Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

Managing customer relations with open source

If you are looking for CRM software, make sure you try SugarCRM. It is professionally done piece of software which is available both as a commercial option and free software.

Free version has practically all the functionality of the commercial one. Commerical version features more reports and statistics, interface translated into a number of languages, and some more plugins and extensions. It is also officially supported by the company.

SugarCRM is written in PHP and works nicely with MySQL and Apache. PostgreSQL is not currently supported to the best of my knowledge. The interface is professionally designed and is also very flexible with themes and menu configurations. The installation is very straight forward and troubleless. I didn’t even have to read a line of documentation to do it. There is an option to fill the database with sample data, which makes understanding all the features so much faster.

SugarCRM supports management of contacts, appointments, phone calls, clients, bugs, notes, and a whole other bunch of stuff that is needed in the business world. Projects and leads are organized by the customer and makes it really easy to see what has been done with the client and up to what degree.

SugarCRM also features nice portal building utilities with RSS feed integration and website bookmarks, which can be either private or global. It comes with an excellent selection of about 400 feeds that one can start reading immediately. These can be, of course, edited and delete, while the new ones are easy to add.

One of the surprising features is the plugin for MS Outlook. It allows one to work with SugarCRm from the familiar interface of MS Outlook, as well synchronise meetings, contacts, emails, notes, and other stuff.

Overall, it looks like a very nice piece of software. I really wish there was support for PostgreSQL backend and LDAP authentication. Other than that everything looks perfect. I will probably be spending some time with this software in the near future. I’ll let you know if I will find any other strong good or bad sides to it.

SCIgen

SCIgen is an automatic Computer Science paper generator. It is one of those tools you wish you had in the first year of college, when a whole bunch of useless homeworks were given to students of you class just to drive some of them away.

SCIgen is very easy to use. It asks only for the names of authors for the paper. After these are submitted, it generates a complete paper with graphs, charts, and analysis. The papers are so good, that they could have actually improved my CPA back than. I know, you have to be nuts, to read one from the beginning to the end, but what can I do – I had a few nutty professors.

Update: Apparently, papers generated by this tool are so good that one of them was even accepted for the conference. Slashdot coverage is here.

On long posts

Looking at my recent posts you might be thinking something like “What’s wrong with these guy? These are like paragraphs and paragraphs of text. I can’t even be bothered to read all that crap!”. Well, if you do, I’ll tell you that I am surprised myself.

I tried to analyse this change of my writing habbits and pretty quickly I realised that it was the migration of my blogging software to WordPress that triggered that change.

As you might remember, one of my main dissatisfactions with Nucleus CMS was the editor. WordPress provides an excellent editor, which is fast, comfortable, and easily extendable (quicktags are easy to add and edit).

With editor hussle out of the way, nothing stops me from writing more, and thus I am free at expressing whatever I feel like and freeing my head from thoughts that would stay there for ages. The more I dump, the more space (or rather thinking power) I get. And the more thinking power I get, the more thoughts I get again. As you can see this is the vicious circle, that I can’t break. And even if I could, I woldn’t do so just yet.

So, for all of you out there who like short posts – my temporary appologies. I will try to put some short items here too, but they will be mostly in the Links category. That’s my educated guess. :)

P.S.: 5 paragraphs to say a simple thing… that’s graphomania or some other disorder.