Over the last few days I’ve been trialling some different invoicing applications as my previous tool, a spreadsheet in NeoOffice or OpenOffice.org on my Mac, became increasingly frustrating to use. The main issue was that the applications would be unresponsive for long periods of time and hang almost completely. This is rather frustrating when you’re trying to bill a client and it starts taking much longer than it should.

So I went off looking for Mac OS X solution to solve the problem as these days my desktop is more Mac than Linux. Previously Linux solutions didn’t impress me much either and I couldn’t find anything nice in the PHP realm to run as a web service which is also an attractive option to me.

So I ended up looking around MacUpdate for options and came across Invoice 3 and Billings before noticing that Billable was on discount for the day. So I decided to try to grab that as well and see what it did.

It was also much smaller than any of the other ones so it managed to get downloaded first. I went through it’s quick introduction movie and then started using it. It was a bit late so I wasn’t interested in messing around too much and then the application decided that upon rendering an invoice a weird “no pages were selected to be printed error” would continually appear. The app locked up for a while before this and whilst now I know and understand why I didn’t know then and tried my best to quit from it properly between annoying error messages that kept popping up (also taking Firefox with it unfortunately) and went to bed.

The next one on my list was Invoice 3, the most expensive one on the list and the nicest looking. It mostly worked fine until it came try to render the invoice and annoyingly came up with the same error messagenas Billable however it didn’t take out Invoice 3 and the app responded better. At this point it has happened to two applications so I went off and did some Googling on the issue. One of the results were the Apple forums which had an issue with iTunes printing. This triggered me to wonder if the network printer I have set up for my dad’s network was breaking things. So I went into the cups config and removed the printer and restarted cups. Immediately Invoice 3 became much more responsive and after a restart of the application and removing it’s preferences file I was also able to get much further. I went back to Billable and it now started to work properly not causing the errors that had previously crippled it.

The other application, Billings, annoyed me straight from the gun. It required the clients to exist in your address book before you could use th in the application. Whilst I see the potential power of this method however I don’t want to put In all of the clients in my address book and them have it replicated to my phone and other devi we that I have synchronizing with my Mac. So that one is out and now back to Invoice 3 and Billable.

Billable and Billings both requested for a copy of my logo however only Billable let me drag and drop my logo into the app. Given at this point Billings is out of the question it was nice to see the logo by default on it’s template which was quite good. By default I liked Billable invoice default template style over that of Invoice, but Invoice looks like it has a much more flexible interface for handling invoice generation. I’ll create a copy of the Billable style invoice and that should keep me happy though I do like it has a message feature for its invoices whilst Invoice 3 will permit you to add multiple PDF’s to an invoice. So I’ll have a play with Invoice 3 before the demo expires and if I’m happy with it I’ll keep using it.

Another day, another Outlook problem. Outlook died today or last night via OWA as well and I was told it was datastore corruption, yay for a system where minor corruption in perhaps one users mailbox takes down the entire system. Bring on Notes with one database/file per user. As a model it also makes shifting someone’s data around a lot easier. Outlook annoyance of the day: no ability to “ignore” specific meetings from highlighting the calendar. I have a regular meeting every day bolds the calendar making it a pointless UI improvement as every week day is highlighted.

I also had a meeting with Stijn and Richard about doing a masters dissertation on MDFS Permissions. It is some newer concepts in how filesystems will operate but I need to find out stuff about how permissions work already and do some reading up on role based access control with how rules relate to the system. Some of it might be pointless but it should be interesting as MDFS permits the concept of a person within the filesystem as well as all of the group information to be stored in a much richer manner as well as metadata about relationships. Very sexy.

More Office fun with Excel still asking me for my credentials when opening my timesheet, surely in a Microsoft friendly environment my credentials would all be passed on and I wouldn’t have to reauthenticate myself _again_ when I want to pull a document off Sharepoint. No really Microsoft, is it that hard?

Google Summer of Code is back again and my inbox is rather full, I’ll be happy when its over because the mail dies down a bit but until then my inbox is flat strap.

As part of my Adobe Presenter work I’m trying to find a way to record the same audio twice on Windows. MCI shareable doesn’t appear to work properly without hardware support and interestingly with Linux using ALSA/JACK would work great but I’m not dealing with linux boxes. I tried downloading the DirectX9 SDK, nearly 500MB! Maybe that will work. Interestingly I could see what other people were downloading in addition to the DirectX Software Development Kit, they downloaded the DirectX Software Development Kit:

Brilliant! Others who downloaded this also downloaded this! Microsoft making leaps and bounds in its logical reasoning algorithms.

Whilst installing DirectX, I get presented with an interesting screen. I can participate whilst not participating at the same time. They must store it in a qubit, Microsoft at the leading edge of quantum mechanics.

Finally for the day, proof that people can’t quite read; people ask how to unsubscribe from a list which has at the bottom of each email message including their own instructions on how to unsubscribe. The list admin in this case responded with text incredibly similar to this:

I’m also trying out davmail to provide better integration between Exchange and normal environment. It provides access to the global address list from Exchange (slow but faster than doing a search on the domain), calendars in CalDAV format (sort of works) as well as a few other things that I don’t think is really useful (IMAP interface, POP3 interface and SMTP interface) since at USQ these are already available so we don’t need them.

Its interesting that in the country you wave at people when you drive past them on obscure dirt roads, it’s just what you do. Today whilst driving to work I waved at a guy one a back street after I picked up my girlfriend’s sister who also works with us at the University (we all work in different departments). It’s a standard suburban street and this guy was walking on the road walking his dog and whilst I waved (out of habit perhaps?), I didn’t get wave back. I guess city people are like that, in the country I wouldn’t have that, it is strange that the close we get together the further we get apart. Perhaps it is also a recent occurence as well, I’m not sure.

On the work front today I listened to some ICT presentations on change management with our call logging system, HEAT, and how it isn’t designed to do change management but the university is looking at tools to handle that. I also listened about risk and how the university should be doing something about risk management and mitigation including some interestong points that the stuff they’ve done so far is relatively useless when push comes to shove. Great!

I also played “find the MySQL DBA” with the internal directory listing a room at the other end of the building to where the DBA was, handy. It took me less time to explain what I needed to him than it did to find him.

I also spent some timd playing with iReport getting Oracle to play nicely with it. I managed to get it to connect to the DB but I can’t work out how to get iReport to handle an “in” style statement properly and allow me to provide a multiselect select box to the user. I may end up having to hard code it to get it to play nicely.

Today is the second day of the Universities snap roll out from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007. Yesterday after having much fun with filters that had their nose put out of joint by the fact that the way messages were delivered changed, I now have a message in my inbox from “MicrosoftExchange329e71ec88ae4615bbc36ab6ce41109e@mbrc.internal”

The adventures today weren’t limited to just Windows with GRUB not seeming to want to let me reboot into a non default operating system. Not sure why it didn’t work properly so I will have to have a look at that later.

I also did some investigation into the ePrints permissions and grants. Looks like we’ve got a few stray permissions that need a bit of a clean up but I guess that will happen in time.

I’m also learning more about Java, however more wins than losses today. I’ve learnt that JBoss chews a lot of RAM, however I got the basics up and running and adding data to a local test system. If I’m lucky might be able to have something ready for tomorrow.

My attempts yesterday with Linux were thwarted by an incredibly late notice of upgrading from Exchange 2003 to 2007. The email was sent at 4:13pm, I conservatively estimate that about 6pm the same day things were shifted about – there was an apology for the “short notice” in the notification email. About two hours, short notice indeed.

I also spent the day trying to get my computer to play nicely with the XP partition and try to get it virtualised. I tried to start with VirtualBox but that didn’t turn out well as I ended up having an issue with the agp440.sys driver whilst booting. I found an issue on the VirtualBox tracker (http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/995) and worked through it but nothing seemed to work properly. I also tried some tips from another site but that didn’t do anything either and I had no real progress.

I gave up and went to vmWare and the latest version of its “Server” product (formerly GSX or the cut down version of their ESX system) and its full web interface is just plain painful and I could get anything to think of working. I found an older copy of their tools that includes the fat client vmWare client tool and used it which was much better and actually let me do what I want to. I guess they’re trying to push people into the ESX environment by making the server as unfriendly as possible. I’m sure the web interface works nicely on Windows but not on anything else. A shame really. The older version didn’t seem to let me get far either so I ended up giving up trying to get Windows to play nicely and virtualise under Linux.

I also had some fun trying to get the Google Toolbar to install properly. Thankfully someone else has solved the problem and with a small tweak I managed to get it installed fine as well as Google Gears. Lots of fun!

I sit here looking at ntfsresize rapidly chew through resizing the Windows partition that I had been given at work. I did my best to make Windows work for me however it just didn’t pull it’s weight. But as I move to Linux I can’t help but think that it has been helped in the interoperability department by Windows being slovenly in it’s upgrade cycle.

Because of this Linux has been able to catch up with the staid Windows versions and become more and more compatible with various items. With Windows XP looking like it won’t disappear any time soon (at least until six months after Windows 7 has passed and it there is Windows 7 SP1) it looks like people like Wine are catching up with their API, the filesystems people have had a good chance to get a head up on things and we’re seeing better compatibility with things like MAPI with the OpenChange project.

So at the end of the day I wonder having installed Linux in all of its glory, did Microsoft taking forever help Linux more than we expect?

My pet annoyance of the day is the Windows task bar and how when I set to hide some how it obstinately at times refuses to hide. I mean really, who would have thought hiding was so hard?

Playing with Jasper Reports again and understanding its limitations. I’ve also managed to work out that my issue was that a subreport hadn’t been compiled before I tried to use it even though it was a part of the project workspace I figured it would just work, I guess I was wrong. I’m also fighting with the query builder as well but I’ll get there.

To add to the fighting, I’m dealing with Linux/Windows incompatibilities as well with some home grown software. It is getting to the point where I’ve given up and I’m going to go back to Linux next week. Until then I tried to use one of the servers and then had firewall issues to add to my pain. So I’ve put in a request for access through the firewall to the new server which should be working fine, but thats more paperwork and another working week.

My iPhone annoyingly keeps pausing and playing when I haven’t touched the thing which annoys me no end whilst I’m trying to listen to podcasts. It looks like I’m not the only one to suffer the issues and the general consensus is that going to the Apple Store in Sydney fixes the problem so its a shame I’m stuck in Toowoomba 😐 so that isn’t much help. What is worst is how it annoyingly randomly starts as well which is even stranger considering the posts which seem to suggest that volume plays a part – so I fail to see how that works when its silent. Perhaps the phone is getting confused by the cellular signals that are being picked up by the headphones and randomly causing it to play, who knows. A pain none the less.

I also tried out the latest Skype upgrade and I’ve found it to be extremely ugly and space wasting design and quickly returned back to the old Skype with a much less space wasting design. The new Skype had some interesting features with the way it does its tabs however the conversation window wastes too much white space either side of the text forcing it to wrap even though there was more than enough space. Sufficient to say, I hate it and I’m happy to be back on the older release which makes much better use of space.

I finished the day reading up on the JSR168 portlet specification. Its an interesting idea and interface and has given me the idea on how to build a portal for system for Joomla, perhaps with integration with Google Gadgets and similar portlet style module systems. Perhaps a dream, but another one for my list.

Today’s weird issue is that in Moodle there are users with “-” as an email address. Interestingly some have logged in and there is even one without “idnumber” set even though they should have a valid value based on their username. Very strange, however nothing incredibly dramatic as the majority of the users aren’t impacted by this.

However after doing Visual Basic 6 for the last few weeks in addition to the PHP programming I’ve been doing for a long time, I’ve managed to get some Java application development work. Its entitled fun with Oracle and JDBC getting JasperReports and iReport fun with paths on Windows and its spaces. So far I haven’t actually managed to achieve much which is rather frustrating but hopefully I’ll get it resolved.

I’ve been playing with X11 on Windows again and its been a rather long time. Initially I went hunting for Cygwin but I knew it wasn’t what I was really after and found Xming again. It has been a while and its a bit hard to find stuff when you don’t remember what its called but I’m getting there.

Another day another issue. Today we have more presenter issues, today its that wave files are not converting properly in MP3 format. I tried using Visual Basic and integrating it with LAME, which is more pain than one can imagine. We are limited to 16-bit audio but I’m going to have to handle 8bit mono which is a shame when LAME wants 16-bit inputs! Suffice to say I decided against fighting for too much longer to build something that will properly convert it and will try to look at it later. Hopefully I can rebuild the original application in a much friendlier manner towards all of this, which will help then but not necessarily now.

I’ve also been spending some more time reading about Git. Some interesting concepts that I’ll have to try out. Now all I need is some time.

And to round out the day I had the ePrints cosmetic release I was talking about. As expected it went off without a hitch and we’ve now got a new version released fixing all of their little cosmetic issues.

Today we had some Dell and ATI fun with Linux. Dell aren’t on my top list of computing providers and ATI are well down on my list of graphics card suppliers because it has horrible drivers, even under Windows let alone the pathetic excuse they have under Linux. The issue was that using DVI on the graphics card didn’t work until the operating systems graphics subsystem picked it up. This meant that the BIOS and boot up until the graphics card initialization set up the display, in either Windows or Linux (even Windows’ loading splash screen failed to display). Using VGA onboard seemed to work well, which was weird. We managed to get a VGA dual monitor adapter (yay proprietary connectors!) from a visitor and tested with this and it turned out that the DVI system was broken however VGA works both on board and on the card. Problem solved.

I also had some fun with the Windows High Contrast system. For some reason I saw the “High Contrast NT Daemon” fail, why I even care and why it didn’t restart it automatically in the background is beyond me (perhaps they need to read up on Mac OS X’s Launch Services system). So I got curious and activated it and found it weird that it as a side effect appeared to make my font really big – but thats perhaps not the strangest thing. It took a few seconds and even a “Please wait” model window to display, greyed the display progressively and then activated it. After noticing how badly Windows handles it, I decided to deactivate it. When I compare this to how hard Mac OS X makes it I really wonder, I can flick it on and off very easily even whilst a movie played on an external display – no lag. I’m really not sure how Windows makes it so hard to work properly.

I’ve also been playing with Git and I’ve been reading through http://utsl.gen.nz/talks/git-svn/intro.html which is a comparison between Git and SVN, basically an advocacy piece. Its an interesting read, it appears that the one thing that I will lose is easy merging in of changes in one command however I guess some extra flexibility will help me in some other areas to avoid having larger uncommitted changes in some of my SVN based repositories.

I also used my Windows box at home to test some network stuff to see how it behaves with the ethernet connector. So we booted the machine with no monitor, checked to see what the network card looked like and was happy with things and then I wondered, how do I shut this down from mac? Well it turns out the answer is very simple:

net rpc shutdown -S 192.168.1.104 -U Administrator

Yay for Samba! Another win for the team.