FluxHQ - Rambings of Beings from a Parallel Universe

GMail just started rolling out free IMAP access to GMail accounts to their users. You can configure it through your ‘Settings’ menu in GMail, you should see a IMAP Acess tab there when it is rolled out to your account. This lets users access GMail through multiple clients while still being able to keep in sync all the email. Cool stuff. Check out the Google release here.

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Just wanted to share a TIP for GMail on the Blackberry. If you want to read your emails which have been archived and labeled you can do the following:

1) Open up GMail on your Blackberry
2) Hit the menu button
3) Select ‘More…’
4) Then in the menu that comes up select ‘More Labels’
5) Place a check mark next to the Labels you’d like to read on the road
6) Save and Exit
7) Now when you want to read email from your labels which have been archived and miss your inbox, you hit menu when you are in GMail and select ‘More…’, you will be presented with a menu with the Labels you have chosen, select a label and be transferred to the Label Mailbox.

Voilà!

My next post will deal with how to sync Gmail contacts with your Blackberry, keeping your Apple address book synced at the same time.

toodles!

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Everybody and their grandmother is looking to cut costs these days and one of the first stops they make in that process is their telephone bill. I’ve been one of the “earlier” adopters of low cost telephony solutions as they trickled into the US market over the years and yet, I still find myself looking for the utopian device with a utopian plan. What I’ve found out should come as no surprise to anyone, perfection in this world is non-existent. But if you think about it, with the way things stand in the US telephony market today, there has to be a way to make this happen, and that’s why I set out on my “quest”, tired of teeny bopper types and their flash, my prerogative was productivity and low cost.

So my journey began with the iPhone. After listening to Señor Jobs in his keynote I began to think that this quest of mine would be pretty meaningless and rather short. But unfortunately for me that wasn’t the case. The commercial availability of the iPhone brought with it a major problem, for me. AT&T. Not my top choice for carrier and definitely not the carrier with the most cost effective plans. Why Apple chose them over, T-Mobile for instance, puzzles me. I figured, well for the utopian device I would be willing to sacrifice the carrier choice part. That was not to be either. Apple did not allow third party apps on their phone and I just couldn’t get over typing on a touch screen interface. The rest of the offering though is stellar, the web browser, mapping, music player, tight software integration and of course all the gimmicks, including my favorite, the pinch zoom. So since the application offerings are slim and the fact that it wouldn’t work on a carrier of my choosing, I decided I was going to pass on the iPhone and wait for iteration 2 or 3 of the product to maybe find that utopian phone of mine.

Moving on, the rest of the offerings could now be classified as Windows Mobile devices, Symbian devices, Palms or Blackberries. I was skeptical about running windows on my mobile device, when I did not trust windows on my computer. Nonetheless, I persevered and gave it a shot. The beginning wasn’t too pleasant, and after a few lock-ups I started using the device. The user interface is a little too nested and finding something turns out to be a pretty tedious task. The other issue I had with WM6 was shoddy power management on the software end. Then there’s the usual windows problems, memory leaks, sudden crashes and suspect memory intensive applications. The positive side of this is that the platform does have a ton of applications written for it, including skype, MS Office documents can be created as well as read and there are quite a few nifty devices running this OS. The bad outweighs the good here so this were a no go.

The Symbian OS started out really promising, people raved about it’s stability as an OS, it’s long feature list and it’s intuitive user interface. The one major flaw of Symbian is that it is designed with smartphones in mind and does provide a solid foundation for them, but it does not offer much for a general computing device. Since I wasn’t looking for a clamshell that could do email and browse the internet, this wasn’t meant to be either. Additionally the device choices are rather slim here in the US.

Palm was one of the pioneers in this space, but gross mismanagement and piss poor product development have created a laggard in this space. Garnet felt slow and clunky in addition to the fact that multi-tasking is a chore and brings the machine almost to it’s, well, knees. The Palm device choices are also not very aesthetically appealing and leaves much to be desired. Chalk up a major disappointment here.

Well, that left me with the Blackberry line from Research In Motion. I was pleasantly surprised with what I found. On the software side, though the OS is a bit flaky, the applications are solid and fast. The push email feature is speedy and very functional, the applications work really well with the device and it’s physical limitations. Multi-tasking, call quality and battery life were all above acceptable standards. The only thing that left a little to be desired was the internet browser, the native browser was ho-hum and Opera on the Blackberry offered rich text internet browsing but that still does not hold a candle to Safari on the iPhone. The included mapping application is good, though you can download Google Maps for the device along with a slew of other Google Applications. On the hardware end, the 8820 and the 8320 impressed me the most, the latter with GPS. They are also UMA capable phones which work with T-Mobile’s Hotspot @ home service. Apart from that they are quad band phones with WiFi, big screens, very nice keyboards and great styling. It’s easy to see why users get addicted to their Blackberries, hence the name ‘Crackberry’, but despite the sounds of it, it’s not the device’s fault that it’s good at what it does, users need to moderate and set limits for their usage, if they find it to be addictive.

So the choice was made, and since I am a big fan of T-Mobile and their cost effective yet very functional calling plans with data & blackberry access, it is the Blackberry for now. The 8820 if you’ve got a few bills to get an unlocked phone or an almost free 8320 from T-mobile.

The quest though hasn’t ended, the perfect device is ever so close, now if someone would just get it together and make one. The other thing I would like to see happen more is VoIP on mobile phones, and I don’t mean a service like jajah or eko.

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Django & Me

It’s been a while since I’ve been using the python web framework named after the Jazz guitarist, Django Reinhardt, Django. I’ve been meaning to blog about it for quite a while now, but lack of time and laziness have prevailed. Django is still relatively unknown when compared to one of it’s rival* frameworks, Rails. Rails has been the darling of web 2.0 and is a framework for Ruby based web application development. A couple of years ago I was confronted with a project that required rapid development, relatively complex data handling, robust interface development and an administrative side. The time constraints placed on the project took me on the hunt for a suitable framework which would enable us to achieve our goals. I came across both Rails and Django along with a host of other frameworks. These were the two that stood out though. Django for it’s brilliant website and example application (Chicagocrime.org), and Rails for the people behind it and the applications they had created from it. Both communities seemed friendly and active, as well as the active involvement of the actual founders of both projects. Familiarity with python, the killer Django Admin interface, the fact that Django was created for a newsroom with different data handling needs, the fact that the scalability of Django at production was already proven and the loose coupling provided by Django, made the choice for me pretty simple. Though I still think there are instances where Rails is a better choice, for me picking Django was almost a no-brainer.

Starting Out

Django makes it pretty easy for newbies to get their feet wet. They have a good four part tutorial on their website, and they also have a book coming out, the book can also be viewed online currently, until it gets published. Other solid places to go for help, are the mailing lists, the wiki and on IRC. Usually your question gets answered pretty quickly by someone knowledgeable in the matter. A simple google search will also bring up a list of blogs and other websites offering tips and good info. Recently there has also been a glut of “middleware” applications for Django, apps you can plug into your app, which can be found on Google Code.

*rival in terms of Web Application Frameworks, not Python Frameworks.

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I thought it would be a nice idea to list some of the apps for Tiger that I find useful, perhaps others can benefit from them.

AppZapper - Great little app for uninstalling apps, it finds all the related config files and other garbage and the interface is awesome.

TextMate - What all the other text editors want to be.

MarsEdit - Blogging tool, the latest version is super nice, but I’m told version 2 thats coming out soon is supposed to be a lot better.

ByteController - A little menubar app to control your iTunes, it’s not fancy but very functional.

Cue-Splitter - An app to split up all those long mp3’s you have, with the help of a cue file. Works for most of the files I’ve tried it on. Look at Cuesheet Heaven for creating cue cheets.

Awaken - An alarm app for Tiger, nice interface and good alarm options.

CompressFiles - A compression app which enables you to leave out mac specific system files during compression, that way when you send the compressed archive over to your Windoze brethren they don’t have all the HFS silliness.

Delibar - Access to your del.icio.us bookmarks from your menubar.

KisMAC - Cool tool for checking out the wifi world around you, with some expertise you might even be able to crack a few networks. Sadly this project has been temporarily halted due to some new laws in Germany.

UnRARX - A RAR application for OS X.

memtest - Command-line application that allows you to comprehensively test your memory chips.

Adium - IM client, supports pretty much any IM with a unified interface.

iScrobbler - Sends out your iTunes now playing track info over to Last.fm

Transmission - A really good BitTorrent client.

Transmit - The best FTP client I have come across, across platforms. I’m glad it’s a Tiger app and that I have a Mac.

Billings - A quote, invoicing and time tracking application. Very cool interface and generates some of the most beautiful invoices/quotes I have seen. Well worth the money spent.

Cha-Ching - A personal finance manager, sorta like Money or Quicken but a lot more intuitive and pretty.

VLC Player - an alternative to quicktime, and it’s free.

Yep - An iPhoto like organizer for PDFs. Nice concept if you have a lot of paper in your life, you can get rid of all the paper and just Yep the whole thing.

Yojimbo - Yep, but for all kinds of files. Maybe a little overkill, but it’s on my wishlist.

XSlimmer - This app analyses your system and gets rid of all the unnecessary source code, application localizations and other bloat.

That’s the list! If anyone out there has any suggestions or would like to add to this list, please use the comments to let me know.

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I caught a snippet the other day about a Silicon Valley startup, Data Robotics, on the BBC, and upon further investigation, I came across their product, Drobo. It’s essentially an external disk storage system, which makes all the configuration of multiple disk systems completely trivial to the user. All the user has to do is plug in Drobo to the USB port and plug some disks into the system. Disk removal and upgrades are also made completely trivial. I absolutely love the concept of not having to fuss with RAID settings, stripe size etc. Some of the other factors I like are the fact that there is no need for homogenity in disk sizes, mixing & matching is ok. Add to that the fact that there is no client software required to run this device makes it a win. Real-time swapping of disks without causing any downtime is also a cool feature. Data Robotics has a demo of the entire working of the Drobo on their website and for more in depth information check out the Arstechnica review.

One of the downsides is the relatively high price, $500 for just the unit sans any drives makes it a little out of the average consumer’s reach. I would also like to see other interfaces such as Firewire or eSata be an option. USB2.0 does not really make me want to run out and get one. But future iterations of the product are something I will look forward to.

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Well, it seems that my prayers have been answered. TV has come to my screen… if you don’t know what I’m talking about, you too should check out Joost. I’ll let you guys watch their cool intro video. I like that old guy and the whole setup is very Matrix-y. I will report back once more TV has been watched and I can form a sufficiently coherent opinion, which is based more on facts and less on exhilaration.

In other news, this blog has finally caught up to WP updates and is sporting teh latest bling. Along the blogging lines, I have also finally started using a third party blog tool, MarsEdit, which I seem to like so far.

I’ve also got some Django-isms to report, but those will have to wait a little longer.

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So the other day at WWDC, Stevo showed off some of Leopard’s new features. I’m impressed, but one thing stood out. A lot of apps now have an iTunes-like interface. Safari’s new Web Inspector which was released a couple days back, also sports the same look. I began to ponder, maybe this was because the iTunes interface is the greatest interface ever. No, that can’t be the case, it’s a good interface I’ll admit, but it has it’s shortcomings. It’s a pretty brilliant move by Apple and the developers of the various apps, the iPod is now so ubiquitous, that everyone who has one has come in contact with iTunes at some point. Making interfaces common across the board, reduces the learning curve significantly, especially when an iTunes-like interface can accomplish similar things across the board. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Apple roll out the next version of iPhoto with an interface more similar to iTunes. Whether this strategy will translate into dollars for Apple remains to be seen. The other factor to also consider is whether this homogenization of interfaces will take it’s toll on usability.

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It’s been 5 days, 12 hours and 23 minutes since I began my wait, and here I am lying in wait for the FedEx truck to show up. In the span of the last few hours I’ve chased down two FedEx trucks and had a bunch of near misses with other couriers. All this because my blessed door buzzer system decided to take the day off on this very day, of course. Why all this ruckus for a simple courier delivery you ask, well it because I’m awaiting my new Mac which is on that delivery truck. Yes, a machine some chips and a PCB is getting my panties all in a twist. The FedEx website doesn’t give you an approximate time of delivery, all it says is, “On Delivery Truck”, great… You would think that since delivery truck routes are pre-determined, they should at least be able to give me a time window during which the delivery could occur.

Furthermore, all this is after I had called FedEx to request that my package not be put on a truck but instead be held at their location, so that I could go pick it up myself. My request was acknowledged and confirmed but not executed, clearly, since the tracking info shows otherwise.

Wait, do I see a FedEx truck…

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The last few days I’ve been evaluating various Open Source/Free CRM and ERP solutions for SME’s(Small & Medium Enterprises) and let me tell you, I was in for quite a ride. Before I go into further detail, these are the products I evaluated:

• ADempiere
• CentraView
• Centric CRM
• Compiere
• Cream
• ERP5
• Daffodil CRM
• Hipergate
• OpenCRX
• OpenBravo
• OpenMFG
• Opentaps/OfBiz
• SourceTap CRM
• SugarCRM
• TinyERP
• vTiger + CK-ERP
• XRMS + CK-ERP

Some general comments before my analysis of the individual packages. I’ve found that these offerings can be broadly classified into two, Java based applications and LAMP-stack based applications (ERP5 being the only exception). MySQL is pretty much the common denominator amongst all of them, barring OpenBravo and Daffodil. As for other database support, Oracle seems to be a pretty strong player in this market, especially with their new 10g offerings in Linux and the free XE alternative. PostgresSQL gets a lot of love too as does MS SQL Server. Another classification that can be made is desktop application and web-hosted application, the latter is clearly the preferred option by many, as I have discovered. Some also offer it as a SaaS (Software as a Service) product, which has a lot of cost benefits over hosting it on your own. Add to it the fact that you can have the vendor customize the app to meet your exact requirements, makes SaaS an enticing play.

My initial objective was to find a system that was free, easy to use and met the requirements of my fictional company ACME Beer Distribution. I was shooting for lowest cost of entry and potentially the highest possible ROI. The company I made up, ACME Beer Distribution, was a small beer distribution company who needs an ERP solution to manage their procurement, sales, customers, shipping, digital assets and accounting. Some of the other features I was looking at were ease of administration, usability and functionality match. Both self-hosting and SaaS option were possibilities, but cost was the driving factor. My findings were very interesting and so I decided to grade them based on my criterion, so here they are.

Grade F: Cream, Daffodil CRM

• This is a CRM app focused on media organizations. It’s got a poor UI, is written in Java and supports Linux, FreeBSD and Windows. OS X is interestingly not one of the supported platforms, considering the focus, I think is not a very redeeming fact. Other than that, the development of this product looks to be at a standstill, so not much hope here, at least you don’t have to pay for it.
• Here’s another CRM product trying to emulate a mini ERP, add to it that development of this product has seemingly come to an end and the fact it uses a non-standard database, you get a recipe for a product to avoid. Daffodil has a non-working demo on it’s homepage and all signs point to a dead project. It’s mentioned here for posterity.

Grade D-: OpenCRX, SourceTap

• OpenCRX would not have been given such a grade had I been evaluating CRM systems only. It is quite the full fledged CRM application with a fairly decent albeit confusing UI. Support and internationalization is very good as is the multitude of databases it supports. If it evolves to anything more than a CRM system, it could very well be worth another look.
• Here is another candidate for the UI reclamation project. Since the world apparently needed one more CRM application, SourceTap stepped up and filled that need. It has a fairly comprehensive feature set for sales force automation, things like E-mail integration and mobile device support are missing. Their support system and documentation could use a little help.

Grade D: CentraView, Hipergate, vTiger+CK-ERP*, XRMS+CK-ERP
This grade category is very indicative of the state of open source CRM & ERP implementations today, mediocre.

• CRM with a little bit of this and little bit of that, that seems to be CentraView’s motto. It’s a J2EE application and is truly open source. CentraView offers consulting and support services for a fee. It’s internationalization support is poor and it’s self-touted sales force automation is woefully lacking any mobile device support. It’ll be interesting to see if it’s developers can get it right in subsequent releases. One of the nice things about it is that it’s got a fairly usable UI.
• Hipergate is another truly open source application. It is web and java based, so speed is not its forte. It’s feature set is a bit skinny and it’s implementations haven’t really been spot on. It’s documentation, support and user base also leave a lot to be desired.
• Middleware. How cliche. Well the next two are good examples of it. vTiger is a open source CRM application based on the LAMP stack, much like SugarCRM, and actually almost emulates SugarCRM to a T. It does have some compatibility issues and the developers are pretty slow to integrate new changes. The user base for it, though, is fairly large and hence it has a very usable support and feedback system. The UI is pretty nice, but can get confusing at times.XRMS is a barebones CRM system with a limited UI and confusing setup. It’s only graded in this category because of CK-ERP, which when integrated properly makes this a semi-usable product.As for their ERP capabilities, they are able to extend themselves into that arena by being the middleware for another open source project, CK-ERP. The feature set is very comprehensive, but the documentation and the support group are not too compelling. Neither is the implementation. It makes no attempt to integrate into the middleware’s UI and workflow, but instead just sits on top and becomes an application the middleware links to, because of this there are some application redundancies and no inter-application communication. However, it is a rapidly deploy-able solution for small organizations with limited ERP needs.

Grade C: ADempiere, Centric CRM, Opentaps, SugarCRM

• Now, normally I dislike projects that have arisen due to a flame-out between developers, but I make an exception here since it is a noteworthy product as well as a distinguished product when compared to it’s parent project. ADempiere is largely based on Compiere and aims to be the truly Open Source and community focused application out there. But in doing so it has forgotten that it’s companies who are the end-users of this product and not developers, at least not what developers think companies need as an ERP solution. So the feature set is a tad obsolete and as usual the UI is nothing to write home about.
• Centric CRM is another java based offering out there, and just like SugarCRM, it does not belong in this discussion, but nonetheless it’s features and implementation, showcase what happens when open source is done right. The install is a bit tricky but once you get past that, it’s smooth sailing. It utilizes Tomcat to serve up it’s web based Java-CRM-ness, but it’s well implemented and seems to have quite an active community behind it.
• Our next contender suffers from the same UI disease that almost everyone else has. It utilizes an Apache project OfBiz as the code-base for it’s offering. That being the case it tries to be a jack of all things and succeeds in being a master of none. It’s invoicing, quoting and some of it’s CRM modules leave a lot to be desired. To be fair though, development is still underway, and OfBiz seems to be a good base to build upon. Hopefully in the upcoming releases they can fix the UI and some of the shortcomings. Opentaps has the potential to be one of best Open Source ERP solutions out there, it’s just not there yet.
• The most impressive of this group is SugarCRM and though it technically does not have many ERP features, I was compelled to put it in here. From install to UI and customization, this takes the cake. But all is not great in Sugar land, the free version comes with limited functionality and the wiki and docs are very disorganized. Along with it’s Asterisk integration, this makes for a fine web based CRM system.

Grade B: ERP5, OpenMFG, OpenBravo, TinyERP
These packages had quite useful features but yet were lacking on some fronts.

• ERP5 has an impressive feature set and it’s UI is one of the nicer ones in this comparison, had a lot going for it, until I had to install Zope. I’m not going into the shortcomings of Zope in this post, but it’s definitely not what I would choose to run my “enterprise ready” app. The other factor against it was that it decidedly has a European focus, not unlike TinyERP and OpenBravo.
• OpenMFG has some serious user interface engineering problems and is not for everyone, as it’s focused on manufacturing. It’s also not a web based tool, it requires a client for the customer’s platform of choice. The only reason it gets a B is it’s redeeming feature set.
• TinyERP is a desktop app, but has connectors for web apps like Joomla. Pretty decent feature set, but not being web based and it’s European flavor has it at a B.
• OpenBravo has most of the features but like most of the others lacks a nice UI. Like it’s compadres in this grade category, it’s main customer base is European, Spanish in this case.

Grade B+: Compiere

• Well, for one it has the most unique name of them all. It also has the most complete feature set of the group. It runs well on different versions of Oracle, and though there is no official documentation about it, it apparently runs on other relational databases. It’s a Java based app, a knock in my book, but the bigger fault is it’s UI. Very clunky and has a 90’s computer feel to it ala CDE. Access is through a client agnostic Java webstart client or a HTML client.

*I wasn't able to install vTiger on a LAMP stack with PHP 5.2, but on 5.1 and below it seems to be fine. This was a big factor since the upgrade to 5.2 basically broke the application.

Well basically there is no solution that perfectly fits my mould, which was disappointing. A few came close and none of them I could install on a LAMP stack, most of them are Java based, which is cool and all, but somehow I have a Java stigma that I cannot get over, and it’s got ‘administration nightmare’ in it. SaaS is my only viable option, the cost of entry is not prohibitive and it’s someone else’s responsibility to maintain the app. The net net is that ACME Beer will have to shell out some money for a SaaS ERP solution to perfectly match their needs, and Compiere is a front runner for that cash.

Some of my other observations:

Almost all the applications have a pretty significant learning curve. Something, I think, that needs to be addressed. If you believe all those Microsoft adverts on the telly, you might just think that Microsoft, through acquisitions, has solved that mystery. It does highlight the need for easy user adoption though, which is key in SME’s. They have a hard enough time trying to be in business, the last thing they need is training sessions for a system that is supposed to make them improve business.

Most of these entities who create the kinds of software listed above seem to be a bit confused about CRM and ERP. ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning while CRM is Customer Relationship Management. ERP is about managing just about everything a company has and optimizing it to further improve their business prospects, earnings and to facilitate cost savings throughout the company, at least in theory. Whereas CRM is about customers and how businesses want to treat customer relationships as assets, which they hope can be leveraged to improve sales. In order to do so you have a CRM application which helps facilitate this process through improved communication, better and more targeted marketing initiatives etc. To better understand this difference, I highly recommend reading this article.

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