Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

There is an interesting quote in the Information Week interview with Linus
I simply don't use Microsoft products, not because I hate them, but because they aren't interesting to me.
And that statement is true for a growing number of people each day !

IWantsandy seemed like a good idea.. send a mail with her in cc: and get a reminder of stuff you need todo. but it lacked one major feature for me. She should understand something like "remind me before" in order for me to meet a deadline in time :)

Apart from that.. I think 1 Sandy is enough and I already have one :)

So I disabled it..

One more thing about Social Networking today ..

Back at T-Dose I realized what one of the older social networks around is. It's the keysigning events that happen at different conferences. At least you have to see the people who's keys you sign and not randomly accept invitations from people you vaguely know (which is something I don't do)

Over the past couple of days there is an increased flow of traffic to my Inbox all fairly identical mails from people that I`m connected to on LinkedIn that somehow are being invited by their friends to also start using Plaxo.
I`m wondering if people don't realise they are resending their whole LinkedIn addressbook an invitation or if they do it on purpose. I`m still looking for the great new feature that Plaxo has that urges me to switch to it or even consider using it actively.
I haven't found it .. so please explain me why you are using plaxo

A couple of weeks ago I started this poll on my blog so people could vote on their social network site.
Guess what the conclusion was.. the majority of my readers favours LinkedIn, some like Facebook and only some individuals like Plaxo or Xing

Yes I create accounts on most new YASN (Yet Another Social Network) thingies, but merely as a form of Online Identity Protection. (It's pretty easy to find a new YASN and create an account there that you shouldn't be creating)

Now I`m all in favour of redundancy and high availability. But I frequently just export my LinkedIn connections to my local desktop and that gives me a nice backup.

So is this going to be the new trend ? I launch a new YASN and suddenly I create an avalanche of mails that will be send to other people. Geez.. this looks like a virus in LookOut
But how long wil our email system live if more and more people start using these tools and more and more new sites implement the feature. ? When will Inbox protection tools start with default filtersets for a list of Social Networks ?
Wil social networks start to figure out ways to evade Inbox protection tools ?

Maybe we just need to add some more meta information in our DNS servers. :)

Tim just explained that Easynet is suffering from a routing loop. Causing dns.be to be unreachable for some folks. So sometimes the cause is not a dns problem, only the result is :)

So while shopping for a new Timesheet application, last month we tried to use eHour. We tried, and have already stopped our evaluation.

Our requirements are pretty simple. A bunch of consultants need to be able to book their time on different projects. We need to be able to print out these timesheets for a customer to be able to sign and our financial department needs to be able to print invoices based on the time we spend for the different customers.

Apart from a rather itchy user interface, a really non straightforward way to add projects or even try to modify them it were mainly
little annoyancies such as not being able to print a timesheet if you only have 1 project you worked on that month, made us look again for alternatives.

Then we ran into this posting on the eHour blog. eHour indeed had fixed some of the annoyancies we had but decided to close their source again. Right end of story for us there.

So rather than being able to help out and contribute to a better product, we are now once again in the market to try our next Open Source timesheet app.

Over at CNet , Matt Assay found out about SimpleTicket.

SimpleTicket was developed by Architel in 2005 for internal use. We looked at Heat, Remedy and hosted solutions like Parature, but most of them were too complicated and expensive for our needs. Next we looked at lowend solutions like Intuit?s TrackIt and found it lacking in several ways. We needed a simple to use system that was flexible enough for us to add features on the fly. We decided to build it ourselves. SimpleTicket was the result....

So I don't know the guys over at Architel and I can't comment on their background or their real experience, so I`m a bit abusing this case as a worst case scenario.
But when I read something like that I wonder. Why didn't those people look at the existing Open Source alternatives in the first place ? I think we have been using OTRS since before 2003 (don't know the exact year) and there are other alternatives out there such as RT. And even if you don't like the features or you need some more.. that's wha open source is all about .. you should improve the product , add the functionality you need and contribute it back to the community.

When I read a n article like the one above to me it translates as Back in 2005 we were idiots not knowing about the whole other software world that was called Open Source, we were shopping
for a (proprietary) ticketing system and we couldn't find one that had a correct price tag. We decided to build ourselves, SimpleTicket was the restult.
Now 2 years later we realise that a ticketing system is not our core business and we decided to Open Source it. Doing so will not only free our time as we don't need to develop it ourselve anymore but it will also give us visibility on the market
I exaggerate a bit .. and while SimpleTicket might not be like this others are.. and it's just not the way opensource works.

I see too much people reinventing the wheel these days... maybe if we could all have a look at what's out there first, improve on that so we can use the time we have available to build something that really needs to be build ?

Like a good multilayer calendaring solution. Or a working Timesheet application ?

Dunno if the term is new.. or who coined it .. but Matt just used it

Build once, Charge everywhere

Hate the concept .. love the terminology .. makes it pretty clear for the abused people.

fine DNS problem
Actually not Alfreso but 123-reg