good news – Dell to offer factory installed Linux OS

Posted by Adrian on Mar 29, 2007 in Open Source | 4 comments Just spotted this on the BBC  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6506027.stm http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/ideastorm/ideasinaction?c=us&l=en&s=gen One of the problems we have put on the back burner was migrating the directors laptops, currently running XP, to linux. This would solve it easily.  I tried running ubuntu off disk in demo mode on my HP laptop, and it...
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time keeping software (PHP open source if possible)

Posted by Adrian on Mar 27, 2007 in Open Source | 5 comments Some time ago we tried to write our own timekeeping software to log the working hours of all our staff.  We tried using VBA in conjunction with an access database, but never got it to a working standard. Now we are back on the hunt for some simple php / mysql type system that will allow staff to clock in / clock out to record their working horus, not project specific, just number of hours a...
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The MVC fun continues…

Posted by rich on Mar 21, 2007 in coding | 2 comments Well.. we finally decided that we should give the MVC framework process a chance, to see if we could truly benifit from it. I’m going to be using a simple ish MVC framework and Smarty for the templating system, this seems to be working both logically and easy for us, or fairly easy anyway. The way im going to do this is have a main page which will control the configuration etc, and then a...
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Shall we use a MVC framework..

Posted by rich on Mar 20, 2007 in Open Source | 4 comments As mentioned in the previous blog, we’re currently deciding how our new project should flow. By this I mean, do we use the more conventional methods we’re used to (hard coding our php for each individual page) or to take the plunge and go the Model View Controller (MVC) route. I’d decided a few days ago to look into MVC, although i’d touched on this within Ruby on Rails,...
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MVC / The problems of running a technical project without a coding background

Posted by Adrian on Mar 20, 2007 in Open Source | 0 comments Our migration to linux based open source hinges on the sucessful implemention of a php – postgresql database to run our CRM.  Now I have done some coding, in fortran and VBa, but I’m a businessman, not a coder.  What coding I do I enjoy, but its not my role really. An issues came up yesterday what I saw as strategically improtant to the sucess of the migration, and this was the...
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windos software that we dont believe will run under linux

Posted by Adrian on Mar 20, 2007 in Open Source | 7 comments In a previous comment, Dan Kegal ( a WINE developer) asked what software we would like to run under WINE but dont think we can do. Easy, here is the list: SAGE line 50 network edition – many, if not most small businesses run SAGE accoutning software, and I dont believe that it will run on a linux platform, but as yet we havent tried it. Graphic design software:  we are a label printer,...
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getting user feedback at an early stage

Posted by Adrian on Mar 16, 2007 in Open Source | 3 comments Our sales team are the heaviest users of our CRM system, and not used to Ubuntu, Firefox, or indeed an web based databases.  Following good advice from an IBM case study, we are holding a user testing experience at an early stage to get feedback on the user experience. The success of an Open Source migration to us is heavily dependant on getting buy in from the users, and their involvment...
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enter the world of AJAX – solving problems with saving records

Posted by Adrian on Mar 16, 2007 in Open Source | 2 comments Using our existing Acess front end to a SQL database, we dont have the problem of our users forgetting to update/save records they are woking on.  It does it automatically.  This is a weakness of PHP web based interaction with databases, you either have to remember to save the record, or you could loose your edits. Ths way we are proposing to work around this is using AJAX, so every...
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Press release

Posted by Adrian on Mar 16, 2007 in Open Source, press releases | 2 comments Hoping that this blog may interest other businesses looking to migrate to Open Source, I’ve posted this press release. PRESS RELEASE 16 March 2007 MERCIAN LABELS BLOGS CASE STUDY IN OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE MIGRATION Mercian Labels has commenced its migration away from Microsoft to Open Source software because of reliability and upgrade cost concerns. Supported by Senokian Solutions, the...
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Auto Increment on PostgreSQL follow-up..

Posted by rich on Mar 14, 2007 in Open Source | 0 comments Just a quick follow-up post here regarding how to achieve auto incrementing on a PostgreSQL field. Thanks to the advise from Senokian I was able to create our database with the exacy same functionality as our MSSQL one. The only field we were concerned with was the customerid one, which should increment by 1 each time a record was added. An example of this is: CREATE TABLE customers (customerid...
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PostgreSQL AUTO INCREMENT PROBLEM

Posted by rich on Mar 13, 2007 in Open Source | 2 comments MSSQL has the lovely added functionality of Auto Increment. Meaning that when you add a new record to a table, it automatically gets added to the next ID. To clear this up, an example is. Customer A has an ID of 1, we add a new record to this table, and it’s automatically given the ID of 2, so the table is logical in the way it flows. If auto increment was not in place each time we add a...
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NULLS AREN’T GOOD!

Posted by rich on Mar 13, 2007 in Open Source | 2 comments The reason for our previous problems now became apparent. This is down to data types; PostgreSQL has a different data type for some of the fields, such as: MSSQL — POSTGRESQL Bin — Boolean Datetime — Timestamp Nchar — Char ntext — Text nvarchar— Varchar This wasn’t the end of the world, it just meant that each field in our database that would need...
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Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) to PostgreSQL Migration

Posted by rich on Mar 13, 2007 in Open Source | 0 comments As already mentioned in a previous blog, we want to migrate our database from MSSQL to PostgreSQL and the first step of this was to see if this was even possible. We decided on a fairly straightforward table (customers), that had many fields and many records (20000), but little in the way of constraints. There are a few guides online showing the easy steps to go from a typical MSSQL database to...
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PHP is great

Posted by Adrian on Mar 11, 2007 in Open Source | 3 comments A quick post on PHP.  Compared to ASP, its great.  Even this Blog is runs on open source PHP code, and it dosnt break.  I love it. .htaccess rewriting is a cool feature of linux/unix hosting as well.
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open source in the press this week.

Posted by Adrian on Mar 11, 2007 in Open Source | 0 comments These 2 articles caught my interest this week.  The UK opposition political party wants to use open source software for central and local government IT: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6430069.stm  Nice idea, I doubt that they have costed the changeover costs though, which would be immense.  Does anybody have an estimated methodology for calculating a ROI on migrating to Open...
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