Archive for the ‘styx technology group’ Category

22 Apr

A Frugal Innovation Approach to Simcard Verification 2019 Edition – Design & High-level Architecture

Posted by ssmusoke in frugal innovation, mobile technology usage, software delivery, software development lifecycle, styx technology group, tips and tricks. Tagged: , , , .

Happy Easter Monday to you all, and I hope that the rains on Sunday night completed the cleansing process from the festivities, the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ and from the feast of the Goddess Ester (depending on which side you lean)… I am one who embraces all religious doctrines an faiths.

So over the last few days I have started receiving a message from MTN Uganda, to physcially visit a service center to verify my sim card registration, well this is only the 3rd cycle for selected customers whose details were screwed up during cycle 2, and I guess I am one of the lucky few with time to waste.

This is a followup to the 2013 recommendations for Simcard Registration https://ssmusoke.com/2013/03/12/uganda-simcard-registration-alternate-approach/ which apparently were not providing sufficient value 😉

Anyway after having to make 10 calls this morning, the reminder message, a hardcoded IVR message, has left me frustrated, but also wondering, why do I have to physically visit the service center, it is 2019!

Rather than complain all the time, I focused my anger with support from my trusted colleagues at Styx Technology Group (http://styxte.ch) we got to protoyping a quick and dirty solution to this mess. What MTN and the regulator need are my National ID details, since they will scan the ID or take a photo of it, take a photo of me then I will have to wait 2-3 days,

A frugal innovation can be:

  1. Mobile App front end to capture data that is needed
  2. A backend system – doesn’t matter what it is – can even reuse the exisiting simcard registration database they have with processes to complete the verification flow, and link into the audit process that triggered this verification
  3. A verification process, which can be done by the app automatically, or using a backup USSD channel. This follows 2FA (two factor authentication to prevent mis-use)
  4. A notification that the verificatio process has been completed and *197# can be leveraged to check status.

This method is not for everyone, but provides a solution for those of us who may not be able to line up and waste 2-3 hours in line to do just this…

Some mobile screenshots from the design team

 

NIN Details

National ID Details

Phone Numbers

Phone Numbers

Confirmation

Confirmation

Thoughts and additions are welcome!!!

UPDATE 1: One of the team members asked me, so does this solve your problem? How do you know which numbers are listed on your NIN that has been provided? Leading to iteration 2 of the Phone Numbers screen allowing the display of existing numbers with functionality to remove currently registered numbers…

Phone Numbers - v2

26 Feb

Crowdsourcing Validation Rules for Uganda National ID

Posted by ssmusoke in database, enterprenur, mobile computing, opensource, software delivery, software development lifecycle, styx technology group, tips and tricks. Tagged: .

I am curious about the ability to validate that the Uganda National Identification Number (NIN) is well formed. However this does not validate that the NIN actually belongs to the person presenting it or that it is correct.

The rules that I have been able to gleam are:

  1. Must be 14 characters long
  2. First character is a letter of the alphabet. C seems to be a common letter – does it stand for citizen?
  3. Second letter is either M or F – male or female
  4. Characters 3 and 4 are numbers, which are the year of birth. Cannot be after 00 since that would make a person below 18
  5. Characters 5, 6, 7 are numbers

How can you help? Which of these rules do not match your NIN? Share any additional patters to build a repository of rules that can later be mapped to programming language validations – Regular expressions and validation frameworks

17 Apr

TechTip: Dbunit Export from Jetbrains DataGrip

Posted by ssmusoke in database, software development lifecycle, styx technology group, test driven development (TDD), tips and tricks. Tagged: , , .

I am an avid test driven development (TDD) advocate nowadays, with a pragmatic slant of course, looking to bullet proof the features that I deliver to ensure that they do what is expected, and work out edge cases.

A big challenge to testing is generating of test data, which is needed to setup some integration test work flows. I have been using Jailer (http://jailer.sourceforge.net/) to generate data from existing tables in a Dbunit format which can then embed in my test dataset xml files.

This is a challenge due to the mapping of relationships by Jailer (a neat feature by the way). So while working Datagrip, the database IDE of choice, we were struck by how to export different formats when looking at a table. This solution would allow us to leverage available filtering and searching features, to nail down the datasets that needs to be exported.

On contacting the support team through Twitter (https://twitter.com/0xdbe/status/853900122828222465/photo/1), the recommendation was to modify the existing XML groovy script to generate DBunit XML, following the steps at https://www.jetbrains.com/help/datagrip/2017.1/extending-the-datagrip-functionality.html

And well an hour later below is a groovy script to do just that can be found at https://gist.github.com/ssmusoke/ca4c55b4e52de97acb99a590644a677f which can be used by creating a new script DbUnit-Groovy.xml.groovy 

The code was not being well rendered hence the move to a Gist

22 May

Styx Technology Group Launches Poultry Farm Revenue Calculator App

Posted by ssmusoke in agriculture, android, enterprenur, innovation, mobile computing, styx technology group, technology.

As part of the Styx Technology Group mission to leverage technology to support executives identify, implement & refine strategic technology interventions in their business & target market segments, we are proud to partner with Kkungu Poultry Farm Enterprises Ltd to help bring relevant, useable cutting edge technology to Uganda agriculture executives.

Leveraging the experiences shared in this post Poultry Feed Economic 101 – Changing the Supplier Scenario, the team has built a simple easy to use calculator to address this question using minimal inputs to help poultry farm managers:

  1. Estimate their spot profitability based on the cost of inputs and revenue from sales of eggs
  2. Use simple data to decide whether to make the feed change based on the impact on the bottom line.

Download the application today from Google Play store with this link http://bit.ly/poultry-farm-calc

Please do share your feedback and let us know to improve this by sending email to poultrycalc at styxtechgroup dot com

Screenshots below:

Layer Profitability computation

Layer Profitability computation

Sample Layer Profitability computation

Sample Layer Profitability computation

Feed Switch Comparison Computation

Feed Switch Comparison Computation

Sample Feed Switch Comparison Computation

Sample Feed Switch Comparison Computation

20 Feb

Alternate Approach to Legal Independent Election Tallying

Posted by ssmusoke in alternative approach, database, devops, innovation, internet, mobile computing, mobile technology usage, opensource, responsive design, software development lifecycle, styx technology group, technology, tips and tricks, web development.

The Uganda elections are more or less over with less than 6 hours for the Uganda Electoral Commission (EC) to announce the results for the presidential elections.

Given all the time on our hands, with no social media, the team at Styx Technology Group designed the following alternative approach to independent electoral vote tallying for future elections that provides inbuilt mechanisms for audit and verification of results.

The primary data sources for the process are:

  1. Official EC list of polling stations and voters per polling station
  2. Photos of the signed election tally sheets from each polling station. To ensure that the photos are not tampered with and provide an audit trail:
    • Each photograph has to be taken with information on the camera, the GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken, date and time when the photo was taken which is available in many cameras that share it using the Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF)
    • Two separate photos of the tally sheets have to be taken by different cameras
    • The cameras taking equipment may be registered beforehand to provide validation of the source of the information
    • The signatures of the returning officers and stamp must be clear and visible in the photo

The architecture for the technology solution is as follows:

  1. Web based solution accessible via any browser. Due to poor Internet connectivity in many areas of the country, an Android app would be provided to assist in data collection, then data sent once the user gets into an area with Internet.
  2. The field officers who capture the photos would also be provided with an option of entering the candidate vote tallies.
  3. In the tallying center, candidate vote tallies are entered from the photos received and vote tallies entered by data clerks. In order to reduce errors the following approach would be used:
    • The clerks are randomly assigned photos as they come in
    • The tally for a station must be entered correctly by two separate data entry clerks, then approved by a supervisor. This process is formally called the two-pass verification method or double data entry.
  4. All correctly entered data is shared with the rest of the world for download and analysis.

This system is mission-critical having to be available for the entire vote counting period of 48 hours,  so the architecture includes the following paths for data collection:

  1.  Multiple access IP addresses and domains for the website in case some are blocked off
  2. Any data collected via the Android app can be sent via email to a dedicated tallying center address. To ensure that only data from the app is received and not changed in transit, encryption is used.

The inspiration came from a quote by Ghandi “Be the change you wish to see in the world”, disproving the myth that there is no local capability to design and implement such solutions and most of all that such solutions have to be complex.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and suggestions…

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