Apr 23, 2007
I have been running two eBusinesses (namely PeopleWords.com and Lokad.com) and back-office systems play an important role in your business.
Basically, there are 3 unavoidable elements for any eBusiness back-office
Account & User deletion Error logs reporting Business oriented dashboard Account & User deletion: IT’S THE LAW, well, at least in Europe, but I suspect that many other countries provide similar laws, rules or guidelines. Intuitively, if a user who has just created an account asks for a deletion of his account (including all the user-related data), complying is a legal requirement.
Apr 15, 2007
Dynacom is a Canadian accounting software that provides an add-on development framework named Synergy. We have started to work on an integration of the Lokad Desktop Sales Forecasting with Dynacom. This post might interest developers who want to integrate together several windows applications (we are considering Dynacom here, but the process would be quite similar for another application).
Basically, Dynacom provides build-in custom action Run external program; yet, this action has a huge drawback: it requires either your application to be part of the PATH on the client machine or it requires to provide an absolute file location (which is likely to vary from one machine to another).
Apr 6, 2007
I am a regular customer of freelance services. It’s especially useful when you need to translate your website or when you need open source developments because confidentiality becomes irrelevant.
Usually, I am browsing the freelance websites on the buyer side; yet I only recently gave a try to the provider side. Most freelance websites include tons of job like
Simple sort in Java, NEED HELP JOIN, INNER-JOIN, LEFT-JOIN in SQL Solving a puzzle in C … Those jobs are clearly student homeworks, and I have been stunned by the fact that those jobs may represent one job out of two on most freelance websites (yet those jobs are tiny on average; thus the business impact is probably much smaller than 50%).
Mar 30, 2007
There isn’t many 100% reliable hosting providers; yet when I buy an hosted subscription plan, I expect no less than a 100% uptime services.
So far, I have discovered only two fail-proof hosting services
Squarespace.com: blog hosting, not a single issue for more than 3 months of service. Hosted-projects.com: Subversion hosting, not a single issue for almost 1 year of service. Such a quality of services is truly worth to be mentioned and praised.
Mar 25, 2007
Continuous integration is a cornerstone of our development processes at Lokad. We are currently relying on CruiseControl.Net to support continuous integration.
Several months ago, I did ask on various web forums if any company would sell hosting packages that would natively include CruiseControl.Net. The only answer that I did get was Get yourself a 300 USD PC and use it as your continuous integration server. I was totally unsatisfied with such answers because the maintenance costs associated with the management of an additional machine are terrible.
Mar 17, 2007
Math.NET is open-source project delivering mathematics / statistics libraries written in C# (and mostly targeting .Net, although Mono compatibility should not be an issue). I have been personally contributing on the numerics package of Math.NET code-named Iridium.
Several years ago, I did setup a [ediawiki-based website for Math.NET, but it’s now completely obsolete. Yet, I would like to mention Christoph Ruegg has released a brand new website for Math.NET. Update your (social) bookmarks with mathdotnet.
Mar 13, 2007
There are a lot of things that are simply wrong in PAD files. My previous experiences of PAD file submission for Resx Editor and Lokad ASP.Net Sales Forecasting were just terrible. I did end up submitting my PAD URLs at random for hours to hundreds of crappy directories (because most online directories do not even work) without knowing whether this work would actually lead anywhere.
Three weeks ago, it did bargain 80 euros or so and gave a shot to submit-everywhere.
Feb 12, 2007
There are quite a lot of things that are just simply wrong in the IT industry nowadays, I have already discussed the case of the Google Adwords, let’s move to the subject of PAD files.
PAD stands for Portable Application Description, it’s an XML format designed by the shareware industry to facilitate the submission of software products to software directories. The idea is pretty simple and pretty nice. As a software manufacturer, you create a PAD file for each one of your products; then you publish this PAD file directly on your website.
Feb 10, 2007
The release system of Sourceforge.net requires to upload your files by FTP to upload.sourceforge.net. The process is basically a pure pain, especially for small files:
sourceforge.net is slow, upload.sourceforge.net is slow too.
you need to process your files by FTP whereas it could have been done much more easily through a simple web upload (at least for file that are less then 5MB which must account for 99% of the file released on sourceforge anyway).
Feb 4, 2007
WetPaint is a hosted wiki solution. Although Wetpaint still lacks from “professional” wiki features like being able to insert custom HTML or scripts, it’s a nice, simple wiki application with a great look&feel. I have triedWetPaint, I did even use it for while for Lokad.com; but looking back, it turned out to be a really BAD move. I have finally manually removed all the content from my wetpaint wiki (because there is no “Remove my wiki” feature available); and I have migrated all the content to community.
