Business – Page 3 – SwitchBL8’s gebazel

Domains

Aug 052005

If you received an errormessage trying to reach this blog (or trying to send mail to rare-it.com), than it should be solved (hey, you’re reading the blog now, so I guess it’s true!). My domains were expired. I thought DirectNic would send me an email when it was about to happen, but this year they did not. So I forgot. With me being employed by Sogeti, I’m not sure what will happen next year. But with the current dollar-euro-rate, I thought $30 for 2 domains was not something to worry about.

New job!

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Jul 302005

Monday, August 1st, I start at my new job. Here’s a link to the companies website: Sogeti. It’s in Dutch.

Backpack

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Jul 052005

Rido found an interesting piece of software. If you’re as organized as I am, you probably don’t need Backpack. But for those that are not, have a look at their website. Backpack enables you to organize your life, your project, your wedding, your list of tutorials for knitting babysocks, whatever. The free edition allows you to have lists and notes and appointments, while the subscription version gives you file and image uploads, and more pages to enter your data.

Of course you can do it all in Outlook, but…where is your Outlook when you’re on the beach, and you want to store the roomnumber of the nice girls you’ve just met and invited you for their party?! You could have run to the nearby internet-cafe, and stored it in your Backpack (wow, now I’m starting to sound like a commercial).

Why would you want to run asmx without IIS?

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Jun 232005

Why would you want to serve asmx (or any other .NET pages) without IIS? I’ll tell you why: because I don’t want to upgrade my OS everytime the webserver gets new features. Because I want to run IIS 6 on Windows XP (I would have probable paid for it, if I could). Because I don’t want a server-OS. Not only does that need to be licensed per seat, but all other software (antivirus etc) is more expensive too.
Instead, I switched to Apache. And via tricks and stuff I can now run .NET via Apache (Wiki), but of course only when I install things manually. No integration with VS.NET or anything else for that matter. But at least I did not have to buy a new server, and a new OS, several seats, new antivirus software, and what-did-I-forget, just to run IIS 6.

The end of online photogalleries?

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Jun 042005

In the US a far stretching patent has been granted. Uploading digital content or “Web-based Media Submission” was patented by AdMission, the company behind techniques used by eBay and The Washington Post, amongst others. So I guess companies like PBase will have a hard time surviving, since they have similar software in use. How can a company patent such a thing, when there is enough “prior art”? Uploading pictures, resizing or creating thumbnails can’t be their “invention”?!

OR Mapping to be patented

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May 202005

Software patents are bad. Most developers know that, but money-smelling-egos seem to make more noise. So…how about patenting a “mapping architecture for arbitrary data models“, or loosely interpreted “OR mapping”, since that’s a big hype at the moment. I think this sucks. We need to stop this. No software-patents!

We should protect ideas, but not like this. Patents are there to make money (not in the least by the patent-registrators) and not to protect ideas.

Learning C# – aargh!

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May 092005

Because of the filesize, I decided to split up my main .cs file into smaller pieces. The namespace is E2O everywhere, and one of the files I created should hold all database-related stuff. So, it looks like this:

namespace E2O { public class DB { public DB() { //constructor }public static void xyz() { if(E2O.frmMain.checkbox1.Checked) { blabla... } } } }

Now why can’t I refer to checkbox1? The compiler gives the error:
An object reference is required for the nonstatic field, method, or property ‘E2O.frmMain.checkBox1’
The object is defined as public (not the default private), but I can’t get to it. HOW? I know, I should probably go out and buy a C# book, but the only thing I want to accomplish is make the maintainability a little easier, the functions work perfectly when they are in one big file.

If anybody knows, please comment, your help will be greatly appreciated.

OpenOffice beta versus Microsoft Office

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May 062005

Microsoft beware! The new beta of OpenOffice has features to be a Microsoft Office killer. It opens and saves Microsoft Office documents flawlessly. It has the option to export to PDF, without a need to buy extra software. It includes an Access-like database product BASE (Access is only available in bigger Office versions, or as a standalone product). Most of all: OpenOffice is free.
True, it lacks a good email program like Outlook, but if you can’t live without it, buy it seperately for about $110. Free OpenOffice + $110 <<< MS Office Standard!

Click on the title for a review of the new beta.

As a sidenote, OASIS (an organisation defining/approving e-business standards) has approved the OpenDocument format, a minor extension of the format OpenOffice 2.0 beta uses. The OpenDocument format will save you from the vendor lock-in, since you can switch Office applications without losing your documents.

E-Sync creates custom Outlook fields

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May 062005

To be able to quickly recognize if an appointment from the ERP-software was already synchronised to Outlook, E-Sync had to be able to recognize the appointments already in Outlook. Since all fields I filled until now are standard-fields that anyone can fill or change in Outlook, I needed custom-fields. For C#, this is not a very well documented area, like more Office development stuff. Lot’s of code reference and samples in VBA or VB, if you’re lucky VB.NET, but C# is scarce. I’m not sure why this is, C# has been around long enough now.

Anyways, E-Sync now recognizes the appointments it made in Outlook by the same unique number that is used in the ERP-software. And since there is no default-form in Outlook showing custom-fields, the user can’t see or change it.

I’ll have to talk to the manufacturer of the ERP-software first, but I guess this is the basis for 2-way synchronisation. And since the user can’t see/change the custom-field, the appointment has to be created in the ERP-software.

E-Sync

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May 032005

E-Sync already proved it’s value before being in a production-state, because one company (in the same business as I’m building it for) asked for more information and about the price. They were definitely interested in buying tool and putting it to good use (saving on hours secretaries have to make manually synchronizing calendars from the ERP application to Outlook).

This is so cool!

For the moment, there will be no “real” information about E-Sync on this blog or on other parts of this webserver. If you need info, just send me an e-mail and we’ll go from there. The application is created for one type of ERP application (which stores it’s data in Oracle), but you can always hire me to create a custom version for your (ERP) application.

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