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I was daydreaming today and I wondered just how many files actually make up the openxtra website. For a small site you would assume that wouldn’t be many?

Well, I’ve counted and I got quite a shock. The website is made up of 4974 files. And that doesn’t count the databases. There are three of those.

It just goes to show that things grow organically and before you know it you’ve got yourself quite a headache. Changing the website is not something we do lightly.

I wish I’d known this 3 and a half years ago 😄

When starting out in business or anything else where a website or email is important. I’ve got a bit of advice for you. I call it the domain telephone test.

Get hold of a colleague or friend, ring them up and arrange for them to ask you the website address and then the email address of your proposed domain.

More fun with GSM Modems. The Falcom Samba 75 behaves in the same way as the Samba 55, i.e. the CD doesn’t actually load the driver or the phone software so you still have to load them by hand, just like the Samba 55.

Mind you the screen image of the phone that turns up is different.

Installation instructions are here.

Open source software never ceases to amaze (and delight) me. I’ve found another gem, though not a network management package this time!

Sqlite is an excellent embedded database. I’ve been playing around with it for the last week or so and I am really impressed with it. It’s quick, it’s simple and it just works.

One of the big problems with a lot of open source software is that the documentation can be a bit sparse. I am happy to say that the Sqlite documentation isn’t bad. And there are a number of books available for it too.

I’ve been seeing lots of activity on the Desktop recently. Apple started it all off with their Dashboard built into OSX. All very impressive but hardly of much interest to Microsoft Windows users.

Anyway. Google have brought out a similar system for Windows users called Google Desktop. It has been through a few versions now and it looks pretty good.

As an experiment I thought it would be fun to create a Gadget as the Google Desktop plugins are called. So, that’s exactly what I did 🙂

Brendan from Sentinal was kind enough to point out a new open source network mapping tool. It looks really good and so far seems to work! It’s called The Dude, probably sounds better in an American accent, and I tried it on our test network with the following results.

There are more screenshots on the Microtik website.

Did I mention that it’s free?

I haven’t had time to compare it to other tools but it was simple to install and it worked first time.

Is it just me or does everyone find the Falcom Samba 55 GSM Modem a real pain to set up? Loading the driver is OK, but trying to get the Mobile Phone Tools to install is a struggle.

I tried following the instructions on the CD to load the BVRP Phonetools, it seemed to an obvious place to start! but as George Bush said after the mid term elections, Shows what I know!.

I’ve not been programming full time since the end of 2002. Ah, those were the days…strong coffee and err RSI a plenty 😄

I am just about to embark on a heavy duty bit of programming, likely to last a few intense months. I’ll fill you in about the reason why in another post.

Anyway, I’ve just been having a peek at all of the new C++ goodies and my, haven’t the C++ standards people been busy. I don’t know why, but I am struggling with the new features. It doesn’t seem to matter how many books I read about generic programming, none do a good job explaining the new features.

It is nice to see the open source network management community is still in rude health. Another network and systems monitoring tool has popped onto my horizon. Don’t know how I missed this one, it looks a goodie!

Based upon the much underrated application server platform Zope, Zenoss sure does look the part. If the website is anything to go by I can see a lot of IT and network managers finding a home for this one.

We are currently on our fifth full iteration of our website. And when I say iteration, I mean full gut wrenching, throw everything out and do it again iteration. That works out to over one full iteration per year.

We’ve used the simplest e-commerce system you can use, called Mal’s-ecommerce, through a PHP based cart and then eventually to our current system based upon Elastic Path.

Trust me, it’s hard. But, that isn’t the hardest part of e-commerce. The hardest part on the web is trust. Trust is way harder to imbue in your visitors than anything else.