Author: dale

My tech career started as an audio visual technician, setting up sound reinforcement and projection equipment at a convention facility, before I moved to electronics maintenance and repair at a community college. After obtaining a university degree in engineering, I designed integrated circuits for the first generation of 900 MHZ analog cellphones, the first generation of CA-code-phase tracking GPS receivers and digital pro-audio. I then progressed through a variety of leadership roles in product management, marketing, engineering product development and manufacturing, in fields such as industrial GPS-based positioning and navigation, pipeline integrity inspection and industrial process control.
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Adding Up SaaS Applications

Incorporating SaaS applications into an enterprise’s business processes can offer a number of advantages, including:

  • focusing internal resources on core strategic strengths instead of infrastructure services
  • being able to pick the best fit from a variety of mature low-risk best-of-breed applications
  • lowered internal IT hardware and support costs
  • well-defined costs

But as always, nothing comes for free and the cost of individual applications adds up quickly. For example, assuming a sales and development SME on a growth track with 100 employees, including a 10-person sales team, a couple senior admin/HR roles, consolidated project management across the organization and a product engineering team who working with part numbers and bills of materials, and using the following SaaS applications:

  • Taleo Recruit for talent recruiting – $500/month (Taleo Business Edition Recruit module, 5 users)
  • Saba People Cloud for basic talent management – $500/month (based on competitor Kapta pricing of $5/person/month)
  • Salesforce for customer relationship management – $1250/month (Enterprise version, 10 users)
  • KnowledgeTree for document management (engineering, legal, administration, etc.) – $2000/month (100 users)
  • Basecamp for project management – $99/month (100 projects, 40 GB storage)
  • Aligni for engineering to manage parts and bills of materials – $199/month (< 10,000 parts)

The total is $4,548/month, and doesn’t include an ERP system for managing financials – which could add another $3,330/month (for either a basic system with limited extensibilty, or the base price for an extensible system before add-ons and customization).

Now, I’m not saying this isn’t money well spent, and for many organizations it is. But bear in mind it’s cash off the bottom line and attention (a rare and precious commodity) taken away from something else in order to learn something new. Carefully consider the complete value – and the complete cost – before signing up for another monthly payment on a credit card, because that’s the easy part.

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SourceForge, Encryption, and U.S. Export Control Restrictions

I was registering the Adapto project on SourceForge today, and when I got to the Export Control question, ended up spending more than few minutes researching U.S. export regulations relating to software and cryptography. Be warned though, I am not a lawyer and the following is not legal advice. I urge you to consult a professional for advice specific to your situation.

SourceForge is operated by Geeknet, Inc., a publicly traded US-based company. When someone outside the U.S. downloads code from a SourceForge project, SourceForge is actually exporting the code from the U.S.

Export of software including cryptography functions from the U.S. is controlled by the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) according to the Export Administration Regulations (EAR) and the Commerce Control List (CCL). This includes software that only calls encryption functions in an external library, such as the PHP openssl_public_encrypt and openssl_public_decrypt functions.

In 2010, the BIS amended the EAR by excluding software products where the use of encryption is ancillary to its primary function and the primary function is not information security or the sending, receiving or storing of information, where the cryptographic functionality is limited to supporting the primary function of the software product, and when details will be provided upon request to a U.S. authority (see EAR Controls for Items that Use Encryption on the U.S. BIS website).

Adapto is a small PHP framework targeted at creating data management applications with minimal code. Although Adapto includes cryptographic functions (implemented through PHP library functions), they are provided only for potential use by an application program and are not used in the normal operation of the framework. They are also not used in the tutorial demo application included with Adapto, and so it appears export of Adapto from the U.S. is not controlled.

Since Adapto does incorporate encryption, it has been noted in the SourceForge project Metadata, but since it is not controlled based on the above analysis, the project does not require reporting to the U.S. government as noted by SourceForge.

 

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Continuous Learning and Innovation

It’s amazing how one thing leads to another. Recently I was finally annoyed enough by my laptops not automatically synchronizing Firefox bookmarks that I had to do something about it. I regularly use two Linux Mint laptops, a Windows 7 laptop, and a WinXP laptop, and was manually synchronizing bookmarks periodically, but what I really wanted was something automatic, real-time, secure and painless. My Google fu told me the Firefox SyncPlaces plug-in might be just what I needed, and I liked that it used my server for storing its synchronisation data.

First, I configured SyncPlaces to use ftp for uploading bookmark data to my server (which is good, because my day job’s firewall only allows http and ftp access). I happened to be at a McDonald’s having lunch, where WiFi is free but ssh is not allowed. However, I have Webmin installed and was able to start the ftp daemon with a quick “/etc/rc.d/ftpd onestart” using the Webmin’s Command Shell module. Once that was done, I cleaned up the bookmarks on the Linux Mint T61 ThinkPad I was using and uploaded them, later synchronising Firefox on my Win7 HP dv9000. So far so good. Now, why didn’t I do this sooner?

This morning, thinking I had better enable ftpd in rc.conf before the system was rebooted  and I had to troubleshoot why ftp no longer worked. I tried using Webmin’s File Manager module to edit rc.conf but instead of seeing my server’s file system I only saw the error “This module requires Java to function, but your browser does not support Java”.  What?!? Firefox doesn’t support Java?!?

Turning again to Google, I found Ubuntu (on which Linux Mint is based) had recently removed Java and the Java Firefox plugin from its repositories and had switched to OpenJDK and the IcedTea browser plugin. The problem was that out-of-the box Linux Mint didn’t include IcedTea! After installing “IcedTea-Web Plugin” using Linux Mint’s Software Manager, the Webmin File Manager module again worked and I was able to add ftpd to rc.conf. Whew!

Why do I put myself through this? It’s because the learning experiences provided help me to stay current with changes in technology. Abstracting a problem and its solution may aid the the growth of a new technology, but abstraction also makes it easy to lose connection with underlying technical aspects. When that happens, the ability to innovate is lost – along with any opportunity to add real value.

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MediaWiki vs TWiki

I’ve used MediaWiki  (http://www.mediawiki.org/) for a couple of years, but stumbled across TWiki (http://twiki.org/) the other day. I like TWiki! In fact, I’d switch my sites to TWiki now if I had the time (time to install and experiment, time to learn a new Wiki syntax or install a plugin to accept MediaWiki syntax, and time to convert my sites).

TWiki impresses me for several reasons:

  • TWiki page editing is familiar to non-technical users (i.e., users whose background in document authoring is Microsoft Word and Outlook). A WYSIWYG editor is standard, images are added directly to pages (unlike the 2-step process with MediaWiki), and drawings can even be created right on the page (through a drawing plugin).
  • TWiki has a database plugin and a chart plugin available, and a page can have a table or chart showing live data from an enterprise database. If this is available within MediaWiki, someone please tell me how!
  • TWiki appears to have a strong following within corporate enterprises. There are corporate testimonials on the TWiki website with an honest (and familiar!) ring to them.

A couple more notes:

“TWiki is the most popular wiki used behind corporate firewall; it gets downloaded 5,000 times a month and is in use by the majority of Fortune 500 companies. Some TWiki deployments behind corporate firewall have over 500,000 pages and more than 20,000 registered users.” (WikiMatrix. http://www.wikimatrix.org. Accessed 2011-10-13)

“TWiki is installed … mainly behind corporate firewalls. Many major companies use TWiki because it is very user friendly compared to some well established commercial groupware systems like Lotus Notes.” (TWiki website, http://twiki.org, accessed 2011-10-13)

TWiki is written in Perl and JavaScript, and uses the file system for storing data. MediaWiki is written in PHP, and uses a database (e.g., MySQL) to store data and the file system to store media.

Now, back to if I had the time ………

P.S. I came across this great tip for simplifying MediaWiki’s 2-step process for embedding an image on a page:

  1. Create the page
  2. Put a reference on the page to the intended image using a made-up name
  3. Save (or preview) the page
  4. Click the reference on the page to the image (which will be in red showing the image isn’t available), which will take you to the upload form with the image name already filled in.

Thanks Henrik! (see http://henrik.nyh.se/2007/09/mediawiki-image-upload-tip)