Business – Page 8 – SwitchBL8’s gebazel

Survey software

Sep 022004

Yesterday I installed PHPSurveyor, a MySQL+PHP based piece of software that enables you to create online questionnairies.

It took me some time to get the software working, but that was basically because the configationfile is not too obvious with its remarks/documentation what to supply as rootdir and as rooturl. The documentation says it should basically be the same, but I found that this is not correct. There is also a reference to the rootdir-variable that should have been rooturl. Having sorted that out, things went very smooth.

With PHPSurveyor, you can create online interviews, and as in all good interview-software, questions can be of different types, they can be conditional (branching) and there’s a bunch of pages to view the results and statistics. The interface is very neat and straightforward.

I will create a survey soon, to act as a proof-of-concept for my perhaps future employee. They want to conduct surveys with potential clients on paper (finding suspects/prospects and sending them the survey via postal mail), but I think having a survey online could lead to “automatic” suspect/prospect generation. One never knows who stops by…

RemObjects SDK 3.0

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Aug 312004

Because Perry blogged about DataAbstract, I dug a little deeper into it, and to RemObjects other product “RemObjects SDK 3.0”.

RO SDK is basically a collection of components to create multi-tier solutions, and it can be clients or servers. There are other products that can help you with that. Think of Midas, or Borlands new DataSnap. But the RO SDK is more than that. With it you can not only create multi-tier applications, but you can also choose whether the application will use the SOAP protocol, or a binary version without the overhead of XML. And you can create ISAPI modules, but also standalone SOAP-servers. Or…a whatever server.

So, that got me thinking. I emailed Perry, and asked him if it was possible to create a normal Win32-server, like a mailserver. His answer was positive, so I read some more about RO SDK. RO SDK gives you the tools to create a server, that can communicate in standardized protocols or in a protocol that you like. On the standard firewall-save HTTP-port, or on any port you like. And on top of that: the SDK is expandable. So if TCP is not what you’re looking for, you can implement your own transport-drivers and use them in RO SDK.

Wow!

I already downloaded the trial version of the SDK and I will give it a try when I get back from my holiday in Morocco (4-26th of September). I was planning to create a mailserver with a RDBMS-backend. By choosing a RDBMS that is scalable the the mailserver itself will be scalable. By making it multi-tier the user has even more freedom in distributing the load.

Mailwasher Pro

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Aug 252004

I use Mailwasher Pro (from Firetrust) as an anti-spam tool. After the trial, I decided to buy it, since it tagged the proper messages as spam, and left the rest untouched.

Nick Bolton sends an email message to you, whenever there is news from Firetrust. I don’t get spam that much, but everytime Nick announces something, I also get a lot of scam/spam messages. What is that? Is this guy selling his client-list to spammers?

I’m thinking of switching to an all-in-one solution: Norton Internet Security 2005. It is anti-virus, anti-spam, and firewall in one product. And it integrates with Microsoft Outlook (instead of running it after the checks are done).

Oracle ISV kit

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Aug 092004

Last Friday I received my Oracle ISV kit, as described in this post. Its contents are two boxes: one with the Windows CD’s and one with the Linux CD’s.

The strange thing about the delivery is in the DHL part. Oracle sent me the kit via DHL, and earlier last week they TRIED to deliver the package at my address. But I was at work, nobody was home, so they left a message that I should call them for another appointment. When you call them, you will learn that DHL in The Netherlands does NOT deliver outside office hours. That’s a service level from the stone age! What normal household has people in the house during office hours? I arranged something with my girlfriend, but otherwise I would have to collect the package at their headquarters in Apeldoorn. That’s a 40-minutes-trip by car. That sucks! In other words: DHL (at least the Dutch one) sucks!

Dia as Visio replacement/alternative

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Aug 092004

If you draw diagrams on a regular basis, chances are that you already own a softwareprogram that helps you with that. But if you have to draw diagrams only on a very irregulare basis, Microsoft’s Visio might be a bit expensive. Consider using Dia, a gtk+ based diagrammers tool. It’s free, and there is a Windows version as well.

Datamodels

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Jul 312004

If you’re ever in need of a datamodel, then this website could be the place to start. Models of like everything, even a datamodel of the new Shrek 2 movie!

Changes to the dbExpress configuration

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Jul 302004

In the dbExpress drivers you can download from SDN, two changes are needed. One in dbxconnections.ini:

DataBase=ASA 9.0 Sample

instead of DataBase=ASA 8.0 Sample. Not mandatory, just for the ethics 😉

The other change should be made to dbxdrivers.ini:

VendorLib=dbodbc9.dll

instead of VendorLib=dbodbc8.dll. The new version of SQL Anywhere Studio has no dbodbc8.dll.

SQL Anywhere Studio installation

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Jul 302004

…occupies only 100MB of diskspace. I selected all features. When I install Oracle (9 or 10) it is about 2GB (with sample database), and that does NOT include a personal DB like MSDE or support for PDA’s. Sounds good sofar.

Sybase SQL Anywhere

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Jul 292004

Just today I stumbled upon Sybase SQL Anywhere. Of course I had heard of Sybase before, but I never looked at it because of its price. But that’s ASE, the Enterprise edition. For smaller companies and/or developers, there is SQL Anywhere Studio. As far as I can see now, SAS for Windows costs about US$399.

What remains is DAC’s for Delphi. It seems there are dbExpress drivers, but the document doesn’t tell me if they will work with Delphi 6 (they refer to Delphi 7 and Octane). Let’s hope so.
There are third party DAC’s, but they are not as common as DACs for SQL Server, MySQL or Oracle.

SQL Anywhere Studio includes a personal database (like MSDE/SQL Server Express), ASA (the client/server-version of the database) and UltraLite, to be deployed on PDA’s.

The Developer Edition of SQL Anywhere Studio is free! I’ll have a try with that and see if it’s any good. If the mailserver turns out to be a usable product and I will be using it myself (of course) I can always buy a non-developer license.

Support as business

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Jul 282004

Deepak has a interesting blogentry about Open Source software. One of the things he says made me think. If supplying support is the moneymaking business of the future, why would any commercial company deliver good (as in bug-free) software, or even pro-actively solve problems before they bite the customers?

In my opinion I think it’s best to ask a reasonable price for your software, and have some sort of support-agreement/subscription system. Like, you get 90-days of installation support, and 5 free supporttickets. The way SuSE does it: the no-support version is cheap, and the more support you want/need, the more expensive it gets. But basically it is the same version of the software you get.

Another thing: use free available software (freeware, opensource, whatever) if the level of support (you can get/you can provide) is in line with the business-needs where it used. Go for vendors that give you 24/7 support in business-critical situations. Use common sense. That sounds like a stupid advice, but you all know a manager to whom this advice applies to!

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