23 May 2005
As RoR grows a little fur it is becoming easier to compare with other frameworks. (Joel Spolsky describes fur as the bug fixes, program requests, etc. that grow over time)
Ruby is a cross platform language. But Rails has many of the dependencies that still tie it to the developers platform to one degree or another. Not too bad considering how far RoR has come so fast. But it does raise some concerns for deploying an application in production.
I’ll keep it in the sandbox for now. And given my workload it will be for the best to bail out of the mailing list for a few months at least. I’m not contributing anything and the platform will likely change a lot in the mean time.
18 May 2005
Joel Spolsky seems to be smitten by Dell. That is probably why his website is called “Joel on Software” rather than “Joel on Hardware“…Joel doesn’t know hardware very well…for hardware see Tom 😉
He mentions in a recent post that an HP/Compaq server runs 2x -3x an equivalent Dell. There must be a Dell marketing type feeding him that comparison! Definately not doing an oranges to oranges…
The idea of a server is a box that you can depend on. My experience with Dell servers (quite a bit) is they are seriously lacking in quality no matter the price. We had stupid hardware problems with $20k Dell servers six months after they were purchased. And the same problems showed up again and again…the Dell fixes were only patches.
Joel’s take on PC Connection is right on for most of these vendors. The salesmen are pretty much clueless and tend to make a pest of themselves. My recent experience with Dell sales folks and HP for that matter is they are not much better than PC Connection. NewEgg stands out because they do not even pretend to offer all the value added services.
There is a huge opportunity in the market for smaller, local vendors.
12 May 2005
AJAX has produced pretty good buzz of late. AdaptivePath is to thank for bringing a cool technology to a lot of attention. The supporting technology for AJAX has been around awhile though. Even now there is little or no mention that Microsoft’s Outlook Web Client used this for a number of years. Google is doing some pretty cool stuff with the technology–especially with GMAIL.
IMHO the cooler lesson is the marketing…or is PR a better term.
There appears to me that there is a new generation of web designers who have remixed technology into something newer and cooler…..something that allows you to think about what you’re doing instead of the plumbing! Just checkout Ruby on Rails, Basecamp/Backpack/TaDa List and WordPress even.
Underneath most of this I think you’ll find signs of a reinvented Apple 😉
Can’t remember if it was Udell or OReilly who came up with the analogy where Microsoft and Apple actually need each other. Microsoft is this big lumbering offensive line on a football team. And Apple is the smaller agile running back breaking through the blocks to gain major yards!
11 May 2005
The word upgrade has become synonymous with nightmare for me.
Well upgrade for WordPress could come to mean painless. It’s a credit to these guys.
10 May 2005
SugarCRM v3 adds a number of new features.
- Projects that can be broken down into tasks
Had been trying out Tasks Jr for managing the todo list. TJr’s interface is definately friendlier but may not be enough to outweigh the integration that SCRM now.
- Documents that can reside within scrm
templates — marketing — invoices?
- Email from within scrm
- Campaigns
- RSS Feeds
- Employees
- Roles
Roles and employees are missing something. It is likely that the pro/paid version of SCRM makes use of them. It may not be worth hacking this in the Open Source version.
The install is getting better. After backing up the web app folder and installing to a new copy of the database the only glitch was with the user/account used for the install. Needed a MySQL account with access to more than just that db.
When the install was complete I had to go back in and change the SugarSales logo’s, etc. back to netsNbytes. I wonder if it’d be worth writing a script to handle this. That would be assuming that SCRM structure doesn’t change in the affected areas.