In a Technical Frame

Wave in a Box

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 17:28:00 +1200

Google pulled the plug on Wave a few weeks ago. This is an unfortunate development for us as we found Wave to be quite useful. We have used it to successfully collaborate on a couple of projects as our designer lives a few hundred kilometres away from where we are. The ability to login at any time and view documents, graphics and other work; catch up on the dialogue and add to it was very useful. The real time aspect of it was also beneficial. Having all the tools in one place worked very well for us.

However, all is not lost. Google have already released a substantial portion of the Wave code as Open Source. They have stated they will "flesh it out" to a more complete application which they have dubbed Wave in a Box. This will be a server and client with some but not all of the functionality of the original Wave. Google anticipates it being more fully developed by other parties.

I'm looking forward to it being released and intend to install it on one of our servers. While it may not be as functional as the original Wave in the early days/weeks/months of its release, I am sure that there are plenty of developers who will enhance it.

Naturally I will post updates of the progress on this blog.

Online CPD - a winner for everyone

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 11:37:00 +1200

It's been sometime since I last wrote a blog entry. During that much of the past few months Lisa and I have been working on our latest project, Online CPD. Online CPD is an online education tool for professionals organisations whose members are required to keep up to date with professional developments. This is usually referred to as Continuing Professional Development - hence CPD. Here is a quick cut and paste from another section of our website:

CLAD Services offers an online Continuing Professional Development (CPD) solution suitable for many CPD courses. This is designed for short courses for professionals and others who need to maintain their education and knowledge levels in their areas of expertise.

Continuing Professional Development is a requirement for many professions. Regardless of whether it is required or not, CLAD Services supports life-long learning and is pleased to be able to provide this facility.

We have approached this in an unusual manner. We are not charging organisations any upfront fees to use the Online CPD service. Instead we are offering to partner with them. They provide the course material; We develop it for use online; People who take the online CPD course get charged a fee per CPD unit (usually one hour). Most of this fee goes to the organisation providing the course material and CLAD Services gets a cut as well.

We like this as it enables organisations to benefit from the courses and this in turn benefits their membership.

Diaspora III

Fri, 14 May 2010 10:25:48 +1200

This is proving to be a very popular project. They originally set out to raise $10,000 by the 1st of June. So far they have raised over $115,000 and they still have 19 days to go. I expect some very good stuff to come from this project.

Diaspora II

Thu, 13 May 2010 07:08:00 +1200

Here are the links to a couple of articles on the Diaspora project I contributed financially to:

New York Times:

Four Nerds and a Cry to Arms Against Facebook

How angry is the world at Facebook for devouring every morsel of personal information we are willing to feed it?

A few months back, four geeky college students, living on pizza in a computer lab downtown on Mercer Street, decided to build a social network that wouldn’t force people to surrender their privacy to a big business. It would take three or four months to write the code, and they would need a few thousand dollars each to live on.

Link to NYT article

Wired

NYU Students Aim to Invent Facebook (Again). We’ve Got Your Back.

Remember when Facebook really was a private club? In the days before we called anything a “social network?” When “sharing” and “connecting” wasn’t bait for the switch of “monetizing” the stuff and nonsense of our lives? Well, four NYU students do, and they are so nostalgic for those halcyon days way back in 2004 that they have set out to re-invent that wheel — for the good of mankind.

The New York Times reports Wednesday that Ilya Zhitomirskiy, 20; Dan Grippi, 21; Max Salzberg, 22; and Raphael Sofaer, 19, decided that Facebook had become so … Facebook that the world needed a safe online haven, one that could fulfill what had once been the fact and promise of Facebook. A place secure from the Big Bad Wolves who walk right though an open door to cull, scrape, decipher and analyze our timelines, and who see a commercial opportunity every time we go for coffee, buy a movie ticket or change partners.

Link to Wired article

Decentralize the web with Diaspora.

Sun, 09 May 2010 10:38:00 +1200

Diaspora is an Open Source project which aims to develop a "privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed social network". Given my rantings in various places about the lack of privacy associated with Facebook and the way they hide their disregard for you privacy, I thought it was time I put my money where my mouth is. I have made a financial contribution to Disapora as I believe it could be the solution to my issues with social networking - namely the lack of control users have over their own data.

From the Kickstart Diaspora page:

What is it?

Enter your Diaspora “seed,” a personal web server that stores all of your information and shares it with your friends. Diaspora knows how to securely share (using GPG) your pictures, videos, and more. When you have a Diaspora seed of your own, you own your social graph, you have access to your information however you want, whenever you want, and you have full control of your online identity. Once we have built a solid foundation, we will make Diaspora easy to extend to facilitate any type of communication, and the possibilities will be endless.

A more complete explanation is available here.

MSI 100+ netbook

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 01:15:00 +1200

Our hardware supplier had a special on MSI 100+ netbooks last week so we bought a couple of them. Our reasoning was that we are spending more time away from the office and home and they would make for light travelling gear. This is particularly attractive to Lisa as she flies to Timaru on a semi-regular basis and finds it difficult working on the tiny plane she has to fly in.

The MSI 100+ is a few years old now which is probably why they were on special. Part of the special included an upgrade to 1.5gb of RAM which is fairly necessary I think. The OS is Windows XP Home which isn't the greatest of OSes but I will be shoe-horning some version of Linux onto my one in the near future. However, I will be keeping the Windows OS as it does come in useful.

For instance, I have installed VMWare vSphere Client and Veeam FastSCP on it. As I spend most of my time in Linux, it has proved to been somewhat of an annoyance when I have had to boot into Windows to do some work through the GUI on our ESXi server. In fact, even as I write this Veeam FastSCP is busy running a copy of a 750GB guest to another storage area. Usually doing this type of thing would tie up my my usual computer for hours. No longer!

The MSI is also very handy for those sleepless nights - currently it is around 2:30am. Awake with a cold and bored so I reach for the MSI and get on the net.

Telecom's XT Network down

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 07:18:00 +1300

As of this moment (Sunday 24 Jan 2010) Telecom's XT network has been down for me for over 24 hours. Whenever people in my household try to use it we get a "Network Busy" error. I dion't know how far the outage extends. As I haven't heard anything about it the outage could be quite localised.

Part of my work involves ensuring a remote site monitoring system (commonly known as telemetry) is up and running. The telemetry system is required to be available 24 hours a day as it monitors water and sewage flows in pump stations. Without it contractors are required to drive many kilometres all over the district to manually check each station. This is a huge inefficiency, wasting both time and money.

Each morning the contractors get a test report. If they don't get the report they contact me via cellphone and I login to the system and find out why it isn't working as it should and fix the problem. Yesterday morning the system didn't send out the test report and so the contractors rang me to let me know. As the contractor is on Telecom's CDMA network they could make calls just fine. I didn't answer my phone (because it never rang) so they left a voice message and assumed that I would act on it when I retrieved it.

Purely by coincidence around the same time I was working on a related network and realised there was a problem with the telemetry system and so fixed it. If it wasn't for this fortuitous coincidence, the contractor would have had to start driving around doing checks until someone found another way to contact me.

So there were two problems here. 1) The XT network was down and 2) The contractor, being on a different network, thought I had been informed. Obviously we need to look at this and have a backup contact system. If I don't answer my cell phone, fall back to Plan B.

Google Wave

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:38:29 +1300

You may have heard about Google Wave. It's a new technology being developed by Google. Google describes it as:

Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more

I was lucky enough to get an invite in the first round of public invites. It was a bit strange at first. As Rod Drury put it, it felt a bit like the first people with fax machines must have felt - no one else to talk to. However, that is rapidly changing. We all were provided with invites to send to friends. They came online and we were all given more invites. Now there must be several million people using it and they are all busy working out how to use Wave and what to use it for.

We have been using it to collaborate with our designer who lives and works several hundred kilometres away. Currently we are working on a website and we are finding the ability to share information through Wave to be very beneficial. We can either work together discussing topics live or separately and read the other's text in our own time. This particularly suits me as I tend to start work around 4:00am which many hours before the designer becomes available.

Wave is an exciting and new development in the online world. Google hope to have it replace e-mail as the preferred contact medium. To further this aim they have made the Wave protocol open and are Open Sourcing the code behind it. They want Wave servers to proliferate to the same extent that e-mail servers have.

Keep an eye on it. It has the potential to be as disruptive as Google Maps is proving to be. Read more about it at the site below. There is also an informative video on the page:

http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html

Are you prepared for a disaster?

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 02:42:00 +1200

A few posts ago I talked about the importance of backups. A recent article brought this to my attention again though it was discussing Disaster Recovery rather than just backups:

Symantec have found that most Small / Medium Businesses are unprepared for when disaster strikes.

Small and midsize businesses are confident in their disaster recovery capabilities, but their actual performance preventing outages shows they are "remarkably unprepared," according to a Symantec survey.

Ninety-three percent of New Zealand and Australian respondents were satisfied with their disaster-recovery plans, and only a quarter from the region believed customers would seek options other than waiting patiently for an outage to be fixed.

However, the practices of these businesses suggest this confidence is unwarranted. Symantec says the average SMB has experienced three outages in the past 12 months, with the leading causes in Australia and New Zealand being a disaster, a power outage, virus or hacker attacks and employees accidentally deleting data.

-- full article in Reseller news

Disaster Recovery is the ability to get your business up and running again should it suffer failure of some type whether it be the loss of premises through fire or flood, sudden departure of key employees, loss of data, hardware failure or any number of other untoward events.

What would you do if your computer system failed and you had an important contract to complete within a few days? Could you confidently say that you would be able to complete the contract? Would you have all the information you required to hand? Would you be able to get your system back up and running the next day?

In the post about backups I detailed our tape backup system. However, our backups go much further than that. We also have redundant disks in our server, backup changed data on an hourly basis to a second server and also conduct backups to staff computers overnight. You may consider this to be overkill but having lost some important data some seven years ago we consider this regime to be of vital importance.

The redundant disks in the primary server ensure that we will lose no data should one of the disks fail. The hourly backup of changed data to a second server gives us the capability of being up and running within an hour after a major server failure, and in the event of accidental data deletion we can restore the previous days data from the staff computers within minutes without having to resort to tape.

You may consider this to be beyond the capabilities of a small business or too expensive to justify. It isn't beyond your means - and what price do you put on your data? How important is it to you?

CLAD Services is a small business, albeit one with the technical knowledge and ability to make this happen. We can design and implement a suitable and affordable Disaster Recovery system for your computer system. We can also look at your business and provide advice on other ways of reducing the risk of disasters and other untoward events that could have an adverse effect on your day to day work.

Remote Access

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 09:29:00 +1200

I mentioned in the post about our phone system that we can access our phone system when working remotely. In fact, we can access our entire computer system when working remotely. We have full access to our file server, phone system, mail system, printers, and other IT services when away from the office. We use a very good piece of security software called OpenVPN to accomplish this.

OpenVPN is an open source Virtual Private Network (VPN) solution. A VPN is a completely private computer network that runs over other, larger networks (the Internet for example). When you are running a VPN, any traffic that passes over it is separate from the network it is using for transport. Other people cannot access the traffic on a VPN which makes them ideal for setting up secure access between different networks or between computers.

OpenVPN is an SSL encrypted VPN. SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer and it is the standard method of encryption used on the Internet. Whenever you login to a secure site such as your bank, you are almost certainly using SSL encryption to keep your information secure and private. The security is enhanced by using a combination of server/client certificates and a username/password combination. If you don't have the correct certificates installed on your remote computer or don't have the correct username/password combination then you will not be granted access. Essentially it is a two-factor authentication scheme.

OpenVPN will run on Windows as well as Linux. It can also be installed on Windows Mobile based phones/PDAs. It needs to be installed at both ends of the link - that is inside your own network and on the computer(s) you will be using remotely.

Being Open Source, OpenVPN is freely available. Setting it up can be a little tricky but then that is the one of the services we can provide you.

Google Maps on the E75

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 06:59:00 +1200

Sometime ago I wrote rather disparagingly about Telecom's XT network. Recently while travelling I have found it useful as the data side of it is far faster than the CDMA network. My phone (a Nokia E75) comes with inbuilt GPS. It has its own GPS application but I installed Google Maps and use that instead.

Google Maps is brilliant. You can add layers to it such as the Wikipedia layer which provides links to a wide variety of information about the area you are in. You can also add your own points and information to the map as a layer. Layers can be turned on and as required so the map doesn't get too cluttered.

When travelling I can run a search on the business I am looking for and it appears in a new layer in Google Maps complete with the contact information for it. Of course, you can also get directions to the address as well.

You can also choose to make your location available so that friends also using Google Maps with GPS can see where you currently are.

The importance of backups

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 07:21:00 +1200

The importance of good backups was driven home to me again recently when our tape drive failed and I had to replace it. I decided that it was time to upgrade our tape drive to a newer model with greater capacity as recently our backups have been requiring more than one tape. I purchased a reasonable second hand tape drive through Trademe. This drive can backup 200 gigabytes of data (or 400 gigabytes of compressed data) which is quite a step up on our previous drive which did 20gb (40gb compressed). The cost of the tape drive and some new tapes to go with it was a little under $1000.00. Well worth the expense when the alternative is possibly not being in business!

However, our backup regime involves creating an End of Month tape on the final Friday of each month. This tape is stored for a minimum of 12 months off site. By doing this we are assured of never losing more than one month of data should we have a disaster that wipes out our computer system (a fire for example). We also have the ability to recover data from the previous 12 months should we ever have the need to.

To ensure that I can recover data from these tapes I had to purchase a replacement tape drive of the same type that failed - also from Trademe! Fortunately the cost of this wasn't huge as it is a fairly old model of drive - but then what is the cost of not being able to restore data when you have to?

It is impossible to over stress how important backups are to a business. Most people are aware of this at some sort of vague "I must backup my data" level and have good intentions of backing up but somehow rarely get around to doing it.

All businesses should backup their data regularly and should store these backups off site. To do otherwise puts your business at risk. There is ample research to show that a high percentage of businesses never recover after a major disaster such as a fire. Around 40% will never re-open and 30% of those that do will be out of business within two years.

Can you afford that?

Telecom's new XT network

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 11:36:00 +1200

I moved on to Telecom's new XT network earlier this week and I am wondering if this is a good move. I have noticed that sometimes my phone rings when calls are incoming and sometimes it doesn't. Just a few minutes ago I received a call. The phone didn't ring - I only happened to glance down at it and see that there was a call. When I answered it, the quality was appalling. I had to step outside before I could hear the person on the other end properly. They kept fading in and out.

I have never had to leave my office to hear a call clearly on any of my previous phones. What's more, I have heard that quite a number of people in this district are having similar problems.

Not a good start.

... About 8 hours later: Worse still, I received a call earlier that could not stay connected. We lost connection three times and ended up with using the landline instead.

I'm not way out in the country. Yes, I am in rural town but it is the main town in the district. The state highway is a couple of hundred meters away; The CBD of the town is about 300 metres away. We have never had problems like this with the CDMA network. If this service continues we won't be moving any other numbers over to Telecom's XT network.

Phone Systems

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 09:29:00 +1200

There has been a lot of talk about Voice Over IP (VOIP) phone systems in the past few years. A VOIP system basically allows you to make calls across a computer network (like the Internet) instead of using landlines provided by Telecom or other telecommunications companies. The cost of calls on a VOIP system can be far lower than those made through a landline provider. Obviously this is very attractive to business.

Here at CLAD Services we have a VOIP system that is based on an excellent Open Source project named trixbox. Trixbox is a Linux distribution that brings together a number of Open Source projects to create a complete PABX system that runs on a computer and, being Open Source, it is available free of charge! Anybody can download Trixbox as a CD image, burn it to CD and then install it on a computer.

Setup can be tricky for people not familiar with VOIP concepts - but Trixbox setup is one of the jobs CLAD Services can do for you.

Once the system is setup you need to add phones to it. With VOIP system you can either use a hardware VOIP phone or simply plug a headset into your computer and use a piece of software. At CLAD Services we use a mix of both. Both Lisa and I work away from the office frequently and we are able to use our computers to connect to the phone system remotely and make calls, pick up voice mail, talk to the staff etc. I'll go into this in more detail in a later post.

Once Trixbox and your phones are set up you can then start making calls across the Internet. However, it can be difficult for people to call you. One way around this is to use a VOIP provider. The VOIP provider will give you an account along with a number that other people can call from other VOIP systems. If you wish to make calls to existing Telecom (or other) landlines, you will definitely need an account with a VOIP provider as many providers also supply the connection between the VOIP system and landline system. We use Venture VOIP for this service.

As most of our clients do not use VOIP we also have two Telecom landlines coming into our office. These are fully integrated into our PABX through the use of a Linksys SPA400. Any incoming calls on these lines are picked up by the PABX and handled like any other call. The SPA400 can handle upto 4 lines so we have room for expansion. Having the landlines also keeps us functioning when power is out for an extended period. As VOIP systems rely on computers and other powered devices, they go down when the power goes off.

Trixbox also provides a full voicemail system for all extensions. You can either pick up voicemail through your phone or have it e-mailed directly to your e-mail inbox and listen to it on your computer. Other features include inbound routing, followme, queues, ring conditions, time conditions, conference calling, music on hold, full call logging and more.

Our entire phone system consists of

Trixbox PABX software + computer

SPA400 telephony gateway

3 x SNOM 300 hardware phones

2 x headsets + phone software

It runs on our internal network and spans two sites. We also can connect to it from the outside while travelling. It is a very flexible and reliable system.

The major costs were the three hardware phones and the SPA400. These totalled less than $1000.00. An equivalent commercially produced PABX and VOIP system would cost many, many thousands.

If you are looking at installing a PABX to handle multiple internal phones and external lines, contact us at CLAD Services to discuss the possibilities.

Extending SugarCRM

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:35:00 +1200

As I said two posts back we use the Community Edition of SugarCRM as our Customer Relationship Management system. SugarCRM is very good and it has a good community behind it. There have been a lot of modules written that extend SugarCRM in various ways, many of which interact with other online systems.

I have added a couple to our install of SugarCRM recently. They are connectors that allow interaction with Dimdim and Google Calendars. The Dimdim Connector module allows us to start a Dimdim meeting directly from within SugarCRM. You set your default settings in Dimdim, install the module into SugarCRM and enter your Dimdim login details. This provides you with a new shortcut in SugarCRM which will log you into Dimdim and automatically start a new meeting with no other setup required.

The Google Calendar Connector module interested me as I use the iGoogle page as my homepage in my browser. I have a number of 'gadgets' installed that allow me to access various useful tools - twitter, google reader, google talk, gmail and, of course, google calendar. I use google calendar reasonably often. In fact,I use it more than I do the SugarCRM one as it appears on my homepage whereas the SugarCRM one requires me to open a new tab. This can cause problems for our staff from time to time. Entirely my fault but I am an obstinate person.

However, the SugarCRM google Calendar connector solves this problem. It allows SugarCRM to synchronise its calendar with the Google one so any appointment adds, moves and changes are reflected in both calendars. This pleases me no end. This also allows me to receive text message reminders when I have an appointment due as Google Calendar can be set up to send texts when something is coming up. Excellent!

These modules are very easy to install as SugarCRM has a module loader in which you select the module you want to install, click a button and there it is - up and running almost instantly. Of course it pays to make a full backup of SugarCRM first just in case. No problems so far though.

DimDim

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 11:23:00 +1200

Lisa and I recently hosted a small online meeting using DimDim. DimDim is an Open Source web conferencing tool. As with all open source software it is freely available for use. In fact, the DimDim people go a step further and will allow you to host conferences using their software on their website for free.

DimDim provides a collaborative area where people can interact using chats (public and private), whiteboards, document displays (for presentations, pdfs etc.) and a follow-me website viewer. You can invite people to join and give them access to resources such as microphones and cameras (assuming they have them of course).

The free version of DimDim limits you to 20 participants, 1 camera and 3 microphones. However, for many small businesses this won't be an issue. In fact, unless you use strict control over the camera and microphone tools, I can see people's bandwidth being swamped with more than one camera or several microphones being used at once.

Prior to finding DimDim we were using an online chat program which was ok but limited in scope and usability. I think we will be using DimDim a lot in the future.

Open Source: SugarCRM

Fri, 15 May 2009 08:29:00 +1200

One of the more useful Open Source tools we use is SugarCRM. SugarCRM is a Customer Relationship Management system (CRM). A CRM is used to track and organise contacts with current and potential customers or clients. We find SugarCRM invaluable for this and use it to store information about every contact we have with our clients.

We track all phone calls, e-mails and snail mails through Sugar. Doing this gives us a complete client history. It enables staff to look back and find when things were done, what was said during phone calls, when that important letter was received and so on. It also allows new staff to quickly come up to speed with an account and be more productive early on in their employment.

SugarCRM is very modular and very configurable. We only use a subset of the available modules. Our main ones are:

Calendar

Activities

Contacts

Accounts

Cases

Projects

There are also modules for managing e-mail campaigns, documents, sales leads and opportunities and more. All of these come with the Open Source edition of SugarCRM and can be switched on or off as required through an easy to use admin page.

This CRM is also very easy to extend yourself. It comes with a built in module builder which works through a click and drag interface. We have used this facility to build modules to track incoming/outgoing snail mail and phone calls. These all link back to the relevant client Account so we can see at a glance what contacts have been made. In addition we added a Time Tracker which is used to track the amount of time spent on various tasks for clients.

SugarCRM comes in a number of editions. We use the freely available Community Edition but there is also the Sugar Express, Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise editions. These editions come at a price.

Using a CRM can help your business manage its customers better and understand their requirements. A good system will help you improve the service you provide to them. Have you considered using such a system?

Site redesign

Thu, 07 May 2009 13:26:00 +1200

Those of you who have been to this site before will notice that we have a new site design. This was long overdue as the old site was difficult to manage and was also looking a bit stale. We decided to build the site around a Content Management System (CMS) to facilitate easy updates and also because it enabled us to introduce new components into the site.

The CMS we have chosen to use is an Open Source CMS called Silverstripe. Silverstripe is available free of charge and is easy to install and extend. A short list of extensions (or modules) includes:

Blogs (this module)

Forums

Calendar

User defined forms

Embargo - date/time restrictions on pages

E-commerce

We use the blog, calendar and forms modules on this site. It also comes with a range of themes available so if you don't want to get into the nitty gritty of editing css and templates, you can just plug a theme you like the look of into the site and start adding your content. We have chosen to use our own theme based on our business colours and have deliberately kept our theme simple so our content speaks for itself.

As one area of our business involves the setup and hosting of websites we would be more than happy to talk to you about how a CMS could help you manage your website and reduce the total cost of it.