Musings of a West Texas Business Venture

The Difference Between Marketing, Advertising, PR and Branding

2007-05-27T18:41:00.000-07:00

What an amazing graphic to explain Marketing, Advertising, PR, and Branding.

No explanation is needed.

Web Page Sizes

2007-05-23T08:50:00.000-07:00

Back to the site optimization theme I've written about lately ....

A lot of attention is paid to file size when working with web sites and web applications. Specifically, there is a lot of literature on compressing Javascript files (by the way, the best way is to use Rhino or the Dojo toolkit which has built an online tool, ShrinkSafe) and tweaking images and graphics for fast, faster, and fastest load times.

Sometimes web developers forget about optimizing the content!

On a recent web project, our team noticed that the pages were taking longer to load than necessary. I noticed my FasterFox timer had gone from a few seconds to over 15 seconds on some pages. We began digging into the first culprits (Javascript and graphics) and concluded that neither were the issue. Javascript was well compressed using a custom ant target (which uses ShrinkSafe to compress the javascript), and the images were at a reasonable size, well under 100K for the whole page.

I decided, somewhat haphazardly, to look at the source code on the page that was taking some time to load. I saved the HTML code as a new file, and checked the file size. At over 65,000 lines of code, the HTML file, alone, weighed in at over 3.3 MB. That is huge, considering that our average page size is between 12K and 45K. After doing some more digging, it appears that 86% of the 3.3MB file is white space ... specifically, spaces and newline characters.

The culprit? A developer, who was using spaces instead of tabs. A simple, and common, IDE setting was inflating a page from under 500K to over 3.3MB. Several JSP files, with loops in them, had hundreds of spaces that expanded in our application to thousands upon thousands of white spaces.

Lesson learned: Use tabs, not spaces, when programming or coding.

Tech Tags: JSP whitespace HTML compress Javascript Dojo Shrinksafe ant

TimeForge.com version 1.4 Press Release

2007-05-21T15:09:00.000-07:00

Lubbock, TX – May 21, 2007 – TimeForge.com, a scheduling application designed for the food-service industry, was released in February and has been quickly adopted by the hospitality industry. For years, electronic scheduling has been a growing alternative to “pen-and-paper” scheduling, but most electronic systems have been overly complex and cumbersome to use. Employee scheduling is now simple! The TimeForge.com software is easy to use, quick to implement, and provides an effective combination of quality software and extensive features, with monthly programs starting under $10 / month.

Along with the basic ability to quickly and easily create schedules that work for your business (including multi-week or monthly schedules), TimeForge.com includes AutoScheduler™, an automatic scheduling tool developed with leading industry experts. The AutoScheduler™ program simplifies the creation of schedules by accurately balancing employee requests, payroll costs, and staffing requirements. With the click of a mouse, the AutoScheduler™ can create an entire 7-day schedule for your business in under 30 seconds! Blazing fast scheduling combined with industry-leading reports puts you and your managers back where you belong .... on the floor with your customers.

TimeForge.com will automatically alert employees of newly posted schedules and schedule changes on a continual basis. Employees can be notified through the TimeForge.com website, email, or even daily text message alerts. Multiple notifications provide a solid scheduling system that eliminates any confusion about staff responsibilities. TimeForge.com also reduces the amount of time that managers spend on the phone with employees. Employees can log in to their individual TimeForge.com accounts and enter a work request (time off, school schedules, work preferences, etc...); the manager can then approve or deny employee requests at their convenience.

TimeForge.com can save your business time and money, and can reduce confusion and tension between the management and staff.

Sign up for your free 90-day trial at www.TimeForge.com today!

About TimeForge.com
TimeForge.com is an employee scheduling application designed for the hospitality and restaurant industries. Currently used by more than 100 restaurants, bars, and clubs from all over the United States, TimeForge.com is designed from the ground-up to simplify the complicated process of employee scheduling, with a single task in mind: to put management back where they belong – on the floor with customers.

Tech Tags: Timeforge restaurant software management employee+scheduling hospitality spreadsheet

TimeForge.com Update

2007-05-19T10:58:00.000-07:00

The premier software for employee scheduling in the restaurant and hospitality industry got an exciting update today!

Many different screen shots and movies are now posted, so you can see what TimeForge can do for your restaurant, bar, or club before you sign up for a free trial. And, as mentioned yesterday, our new pages load even faster than before - we reduced the size of our pages by another 40K, which means TimeForge.com is now simple AND fast.

Coming soon to TimeForge.com: Tutorials and Version 1.4 of the software

Ready to see what automatic employee scheduling software can do for you? Sign up for a free trial of our flagship software product, TimeForge.com

Tech Tags: hospitality software restaurant schedule TimeForge.com

Speed of a Website

2007-05-18T20:26:00.000-07:00

SmugMug founder Don MacAskill recently wrote about the need for speed in his application space. Specifically, he took some stats from the Alexa tool from Amazon.com.

According to Alexa's own Speed Test, Alexa aggregates data from all of their users who have their toolbar installed on their machines. But I'm not sure how they decided that SmugMug takes (on average) 0.9 seconds to load. Perhaps an explanation is in order.

According to WebSiteOptimization.com (a tool we use quite often), SmugMug's index page is 351K and it would take someone on a T1 about 6.26 seconds to load. Which means that if Alexa's load time is 0.9 seconds, the average Alexa user who visits SmugMug.com would be (6.26 seconds / 0.9 seconds) = 6.95 times faster than a T1 connection. Since a T1 is 1.44 Mbps download that would be 10.08 Mbps down!!

Using those same numbers for our restaurant / hospitality employee scheduling product TimeForge (which is about to get a massive update on both the website and the application) we get some great load times! TimeForge is 171K in size (our next update should reduce the size by another 40K!), and should be loaded by a T1 in about 4.11 seconds. Assuming that our average user has a 10Mbps connection (like SmugMug!), our load time is 0.59 seconds!

As for the 10Mbps? Don pointed out - statistics are best in relation to other statistics, and doing some digging on our competition would probably be the best relation for the Alexa stats.

Tech Tags: SmugMug Alexa Amazon.com TimeForge optimization

IEEE Paper on Embedded Mesh Networks

2007-05-14T18:45:00.000-07:00

Exciting news!!

A paper that we sponsored and co-authored (through Resolution Systems) is going to be presented at the IEEE International Symposium on Consumer Electronics conference held in Dallas, Texas from June 20, 2007 - June 23, 2007. The paper was a fairly comprehensive look at the transmission of Zigbee data over a CC2420 chip using an MSP430 microprocessor from Texas Instruments.

Much of the work was done by our chief electrical engineer, Michael Helm, and the paper is an exploration of antenna orientation, transmission distance, and how well data transmits through various objects (like refrigerators). In fact, during his course of work testing external ranges, he almost stepped on a prairie rattlesnake!

Michael will be presenting the paper on our behalf in Dallas, so stop by and say hello!

If you are interested in any of our findings, feel free to contact us.

Tech Tags: Zigbee CC2420 MSP430 embedded IEEE

Accounting Software

2007-05-12T15:56:00.000-07:00

One of our clients, Vann Alexander Home Medical Supplies (VAHMS), an amazing mail-order diabetic company in West Texas, is currently in the market for a new accounting package. They have outgrown Peachtree, a 5-user (named users) product, and now are going to be forced to upgrade or slow down their growth. The three main criteria for the new software package are:

Conversion of existing data. There are years of backed up archive files in Peachtree, and thousands of inventory items and clients. Ideally, all of the archives can be imported to provide some amazing analytics.
Source code / API connectors. The accounting software package will be integrated with a medical billing software component, a custom developed CRM and marketing package, and a comprehensive statistics tool to provide a unique look at their business. We also want to reduce the amount of typing that has to be done (a customer should need to be entered only ONE time).
Cost of expansion. Right now, Peachtree is at its physical limits, and Sage Software would really like VAHMS to upgrade to one of their MAS options, at a significant cost. Switching to a product like Quickbooks Enterprise would give VAHMS the ability to expand to 20 users, mostly inexpensive, and then a new solution would need to be found.

We have been reviewing a number of software options for them for the past few months, and have narrowed the search down to QuickBooks Enterprise and Fitrix. Both have advantages and disadvantages. Anyone have an opinion?

Tech Tags: Peachtree Fitrix Quickbooks API accounting+software

Latest Updates

2007-04-28T15:48:00.000-07:00

I apologize for the lack of blogging over the past few months. We've been extremely busy working on TimeForge, an employee scheduling software product designed for the hospitality / restaurant industry. We also acquired several new clients that are occupying much of our free time.

In short, we are still around and working harder than ever to provide our clients with the most advanced technology available.

Employee Scheduling Software At Its Best

2007-02-10T14:36:00.000-08:00

The pre-party has officially started! As you are aware, we have been hard at work developing an employee scheduling program, with the sole intent of developing a program which delivers a fast ROI to hospitality management, and makes scheduling requests and employee notifications as simple as possible. We're almost there .... The new software is called TimeForge.

If you are interested in being one of the first users on timeforge, head over to the website and sign up for the TimeForge User's newsletter. Everyone who signs up for the newsletter before we launch will receive between 6 and 12 months of free use of our revolutionary scheduling software. The software is scheduled for an official launch by late February, 2007.

Tech Tags: timeforge employee+scheduling schedules beta

Amazon.com's EC2, Part Three

2007-02-03T11:04:00.000-08:00

EC2's weakest "point" is that data inside of the virtual machine only lives as long as the machine is powered off. When the machine turns off, all of the data is lost, unless it has also been saved somewhere else. One way to store data off of the instance is to use Amazon's S3 service, which works fine for storing "regular" files, but does not work as well with remote storage of real time information, it could take more than 10seconds for file changes to appear on S3. For many applications, for instance database storage, S3's service would be extremely cumbersome.

A few third-party tools have appeared to try and help solve the remote file storage problem, the most prominent of which is S3InfiniDisk. S3InfiDisk is a filesystem, based on the FUSE project, and includes caching of data, and multi-write and multi-read access to S3's storage buckets. I have not yet tried out S3InfiniDisk, but its creators claim that it is fast enough to use beneath a modern database, like PostgreSQL or MySQL.

We will likely continue to use, and evaluate, EC2 for our infrastructure needs, both internally, and for our clients.

Tech Tags: EC2 Amazon grid S3InfiDisk Xen

Amazon.com's EC2, Part Two

2007-02-02T18:01:00.000-08:00

Setting up an EC2 account only takes a few moments of time, and the documentation from Amazon is great. They have a great get started guide, which is located here. There is also a good video for Windows users.

EC2 is a service built on Amazon.com's Sun Grid, using Xen (x86) instances, and is capable of running Linux and Windows (using emulation). Access to the grid is through Amazon's set of Java tools, or through a web API. There are also some 3rd party tools that are beginning to appear to ease the administration and deployment of the EC2 and S3 products, including AWS Console.

After using EC2 for a few weeks, it appears to live up to all of the hype, even as a Beta product. Transfers to and from EC2 were extremely fast, in many cases I was able to achieve a consistent 400K/second (more than 2 full T1's). The images that I have launched have also been very fast when compiling programs, and running them.

Tech Tags: EC2 Amazon grid AWS+Console Xen

Amazon.com's EC2, Part One

2007-02-01T01:05:00.000-08:00

I first wrote about Amazon.com's EC2 Service many months ago, when it was first released. I had promised to update my readers on its stability and capabilities at a later date. Today is that day.

We are currently developing an application which needs a lot of "go-juice" - plenty of computing power to crunch a lot of numbers. Although we could buy physical servers to handle the increasing load on our software service, this will require us to spend money - a significant capital expenditure. As an alternative, we are researching the possibilities afforded us by using Amazon.com's significantly cheaper virtual servers, and expand onto their Grid.

Each server, when run 24x7 throughout the month, is less than $80.

Tech Tags: EC2 Amazon grid

timeforge.com - The Premier Web Employee Scheduling Application

2007-01-20T06:09:00.000-08:00

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

2007-01-09T22:34:00.000-08:00

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.

Tech Tags: Crystal+Reports Java slow+execution JasperReports

Carsonified .... DropSend Sale Did Not Happen

2007-01-07T20:07:00.000-08:00

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.

Tech Tags: DropSend Carson+Systems TechCrunch web+application

Maxiumum Linux Server Uptime

2007-01-05T18:16:00.000-08:00

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.

Tech Tags: Resolution Linux server uptime Windows

Technical Bloopers

2007-01-04T21:43:00.000-08:00

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!

Tech Tags: Novell blooper University server

OpenVista ... or Not?

2007-01-03T08:03:00.000-08:00

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.

Tech Tags: MedSphere OpenVista Eric+Raymond

Criss Angel MindFreak and Logos

2006-12-31T20:59:00.000-08:00

While I was pondering the GPL and trademark issues, I noticed that the A&E channel was running Criss Angel MindFreak episodes back-to-back. He's a very interesting character, and the show is equally as entertaining.

However, during my trips to Vegas (where most of the show is taped), I always see people walking around in branded t-shirts and jackets. After watching three episodes I noticed that the audience members is always wearing blank t-shirts and jackets. No brands, what-so-ever.

Coincidence .... canned show, or not?

Tech Tags: logo trademark Criss Angel MindFreak

Uversa's ClearHealth Trademark - Part Two

2006-12-21T08:48:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure of the "right" way to handle trademark issues surrounding an Open Source project. Obviously, twenty companies should not offer different products under the same name. This would cause confusion among users of the project. However, the trademark concerns seem contradictory to the spirit of the GPL. Basically, for other commercial entities to benefit from the community, the trademark owner has to get paid. This certainly would reduce the likelihood of code contributions from the "other" commercial entities.

We have contributed code and man hours to Sequoia, a project from Continuent, and to OSWorkflow, a project from OpenSymphony. Both companies are similar to Uversa, in that they offer consulting and development services in addition to the Open Source products. Interestingly enough, both groups / companies have significant Open Source and Internet presence, but OpenSymphony and Continuent don't really have any trademark issues. In fact, I would hazard to say that both of those projects are more popular than ClearHealth.

Searching for ClearHealth on Google: 44,500 results.
Searching for Uversa ClearHealth on Google: 590 results.

Searching for Sequoia on Google: 8,550,000 results.
Searching for Continuent Sequoia on Google: 114,000 results.

Searching for OSWorkflow on Google: 179,000 results.
Searching for OpenSymphony OSWorkflow on Google: 112,000 results.

We have not made a decision as to which route we are going to take. We can fork or rename the project, or we can become a Uversa reseller.

I can certainly appreciate their desire to protect their trademark. Of course, as we continue to modify the codebase, and move further away from the code that they wrote, we will want to use an identifiable name and do not want to be forced to pay someone to use our own code.

Tech Tags: ClearHealth Uversa EMR trademark GPL

Uversa's ClearHealth Trademark - Part One

2006-12-20T20:08:00.000-08:00

We have run into an interesting situation regarding our recent installation of ClearHealth at a local clinic. As mentioned previously, ClearHealth is a GPL software product that was originally a fork of OpenEMR. After the initial version, a lot of the code was rewritten, and was re-released as ClearHealth, a trademark that Uversa aims to enforce.

We would like to tell our customers that we can install, support, and customize ClearHealth (a GPL product) and it would be nice to put the product on sales literature. But it doesn't appear that this is likely to be possible.

According to the CEO, David Uhlman, the trademarked name, ClearHealth, cannot be used outside of the fair use clause, without written permission. Written permission appears to require joining their reseller program (whereby Uversa would work with us, and we would work directly with the client), or they would work directly with the customer (we would basically provide leads for Uversa). His comments can be seen in his reply at their forums. The other option that they offer is to rename or fork the product.

Fred Trotter did just that, providing a "friendly fork" of the ClearHealth product as MirrorMed. Of course, since the original version of ClearHealth was an OpenEMR fork, one could say that they are at least eating their own dog food (promoting what they themselves did).

I'm not sure of the "right" way to handle trademark issues surrounding an Open Source project. Obviously, twenty companies should not offer different products under the same name. This would cause confusion among users of the project. However, the trademark concerns seem contradictory to the spirit of the GPL. Basically, for other commercial entities to benefit from the community, the trademark owner has to get paid. This certainly would reduce the likelihood of code contributions from the "other" commercial entities.

What are your thoughts on the GPL and trademarks?

Should the rules differ in the medical community?

Tech Tags: ClearHealth Uversa EMR trademark GPL

cVent.com Customer Survey

2006-12-17T19:27:00.000-08:00

On Friday I ended up on a Webinar with cVent, a Customer Survey company. One of our clients wanted to know if their product could assist them in taking customer surveys. An hour and a half later, I had my answer.

Their product, one of the most expensive on the market, does almost nothing that a product like SurveyMonkey.com or Zoomerang.com can do. They do, however, have a very clean interface.

I did find one of the slides very humorous, where cVent showed off that they had 2,000+ customers. I believe Zoomerang's home page says 800,000+ customers.

Tech Tags: cVent Customer+Survey Survey+Monkey Zoomerang

Information Week Targets Health Care

2006-12-06T13:24:00.000-08:00

This week's Information Week is laying Health Care on the line. Specifically, the articles discuss what large employers (Walmart and Intel) are doing to try and drive down the costs of health care, and also profiles a few clinics and hospitals about their fight to implement EMR's.

[If you have not been keeping up with the CCHIT debates, and what many perceive as governmental regulations of EMR systems, then please look here, here, here, and here.]

Tech Tags: EMR CCHIT Health+Care

Lulu.com and VioVio.com

2006-11-30T16:50:00.000-08:00

Over the past few years, I have amassed almost six gigabytes of digital pictures and videos. Most of this collection is haphazardly laid out in random folders (basically, when the camera gets full I copy the 1GB or 2GB file onto a laptop and go back to taking pictures).

Although we have a nice HP Photo Printer (model 7960), printing them out is a time consuming and tedious process. And although digital photos are fine for me, they don't hang well in the office or at the home. Today, we decided today to try printing out a photobook that would have a bunch of photos in them, and add captions (so that I remember what happened, and who was with us, in a decade).

I started with ShutterFly (we occasionally use their service for individual prints) but found their pricing to be high. VioVio.com was next on my list, but they have almost no layout or caption capabilities. I settled on Lulu.com, and was able to upload and caption a photobook using their Java applet interface. I ordered an 8 page book for around $6.13, under $10 with shipping. I'll let you know about the quality when it arrives.

Are there any others that I should try?

Tech Tags: Photobook Shutterfly Lulu VioVio review

MediSoft is the Most Purchased Product Ever?

2006-12-01T18:45:00.000-08:00

Medisoft, a Physician Management product which is both cheap and easy to use, was purchased by McKesson (publicly traded as MCK) earlier this month. The purchase was a $1.8 billion deal, and would be mostly insignificant news if this was the first time Medisoft had been bought or sold.

However, prior to McKesson owning Medisoft, it was owned by PerSe (publicly traded as PSTI). In fact, PerSe has not owned Medisoft for a full year yet (they acquired them on Jan 6, 2006), and also produces a competitive product (Lytec).

Prior to the PerSe acquisition, Medisoft was owned by NDCHealth. NDCHealth acquired Medisoft in 2000, from yet another company. [Note: McKesson is actually acquiring the entire PerSe company, including both Medisoft and Lytec.]

Apparently their acquisitions are occuring so fast, that the employees claim they're not done being absorbed from the last acquisition! I'm not sure what the future holds for either product, but I certainly would be somewhat concerned about the product's future.

Advertising Blurb: If you're not happy with your Medisoft or Lytec products, or their future, feel free to contact us and see what Resolution Software can do for you.

Tech Tags: McKesson Medisoft Lytec PerSe NDCHealth physician+management