Phone Scan !!!

I have been using Evernote on my phone for a few years now to store images of documents that I needed to archive, and it has great features to convert these into pdf documents and convert to text (OCR). Then I cam across an App called CamScan. This remained my favorite app and I considered it to be the most useful app I had on my phone. It did, and still does a wonderful job of converting captured images of documents into perfectly pdf files, by straightening the skewed images which is a result of phone camera not being perfectly parallel to the document being photographed. However, one limitation that bothered me was that it has a subscription based licensing model for full featured app, and at some point started adding an ink mark, rather a full colored logo on the scanned document which sort of was a way to (Ahem!) force  people to go for the paid subscription. In mu quest to find an equally good free app, I started searching around the app Market Place and found quite a few similar products with a wide range of good to bad reviews. And then by chance I came across an app that pretty much every smart phone (Android) comes pre-installed with, and other platforms (iOS and Windows) also had access to it. This is the Google Drive, when you click on the New icon (a plus sign inside a circle) in the lower right corner from within the Google Drive app, you get the options to create Folders, Google Docs/Slides/Sheets and Upload. Nestled besides these options is the option for Scan. Selecting the scan option open ups your camera and you can take a photo of your document which will be auto-corrected (unskewed, brightened and rotated) as a pdf document. You can save it or redo if the results are not to your liking. Also, you can add more pages to the same file if needed. Make sure you rename the file and select the correct location to save to. Not to be left out, Microsoft added similar feature to its OneDrive app. I will write a more detailed review of the three apps (CamScan, GoogleDrive Scan and OneDrive Scan) or will ask my sons to do that for me and post them here :).

OneDrive Scan

Google Drive Scan

CamScan

Business Intelligence - The Intro

BI Dashboard examples (Click to Enlarge)

Business Intelligence does not have a formal definition but the term is used for a variety of tools and activities used to analyze raw data and present it in a more meaningful and useful format for business analysis purposes.

The term Business Intelligence has been abbreviated to BI and is used alternatively. We will stick to using the abbreviated form BI for representing Business Intelligence in all our Articles, Blogs, Guides and Forums.

BI provides current performance status in relation to past performance and predictive  future views, and provides the target users (business leadership) the ability to modify (slice and dice) and dive deeper (drill down) or summarize (drill up) information. The data becomes even more useful when a comparison to industry specific benchmarks is incorporated.

BI helps organizational leadership to make informed decisions and take calculated risks in both operational and strategic spheres. KPI's can be established and performance can be measured against those. Performance Indicators breaching preset thresholds utilizing easy to read and at-a-glance visuals, can lead to further digging (slicing/dicing and drilling) into the data.



BI information is generally represented as Dashboards, which are collections of related visuals and reports, providing an at-a-glance . Raw data is converted into an OLAP cube. OLAP stands for Online Analytical Processing, which may be defined as a computer based technique for analyzing data and providing insights. Cube is used to define a mutli-dimensional data sets. traditionally a data set has two dimensions , rows and columns. OLAP cubes have more than two dimensions and those with more than three dimension are also sometimes refer to hypercubes. The advantage of cubes is the data is pre-processed and readily available for slicing, dicing and drilling, saving time compared to running queries in real-time against traditional relational data sets.

NULLs in SQL results Export to EXCEL

I was working on a project to export some data into a tab delimited file. Initially, we did some test files and it was simple enough to use a select query and export the results to a text file by right clicking the top left box of the results pane. However, the recipient indicated that the file had NULL columns with the text string 'NULL' in them which interfered with their processing. They requested us to remove the NULL string and instead pass on these fields as blank. I found a free tool called FnR, for Find and Replace, which replace text strings with whatever value is specified. It was all working fine till they asked us to send a full file with more than half a million records. FnR refused to work and would time out. I generated a command line command, another useful feature built into FnR, and tried that, but no joy. So i went to my trusted friend Google and asked for solutions. I found that this has been a very common issue and many people had asked for a solution, only t get lectures on what they are doing wrong and long debates of what DBAs and Analysts  deemed best practices. Some workable solutions were also discovered in the process, but when dealing with a large number of fields it becomes impractical to use REPLACE or COALESCE commands with every field to check if it contained a NULL and then replace it with blanks. While the debate lingered on from forum to forum, the person asking the question would eventually bail out due to frustration without getting a proper solution to their problem. I did however came across one suggestion that wasn't given much attention of using the query to export the results to text, rather than the right click process I was following. I decided to give it a try and, viola, no more NULL strings.  

.URL files not deleting

I was deleting a folder and it kept denying permission, everything was deleted except two files that appeared to be internet shortcuts with a .url extensions. Checked permissions and properties and looked everything but simply could not delete this folder or the files individually. Resolved this by stopping the Indexing services. The files disappeared by themselves and I was able to deleted the folder.

Newly Added External IP to ISA 2006 not available

Adding multiple external IP addresses to an ISA server is a simple task, primarily you go to the WAN adapter Properties> TCP/IP settings> Advanced... and add to the IP addresses list. The issue generally encountered is that the IP address you added is not available in the list of IP addresses on the ISA server management console. First try shutting down the ISA Management Console and restarting it (close out and open), it that doesn't work, then restart the Windows Firewall service (WARNING: that will restart RRAS as well and you will loose remote connectivity). Restarting the ISA Management Console should do the trick.

MS Excel with phantom contents

This morning I came across a strange issue of not being able to view the contents of certain cells in an Excel spreadsheet. the selected cell did display the contents in the formula bar, but the cell itself showed blank. Did some quick google search and found others had faced similar issue. There were a few suggestions and seemed to work for some. It included selecting the cell / row and pressing crtl+B, essentially formatting the text. This worked for majority of the users with this problem. However, didn't work for me. Another suggestion seemingly working for a few others was to go to the View tab and selecting Arrange All>Tiled>OK. That didn't work for me either. Finally what worked for me was to selected the cells with invisible text and changing the font to another font. The issue seems to be with a corrupt font on your system. Well there you go, one of these solutions should work, please let me know if they didn't, thanks.

Security Considerations for Use of Mobile Devices in Healthcare

It is not uncommon these days to see physicians showing off their iPhone/iPads or Android phones/Tablets and demonstrating how they can access their patients' health records from anywhere. Well, just demonstrating in itself is a violation of Privacy laws under the HIPAA/HITECH Acts, there is also a much larger security concern attached to the use of mobile devices. HIPAA Privacy section deals with three core factors of patients Protected Health Information (PHI) privacy, and these include Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability.  HIPAA Security section deals with the Technical, Administrative and Operation safeguards for PHI. Another term becoming more and more popular recently is Bring Your Own Device or BYOD, and it refers to using a mobile device personally owned by you and using it for work. There certainly are considerations to be aware of for both company maintained/issued and personally owned devices us for remote access to PHI.

Best Practices for Using Mobile Devices to Access PHI:

• Authentication: Make sure to use a password or other authentication process to identify the user of the device. This is achieved by enabling the lock screen for your mobile devices and establishing a strong password, PIN or passcode. These must be masked to prevent people around you from seeing it. Also activate screen locking after a set period of inactivity.
• Install / Enable Encryption: Encryption helps secure local storage and safe transmission/reception of PHI. The mobile device may have built-in capability of encryption, or you may have to procure a 3rd party tool for this purpose.
• Remote Wiping and Locking/disabling: Remote Wiping allows you to erase data from your mobile devices remotely on a lost or stolen device. Remote locking.disabling is more useful when a device is misplaced and not stolen. By remotely locking the device you can unlock it once it is found, as opposed to remote wiping where nothing can be retrieved even if you are to find your device.
•  Disable File Sharing: Most of the mobile device come with a built-in capability of sharing stored data within a local network or over the internet. You can also find application that can be installed for sharing files. The mobile device file sharing capability should be disabled and not file sharing applications should be installed on them.
• Enable Firewall: Firewalls protect against unauthorized connections to your mobile device,  they intercept incoming and outgoing connections and block or permit them based on preset rules.
• Security / Anti-virus / Anti-Malware software: These security software protect against malicious applications/programs, viruses, spyware and malware. Make sure your security software is up to date with latest virus/malware definitions installed. 
• Research new Apps before installing: Before installing a new app or software, make sure you are aware of the permission it has for access to data and functionality of your device. For research use reputable websites and sources. 
• Maintain Physical Control: Mobile devices have the benefit of being portable, smaller in size which are also their biggest disadvantages when it comes to security. They are easily misplaced or stolen and that might lead to unauthorized access to PHI. You must maintain physical security of your device at all times to prevent it getting into an unauthorized person's possession. 
• Using Public Wi-Fi Networks: Public wireless connection pose a huge vulnerability of data interception and access by unauthorized persons. You must only use secure, encrypted connections, and only use public networks if you have the ability and knowledge to secure your communication by using VPN and or encryption technologies. 

Tips to protect and secure PHI on Mobile Devices:

1. Install and enable encryption to protect health information stored or sent by mobile devices.
2. Use a password or other user authentication.
3. Install and activate wiping and/or remote disabling to erase the data on your mobile device if it is lost or stolen.
4. Disable and do not install or use filesharing applications.
5. Install and enable a firewall to block unauthorized access.
6. Install and enable security software to protect against malicious applications, viruses, spyware, and malware-based attacks.
7. Keep your security software up to date. 
8. Research mobile applications (apps) before downloading. 
9. Maintain physical control of your mobile device. Know where it is at all times to limit the risk of unauthorized use. 
10. Use adequate security to send or receive health information over public Wi-Fi networks.
11. Delete all stored health information on your mobile device before discarding it.