Archive for April, 2009

Nützliche Tools

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

Einige nützliche Tools:

Harddisk Search & Stats – Harddisk nach Dateien und Dateiinhalt durchsuchen. Enthält einen praktischen Textviewer, mit dem man dann in den gefundenen Dateien suchen kann. Perfekt um Code von anderen zu verstehen

BambooInvoice and PDF Customisation

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

Using the very cool  invoice package BambooInvoice built upon the CodeIgniter project. (Go check them both out, if you haven't done so already!)

The task set before me is to integrate an additional image in each PDF invoice file generated.

We start here: Z:\!tmp\bambooinvoice_089\bambooinvoice_089\bamboo_system_files\application\views\invoices

And edit pdf.phpthe company logo is already being included in the PDF output.

<?php if (isset($company_logo)) {echo $company_logo.'<br />';}?>

Now I'd like to see the content of this variable – which will probably be HTML – to build the new image code accordingly:

 <?php if (isset($company_logo)) {echo htmlentities($company_logo).'<br />';}?>

After generating a PDF we get:

<img src='/web/vhosts/0-iddres/bambooinvoice_089/img/logo/sevenvoicelogo1.jpg' />

OK, here we could go the easy way and just include a patched string. But we're tough boys, ain't we? If the  underlying adress changes, the image output would be broken. So, a search for the source of company_logo is in order.

invoices.php contains this piece of code: $data['company_logo'] = $this->_get_logo();

get_logo is found here:

 function _get_logo($target='', $context='web')
{
$this->load->helper('logo');
$this->load->helper('path');
return get_logo($this->settings_model->get_setting('logo'.$target), $context);
}

which in turn leads us to this snippet from logo_helper.php:

function get_logo($logo = 'logo.jpg', $context = 'web')
{
	$CI =& get_instance();

	// if they don't have a logo in the database, just default to logo.jpg
	if ($logo == '0' || $logo == NULL)
	{
		$logo = 'logo.jpg';
	}

	if ($context == 'web' OR $CI->config->item('logo_base_url') === TRUE)
	{
		$path = base_url().'img/logo/';
	}
	else
	{
		$path = set_realpath('./img/logo/');
	}

	return "<img src='{$path}{$logo}' />";
}

The solution is quite easy: specify 'name.jpg' as the first parameter to get_logo. Drop the code below into pdf.php:

<?php
$this->load->helper('logo');
$this->load->helper('path');
echo get_logo('name.jpg').'<br />';
?>

where name.jpg is the filename of your additional image. Don't forget to remove htmlentities again, if you followed me along instead of skipping to the solution immediately.

Website attractivity

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

Attractive websites:

I seem to prefer websites, which have a bottom bar with links to relevant information.

Unatractive websites:

https://www.forge.funambol.org/DomainHome.html

What is this website about? There's no clear information given in the top section of it.

http://sourceforge.net/project/screenshots.php?group_id=145855

A turn-off are ads on the site for a product you're looking at. I know, Open Source has to be financed somehow. Sugar knows another way here :-)

Decision making

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

Man thinkingCurrently I am evaluating different CRMs, and I'd like to share with you my decision-making process. Based on this I should also vamp up the Sevenvoice website. (Do have a look and tell me what you think about it, btw.)

Please note, I'll prefer software in English over German or any other language. I believe software which will be available only in German, Russian, etc. won't have as many features, and an as-high customer base, as software written in English, the lingua franca of modern business.

  1. I start off with top ten lists or generally listings of CRMs, including users' comments, to open some tabs with prospective CRMs I'll be looking at
    1. For instance: http://www.insidecrm.com/features/top-open-source-solutions-121307/
    2. Please note, I'm very fond of taking the "underdog" solution – if it has points of benefit for me, that is. I choose YATE over Asterisk, for instance.
  2. Is the company's website professionally-looking (=do I like their website design)?
    1. http://www.opencrx.org/ would be a negative example for a professionally-looking homepage
    2. http://www.dolibarr.org/ is another negative example
    3. http://www.snapcrm.comhttp://www.opentaps.org and http://www.openbravo.com/ are positive examples
    4. http://xrms.sourceforge.net is a bit minimalistic, but still clean
    5. http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/ also positive
  3. Does the website claim, that its targeting a different audience than me?
    1. "Our CRM is focused on non-profits" – OK, not for me, I guess.
  4. Does the company offer a "community edition"? (think Zimbra – the OSS community edition is working great for us, and I definitely plan to upgrade to the commercial edition, once the money's there in spades)
    1. This has to be communicated clearly! http://www.openbravo.com may have such an offer, but I couldn't find it fast enough. As there are other alternatives (www.snapcrm.com)
  5. Does the software run on LAMP (Linux / Apache / MySQL / PHP)? (I could actually set up a virtual machine for Java, but it's going to take time, and I'll only do this if I believe there's a significant benefit to be obtained. )
    1. SnapCRM runs on Java. The company also has a set of other interesting software modules (mash up etc) to go with it, so it stays on the list. (Interesting, how they had me nearly convinced, so I don't drop this software, even thought it doesn't fit LAMP. Sugar is a bit higher on the scale now, though.)
  6. Very important: I look for a live demo, screenshots and demo videos with narration. Actually I prefer the videos, since I do not have to bother logging into a demo and trying to figure it out all by myself.
    1. Is the software simple to use, or feature-bloated? I dropped SnapCRM from the list, because it seems to have a lot of bells & whistles I do not really care for (a lot of these things are taken care of by Zimbra for me!) Note: This point lead to a quick search whether something for Zimbra already exists. They claim they'll be looking at Sugar. So Sugar's credit is rising :-)

After looking at a couple of other options, I decided to go with SugarCRM.  SnapCRM seems to be complicated to set-up and complicated to use (in spite of its very clean and appealing website). Maybe I'm delusional about CRMs, and they need to be complicated. Time will tell :-)

Kokain

Monday, April 27th, 2009

Kokain ist eng mit in der modernen Medizin verwendeten Lokalanästhetika ("Betäubungsmittel") wie Xylocain usw. verwandt. Kokain kann medizinisch nicht eingesetzt werden, da es nicht sterilisierbar ist (es zerfällt wahrscheinlich beim Erhitzen).

Das Interessante ist – um also bestimmte Gefühle zu erreichen setzen Menschen ein Betäubungsmittel, im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes, ein. Sie rechnen jedoch nicht die ausgleichende Wirkung des Körpers ein, der bestrebt ist seine Balance auf Einflüsse von außen hin zu halten – infolgedessen verblasst die Wirkung des Betäubungsmittels, und der Benutzer muss höhere Mengen davon anwenden.

Viel anstrengender, aber auch langlebiger (ewig kann man ja nicht sagen angesichts der begrenzten Lebenszeitspanne) – eigene mentale Kontrolle. Manche Tieftauchrekordweltmeister beispielsweise sind in der Lage ihren Herzschlag zu kontrollieren – was auch viel mit "Inaktivierung" zu tun hat, und zwar des Sympathikus, "des Kampfnerven".

Kokain, das ist keine Lösung. Es macht nur die Drogenbarone reich.

To-Dos

Monday, April 27th, 2009

Infrastructure

  • CRM System
    • Access Control -> View only parts of customer and make notes when he calls
    • List: http://www.insidecrm.com/features/top-open-source-solutions-121307/

(see the decision making article for my choice of CRM, SugarCRM)

    Изменение взгляда

    Sunday, April 26th, 2009

    Изменение взгляда

    Я заметил, если у меня есть конкретная задача, тогда я беру другой подход к решению задачи, чем когда просто думаю про жизнь и унываю.

    Когда у меня конкретная задача, для клиента, я рассматриваю разные возможности, отбрасавая те, какие не подходят – будь-то из-за не-возможности, или из-за нe-элегантности. Если идеи нет, то проблема откладываeтся, ибо я уверен, что проблема будет решена.

    Иначе когда я фокусируюсь на "проблемы фирмы" – здесь одна не-решенная проблема следует за другои. Даже не получается подыскать решений, потому-что каждое предложение в голове бракуется – оно ведь вызывает очередную проблему!

    Может-быть пришло время, видеть самого-себя как клиента, который просит решения своеи (однои!) проблемы, при своих условиях.

    Самым важном может дажe быть фокусирования на одну задачу, вместо несчастнои попытки решить сразу-же все. Не зре ведь существуют компании по консултированию других компаний, вроде Ernst & Young.

    43 Things

    Saturday, April 25th, 2009
    I took the 43 Things Personality Quiz and found out I'm a
    Self-Improving Self-Knowing Tree Hugger

    The website also said: 0.87% of the 133357 people who have taken this quiz are like you.

    There actually were lots of things I'd already done, never thinking them to be particularly special.

    Also, they have this guide to writing lifelists. Hell, it might come in handy some day :-)

    Another test: I'm a O96-C83-E37-A44-N84 Big Five!!

    Des prix – une affaire compliquée

    Friday, April 24th, 2009

    Au début de ma firme, j'ai essaye de gagner les clients par offrir des prix bas. La problème qui suivit consiste de deux sortes.

    Premièrement, on  se sent mal pour travailler beaucoup et gagner peu. On a peur que les clients ne va retourner pas, si les prix sont "trop élevé", et on donne en prime beacoup des choses.

    Deuxièment, les clients s'habituietent aux prix bas. C'est une vraie problème, parce que un de ces jours

    Business No-Nos

    Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

    Mistakes other companies have made. Feel free to compile a list of our mistakes :-)

    23. April 2009: Never decrease customer benefit

    Credit Europe Bank succeeded in winning me as a customer by offering the best rate on day-to-day money – 5.75 %. Just now, I received a letter from, stating they downed the interest to 4 %. While this still is a very good interest, I will take my money out of this bank as soon as possible. I had even recommended them to several friends and would have felt responsible, had they opened accounts with them. Probably it's acceptable by their terms of service, but the "diffucult market conditions" they claim had been there in December already – when I opened my account. Perhaps they even use this ruse periodically to gain new customers and reset them to 4 % after some time. Offering to switch to a term deposit of two or more years at poorer rates – 5.25 % – in the same mailing is like being a bull in a china shop.

    Anyways, my money is looking forward to be invested in stocks directly.