Posts made by jasonh

@IRJ You could always just use it for the ticketing system. During the initial setup you can disable the modules you don't use, and there's two ways to configure the ticket systems (one that strictly follows ITIL, and one that's more traditional)

We've been deploying SSDs in all our 30+ laptops for the last 4+ years. In the beginning we mostly used Kingston and a few OCZ, but in the last 2 years have been going with Intel whenever possible (sometimes hard to find stock on the smaller sizes) or Samsung. We experienced a lot of premature failures with Kingston drives, many of them with less than 1 year of service. Their warranty process was a nuisance. At one point they also had issues with buggy firmware which bricked a few drives.. The few OCZs lasted a long time but I believe they have all failed now (after 3-4 years; which is kind of expected with SSDs.) So far no issues with any Intel or Samsung drives knock on wood

I'm starting to test iTop; it's open source, runs on Linux or Windows (uses PHP and MySQL), has positive reviews, and online demo looks very promising. It is a full ITIL platform so it's has Configuration, Change, and Service Management components, in addition to Incident Management.

I'll definitely post an update once we had a chance to do some reports so I can comment what their table and record structure is like. We'll be doing them with Microsoft SSRS, but concept would be the same as Jasper.

Yes, Jasper Reports would work well. ProcessMaker stores everything in MySQL so any reporting tool that can talk to MySQL can utilize it. I haven't looked at the tables myself, but the other guy here who's been dealing with it more said they look fairly straight forward.

As for how we like it, setting up the forms and workflow is relatively easy to work with (that is, compared to jBPM and Activiti; it still requires some time and effort to understand how to create everything and learn it's nuances) and is quite flexible. The way it outputs copies of completed forms to PDF is pretty good. They have some decent documentation and so far we've been able to find solutions to all our questions in the online forums.

The one thing that's "missing" from the open source version is any kind of reporting tool for summarizing data collected in the forms. The only thing you can really do in the software is view forms/cases based on search results or browsing the history. However even if they had a tool (which their professional edition does), we probably wouldn't use it because we already have a reporting tool (SSRS) in use for all other reporting at our company, so we will just develop all the reports under there.

We've only gone live with one process, which is a fairly simple form that goes through a review process to ensure it gets recorded and the appropriate people are notified (accident reporting), but we're now working on some more complex processes (engineering changes) as well as a few more simple ones (expense reports, capital requests,)

We're currently using the open source edition on a CentOS server, so cost was $0. I haven't contacted them about licensing the professional edition, but according to their website it looks like they use a subscription model that starts at $10k/year.

FYI for anyone reading this in the future; we ended up going with ProcessMaker. It has all of the requirements I listed, plus runs on Linux and has basic AD integration (it will use AD/LDAP for authentication, but you have to select the users you want to import and remember to import new users in the future; the paid version gives you automatic LDAP sync and SSO)

I just realiezd; it sounds like "play-doh"!

OpenERP has renamed itself to "Odoo":

https://accounts.openerp.com/blog/Odoo-Blog-1/post/Odoo-The-New-OpenERP-156

I've been following OpenERP for a while as it really seemed to be (maybe still is?) the most promising open source ERP/accounting system. However they never quite had the level of professionalism I was looking for due to poor documentation and poor upgrade paths, amongst other things (e.g. weird changes to their website.)

What really threw me off was this:

"Choosing the right name is hard. To find the perfect name, we analysed the names of top internet companies. We discovered a direct correlation between the company valuation and the number of 'O' in its name. The graph below shows the average valuation of the top 10 internet companies according to the number of 'O' in their names.

With three 'O' in its name, 'Odoo' is in phase with our ambitions."

Is it just me, or does that seem rediculous? I actually had to stop and re-read to make sure it wasn't a joke.

I really wonder what they've done other than take FreeBSD and install a few packages? On the surface I don't see much value added over a vanilla FreeBSD installation. If there is some good value they've added, they don't appear to be touting it on their website.

I'm just not sure why I would chose this over FreeBSD? Or if I wanted something that was more of a "ready to go" desktop system, why not PC-BSD? The PC-BSD guys did a bunch of work getting things like auto mount to work well out of the box, and developed decent GUIs utilities for package management and backups. I would be very surprised with JabirBSD has half of this.

This project wasn't well received last year on the FreeBSD forums And this interview last year had a lot of odd responses.

The hospitals around here all have regular PCs on carts with Saran Wrap taped over the keyboards.

Another point I just thought about with vegetables; I started to enjoy them more once I started eating good ones. Vegetables from the grocery store, including the organic ones, are usually crap compared to real good home-grown or farm-fresh vegetables; they have more flavour, brighter/deeper colours, and apparently more nutrients. I grow some of my own, my parents grow quite a few, and I buy from the Mennonites, road-side farm stands, and the farmers market as often as I can.

My pet peeve is seeing slices of pale pink/red-ish tomatoes in places like Subway.

While you can probably lose weight by eating carbs and doing tons of exercise, it's (a) probably inefficient (the more carbs you take in the more exercise you need to do to burn them off) and (b) it's not exactly a healthy approach (where do you get your vitamins?)

I've heard that fatty foods and sugar (including carbs) are addictive; the more you eat them, the more you crave them. In my experience this is very true. Once I managed to consistently reduce my sugar (I haven't drank soda/pop in almost 10 years) and carb intake for a long period of time, the less I craved them. I also found that the more I ate vegetables, the more I craved them. After a while, I could barely stomach any fast food; it just didn't taste good any more (it probably never tasted good, but I didn't realize it.) This took quite a few months of real healthy eating. It was very difficult but I guess I just had the willpower to do it (my motivation was wanting to reduce my risks for long-term future problems that run my family like like heart disease, high blood pressure, cancer.) Today I still eat out quite a bit, but I'm a lot more selective about where I eat (less fast food chains, more small diners and delis and whatnot.)

I lost a bit of weight due to improved eating habits, but I don't think it was all that much. Where I really lost weight was from daily exercise. I spent an entire summer biking anywhere from 5 to 10km (3-6 miles) almost every day (maybe 6 out of 7 days on average.) While not an extraordinary feat, it was convenient enough and didn't tie up a ton of time so I managed to do consistently for a long period of time. I probably lost 15-20lbs over that summer with no other exercise, although I'm sure the improved eating around the same time also helped.

Within the last year I lost about 25lbs due to a "mostly" gluten free diet. It's "mostly" gluten free because my fiancée has Celiac Disease so we don't eat any gluten at home nor even keep it in the house for fear of cross contamination; she's that sensitive to it. But when I'm outside of the house I will still eat a sandwich or breaded food, but very little. I wasn't overweight before, but I was at the top end of "normal" weight range for my height. Now I'm in the middle/low side of the normal range. This was with no other changes in my eating or activity levels (which have not been that great over the last year or two; slowly working on getting back into the habit of exercising and hoping that warmer weather will help.)

I've always shied away from the option to "Login with your [Facebook/Twitter/Linkedin/etc] Account", mainly because of privacy concerns, but also because I've heard of design flaws with the OAUTH and OpenID systems (mainly from listening to Steve Gibson's podcast)

XFCE. I like that it's highly customizable, lightweight, and doesn't look half bad (still not as fancy as KDE or Gnome 3 though). I also just started using this XFCE plugin called Whisker Menu which is an alternative launcher with search functionality, so I can do the traditional thing where you just press "Windows" key and start typing a search request.

Our payroll system (ADP) is SAAS and it's a poor setup. They only support Internet Explorer due to all these special plugins they require for simple things like a data entry grid and printing reports (not sure if they're ActiveX but I'm pretty sure they are.) And they are often 4-5 months behind supporting new versions of Internet Explorer. Plus every time you move a user to a new computer you have to call in and talk to someone and get a one-time password before you can download the new certificate.

Yes, it's a Lenovo x230. I ran Fedora on it for the longest time but started getting weird problems (system crashing/unstable, wakes itself from sleep, wifi randomly cuts out) and I wasn't sure if it was just Linux/Fedora being buggy or a hardware problem. I'm a longtime fan of BSD (last week I came across my FreeBSD 4.2 and OpenBSD 2.x/3.x CDs while cleaning the basement) so I loaded FreeBSD 10 but couldn't get it to properly resume from sleep mode. I ended up trying OpenBSD because most of their developers use Lenovo/Thinkpad laptops so they are very well supported, which I suspect is why sleep mode works flawlessly with it. Also the stability and wifi problems have gone away.

My router/"NAS" (shared storage) box at home is running FreeBSD. I also run an OpenBSD system at work for a web server and NAT gateway.

As far as I know, the Enterprise edition operates exactly the same as the personal edition but with the added benefit of centralized management and AD/LDAP integration. I use the personal edition at home and couldn't live without it now.

I'm not using one but starting to evaluate iTop