fingerprint: b1:4e:2d:b8:7f:27:96:ba:21:ef:46:fc:12:43:b5:4c:83:3b:dd:b9 
  (R)eject, accept (t)emporarily or accept (p)ermanently? svnsync: PROPFIND request failed on '/somefolder' 
svnsync: PROPFIND of '/somefolder': Server certificate verification failed: issuer is not trusted 
(https://someserver.com) 

When svnsync was being run from post-commit it was being run as some system user which hasn’t already accepted the certificate to have it in it’s certificate store.  I began looking into how I would add it when I realized that I had a scheduled task for which I could specify the user to run as.  So, the simple solution is… create a scheduled task which invokes svnsync. 

Then add to your post-commit.bat

@echo Running from postcommit hook! >> C:\sync_serverupdatessvn.log 2>&1
call SCHTASKS /Run /TN  >> C:\sync_serverupdatessvn.log 2>&1

Just replace <YOURTASKNAME> with the name you gave to your scheduled task you created.  You’ll also probably want to update the logfile name and path.

Recently, I created my first “VisualForce” email template.  I found that lots of the documentation for VisualForce for when you were creating “Pages” and not “Email Templates.”

See my solution outlined here for a basic tutorial on how to create a visualforce template which needs to access Apex controllers and Apex classes to perform basic math operations etc.

http://community.salesforce.com/sforce/board/message?board.id=Visualforce&message.id=14004&jump=true#M14004