timeforge.com - The Premier Web Employee Scheduling Application
The premier online employee scheduling application,
www.timeforge.com, went into private testing on Friday afternoon. This product has been in development for more than two years, and we are still putting the final touches on it.
TimeForge is an online web scheduling software platform, designed specifically to ensure that the person responsible for scheduling
always makes the best employee schedule possible. Although
TimeForge will work with many different employee scheduling scenarios, it is ideal for businesses who who do shift scheduling, such as retail, hospitality, and medical industries. Also, businesses who have a combination of shift schedules and fixed schedules will recognize significant benefits from using the software.
We are planning on releasing the software to the public in early February, with a great selection of benefits for managers, employees, and business owners who need good, robust, and proven employee scheduling software.
If you are interested in being in our Beta test, please feel free to email us at
info@timeforge.com!
Scaling Crystal Reports
We recently deployed an entire web application which used
Crystal Reports XI R2, the developer edition. The total application included about 40 different reports, including accounting reports, lead reports, and workflow reports. Most of the reports are blazing fast on a new Dual Opteron system, with 4GB of RAM, being run from with a Java container. However, one of the reports were taking an extraordinary amount of time.
How much time?The actual query takes about 2 seconds to return more than 300 rows for 12 months. When running from with Crystal Reports, the same 300 rows takes more than 6 minutes to run.
Why?This particular report uses a "super" report, and a "sub" report, both run inside of the Java container. Specifically, the Java program runs the Crystal Report "super" report, and then the Crystal Report "super" report runs the "sub" report for each, and every, row that is found in the "super" report. Which means that if the "super" report returns 300 rows, then it has to run 300 "sub" reports.
With the overhead of the Java container, the Crystal Report "super" program has to initialize and launch 300 separate copies. Each initialization takes several seconds, making it the slowest part of the actual report execution.
How To Solve?We rewrote the two reports to utilize only one report, by refactoring some of the underlying tables.
How Much Faster?The report now runs for 12 months of data in under 10 seconds, including creating a PDF for simple viewing.
Carsonified .... DropSend Sale Did Not Happen
Back in November, I wrote about
DropSend, a web product being sold by Carson Systems. I followed that article up with
an explanation of why it was not worth the asking price of $1 million (I did actually email Ryan to find out what they were asking for the application).
As it turns out,
YouSendIt, one of the "top" three buyers, who had all agreed on a lofty minimum price,
also felt that it wasn't worth the asking price, and could not justify the cost.
Ryan has not updated the Blog (about the sale) in about three weeks, and one of his New Year Resolution's was to continue growing
DropSend to $20K per month. With a resolution like that, one can only guess is that the other two talks have stalled also.
TechCrunch.com made the same guess, and declared
DropSend a
"failed merger".
Perhaps I was not the only to think that $1MM asking price for a product making $70K / year was just a little much.
Maxiumum Linux Server Uptime
This server hasn't been up and
running for 4 years yet, but it has been up for almost a year, live in production, and used on a daily basis.
If you cannot read that number above, it's 329 days, 7 hours, and 29 minutes. Running, continuously, non-stop on a live production linux (Redhat 9) server.
Technical Bloopers
Although it is quite an old story, I ran across
this article again today. Basically, a
Novell server, which had not gone down in 4 years, suddenly needed an update. Try as they might, the system administrators could not locate the actual server, until they followed the network cabling and ran into a wall. Turns out that maintenance workers sheet-rocked around the server, and left it self contained, for four years.
Try that with a
Windows machine!
OpenVista ... or Not?
The ongoing saga of the semi-Open Sourcing of
MedSpehere's version of
VistA has included the company founders for MedSphere,
Fred Trotter an medical Open Source advocate, and
Eric Raymond.Read more about the
controversy here.
