Techie :: Techno ::: November 2004 Archives

The SCO site has been quite subtly defaced. One of the images on the main page of the site has been replaced with the one below: The image that *should* have been there is below:

There was an interesting post to ILUG this morning with links to alternatives for a lot of common Windows applications. Ken Guest's list of applications is an excellent starting point. I'll definitely be adding that to the resources section when I get a chance. There are still a couple of areas that it is hard for linux to compete, but things are definitely improving. I only wish the AIB would make their online business banking compatible with other browsers and OS!

As of last Friday ICANN's rules on domain transfers have been changed quite dramatically. Whether this should be seen in a positive light or not is hard to say, however the potential for abuse is all too real. Some of the registrars make it relatively easy to edit domains "en masse", so locking isn't an issue. Others don't seem to understand why updating several hundred domains manually is a painful exercise :cry:

Well if you haven't heard it already (where have you been hiding?) Firefox 1.0 has finally been released. I've been using it on both Windows and Debian for the last few months and love it. Why? Tabbed browsing is the main thing for me, but it's not the only one. I made a few comments on it in the past when PR1 was released. I also ran into a few issues with getting its links to work in evolution Needless to say quite a few people in the "techie" community have been talking about this today. Tom should be providing a review later, while Slashdot et al have been raving all day (they might also have been ranting, but we'll ignore that) So far I have found one minor "bug", which was not an issue in previous versions. For some odd reason FF cannot communicate properly over SSL with sites like amazon, so you have to do some messing with your settings!! Under Tools>Options>Advanced>Validation >Enable OSCP If you're having problems downloading from the main site you should have a look for a torrent source. There seem to be a few floating around... If you want to design or develop for Firefox you should really learn to use standards compliant coding:

Niall has packaged Skype for Debian. It works perfectly! More details on his site here

Well... Not really... One of the spam trends I've noticed recently is "link swap" spam. If you only run one website you might be duped into believing it was a genuine request for a link swap.. ... except when you get 100's of them with almost identical text and very obvious indications that they have never "visited" your site except with their spam bot! Typically the text reads something like this: Hello, I came across your web site recently http://www.xxxxx.com/, and I am intrigued by its contents. I was particularly fascinated by your site. I thought our web site might interest you and be of help to your web site visitors. Here we listed the brief description of our site, Title - description of spammer's site - http://www.somespammersdomain.tld I feel that exchange of links would elicit mutual beneficial effects to both the sites and their visitors. If you feel that exchange of links would prove to be apt and beneficial, please do include our links in your site and forward your link details. Even if you should feel that you are not happy including our link in your site, do let us know whether you would have any objections if we were to include your link in our site. If you should feel that it requires further discussion, please do get in touch with us at Best Regards, Some Spammer or some spammers "promotion company" What amuses me is that they tend to either pick sites like search.ie or translationresearch.com which actively accept links! Or else they choose sites that have zero relevance to them. I blame google! (sort of)

I've been experimenting with a number of CRMs over the last few months. There seem to be a couple of types on the market:

• Desktop based
• web based
• Combination

The desktop applications all seem to be windows based and include some form of email client that either integrates with Outlook or replaces it. Although a lot of companies use windows only on their desktops we don't, so these solutions wouldn't solve anything for us. The web based solutions may have some kind of "hook" into an email client, but this is not a "given" The desktop ones I've "played" with to date have all been very disappointing. Although they may offer all the functions that a CRM needs I can't understand why they are so damned ugly. The user interfaces in both goldmine and Act! remind me of the kind of UI that you'd have found in windows 3.1!! The other thing that is annoying is their "backends". The database support seems to be an after thought. On the web based side I did come across a few that looked quite good, but they required IIS to run. That increases the TCO of any application significantly, as it would add approx €2000 to the initial cost, plus the added admin overheads. In the Open Source world there are a few CRMs, but most of them are very immature. Yes - you could adopt one to suit your needs, but that takes time, patience and money, so buying or supporting a more mature application is a lot more attractive. So what are the options? The only "mature" OSS CRM that I've come across to date is Sugar CRM. It comes in two flavours which both run off LAMP (linux apache mysql php if you aren't sure). So for the last couple of days I've been testing it in a semi-live environment. The installation of version 2 only takes a couple of minutes and is quite intuitive. The installer prompts you for some basic information, such as database details, and then checks that certain files and directories have the correct permissions. This worked quite well, but failed to check the permissions recursively causing issues with some of the GD functions used for generating graphics internally. Documentation on using the application is completely absent, which is a real pity. You can guess what most of the functions are, but some of them are not as obvious as the authors might think. The user interface is supposedly "skinnable" but as it ships with three functional themes extra customisation isn't too much of an issue. In common with a lot of software, however, all the default settings are completely American ie. US dollars, US English and US format for many functions. You can activate a second currency, but you cannot deactivate US dollars nor can you change the currency used to produce the graphs of sales activity or potentials. This causes an interesting issue with figures being available in one part but not being reflected anywhere else! We're going to keep using Sugar for the moment and see how we get on with it. If anybody can recommend a better solution I'd appreciate their recommendations