SugarCRM or, more accurately, SugarCE (community edition) is opensource customer relationship management software, or CRM software.

Like other CRMs available, its purpose is to make it easier for you to keep track of your customers and your company's relationship with those customers.  You can do that by keeping track of leads, sales, and so on.

Now I've just spent over 10 hours today trying to install and run SugarCRM but I continuously encountered issues where it would hang for minutes at a time and generally be very useless. 

I checked my logs, checked the other applications on my web server and everything seemed fine.  In fact, more than fine, being a Sunday afternoon, everything was running extra fast.  Every except SugarCRM, that is.

"Not a problem, I'll go to the forum", I thought.

Ha ha. Ha ha. Ha.

I encountered a number of people experiencing the same issues I was but here is where it gets interesting, threads were being opened but never answered.  I must have found over 7 threads relating to the issues I was having without any one of them having a single answer posted.

That's terrible.

In my (extensive) experience with OpenSource, questions get answered in hours or days.  They don't get left there for you to battle with by yourself.

To me, the problem is NOT the community but in the way that the Sugar company itself runs it's forums and the rest of it's company.  It would appear that no one is employed to moderate the forum, much less provide added support.

They might step in at this point and argue that the community edition of their software isn't supported but this level of UNsupport leaves a bad taste in my mouth.  The sort of bad taste that ensures that I never try the commercial version of their software.

I'm bitterly disappointed in SugarCRM.  If this was someone's first experience with OpenSource can you imagine them ever coming back? I don't think so.

If you're logged into your Google account while searching for something, you'll have noticed some changes to the results.  Specifically, arrows that allow you to move certain results up, and the ability to comment on search results.

What's my take on this?  Despite what Google is saying about how your changes won't affect other people's search results, I don't believe them!  I think that this is a cheap way for Google to have user-moderated search results!  I'm not saying the new features aren't useful, I think the changes are great but I also definitely think Google will take note of what people are doing and take some of into account.  After all, how can you ignore millions of people's opinions on where things should be ranked?  If there's a common-thread that, say, one YouTube video should be ranked higher than others for a particular keyword, Google would be stupid not to use that information to its advantage and offer better search-results.

I think it's smart and I like it.  Putting the internet back in the hands of the users is what it's all about!

Check out Google's blog entry on SearchWiki.

I was just telling my friend that I'm getting a Baja motorcycle and, after she warned me not to get one, about 40 mins later, I replied...



--



(11:19:15) norio: oooh, btw, i'm telling marc i'm getting a Bajaj Avenger (cruiser) bike

(11:19:17) norio: R20k brand new

(11:19:21) norio: and incredibly fuel efficient

(11:19:28) norio: got a good following in SA

(11:19:38) Allyson Rabkin: no no no no no no

(11:19:39) Allyson Rabkin: :(

(11:20:16) norio: eish, what's up?

(11:20:39) Allyson Rabkin: i've picked up pieces from bike accidents love

.... (40 minutes later) ....

(12:03:48) norio: i hear u

(12:04:03) Allyson Rabkin: wtf?

(12:04:09) Allyson Rabkin: ???????

(12:04:26) norio: upgraded my pc and now it doesn't tell me when u've replied :P

(12:04:37) Allyson Rabkin: omg

(12:04:38) norio: so i'm responding to, "i've picked up pieces from bike accidents"

(12:04:38) Allyson Rabkin: hahahahaha

(12:04:46) Allyson Rabkin: i was just testing my mic

(12:04:49) norio: ROFL!

(12:04:49) Allyson Rabkin: and saying

(12:04:58) Allyson Rabkin: "hello can you hear me"

This year I've learned to be INTERdependent instead of just
INdependent. Stephen Covey believes we "evolve" from dependence to
independence to interdependence and this last change has seen huge
improvements in my life. It takes a lot of strength and trust to hand
something over to someone else and have faith that it will work out OK.



I'm now more comfortable with LETTING GO of the stuff I'm not so good
at and finding partners to fill those shoes for me. I now focus on
creating (I'm a creator wealth profile) and the opportunities are
abounding.



Currently, I'm teaming up with a fellow entrepreneur who's a well-connected
marketing and business buff and I believe that single partnership is
going to catapult me from S-Quadrant to B-Quadrant (Google: Cashflow Quadrant by Robert Kiyosaki) because, together,
we're building a business that will mostly run itself and we have
nearly no competition that can match our resources.



That's just 1 partnership.



Then there's my guitar forum. My partner there will soon be using his
contacts in the music industry to find us advertisers. Even at R300 per
month to start off with, we'll be making money and building our name as
an effective place for music companies to advertise their wares.



And what do I have to do? Not much except trust my partners and create stuff - which I love doing! :)



I'm working with a friend and fellow developer on a few projects and my designer in PE
as well. With all these projects, I'd normally try do it all alone and
you know what happen, right? Nothing. I get overwhelmed and my projects
end up being shelved for months or years at a time. Now they're
actually going somewhere!


Then there's Spot On Forex. I build the
technical systems and set up marketing campaigns, Ivan does the really
hard (trading) work and I get 50% of the profit. Not a half bad deal
considering systems only need to be built once ;)  Even if I stuff-up while creating them, I'll eventually get them right and then I'm done.



Each system I build multiplies my income. Even if it's %0.5, that's
compound growth and so the next %0.5 will be worth even more to me.



I foresee myself being a millionaire before I reach my 26th birthday. Beyaddaful!



No I'm not boasting. I believe sharing these types of stories will give
SOMEONE out there hope and if I give just one person enough hope to
persist through whatever they're going through now, my whole life has
been worthwhile!



At school (Jeppe Boys) we often had motivational speakers and our
headmaster always tried to motivate us by sharing us stories from
Covey's, "7 habits of highly effective teenagers". Most kids hate that
type of thing but, for some of us, that was like drinking from the holy
grail and I've since held the belief that it's worth speaking to 1,000
even if only 1 listens.

I've just set up a site where you can buy "Premium" Drupal Templates and Drupal Themes (same thing, really).  I think the availability of paid-for themes for Drupal shows that it had matured to the point where the masses can now use it without necessarily being a techie.

Now we just need more techies to see the opportunity and start selling more templates.  Yes, yes, I know most of you guys are against charging for your work on something GPL but, really, this is how we get QUALITY stuff out there and this is the next step to growing Drupal.

Enjoy the templates and please make sure you buy at least one ;)  Support a fellow blogger, and all that :D

Debian is, in my opinion, the best distribution for a server you have to maintain yourself.  That's because it takes care of a lot of stuff for you and apt-get is soooo easy to use.

Of course, you have to keep your server updated or, sooner or later, someone will hack it to itty bitty pieces.  And running updates automatically is dangerous as someone can mess with the DNS server you use and get you to download trojanned software nice and automatically - wonderful!

So instead of updating everything automatically, install apticron and it will automatically check what updates are available and it'll email you daily to let you know if something needs updating.

Then you can log in to your server, check that everything's OK and, if it is, do the update.  It's magical :)

As of yesterday, I'm officially a quarter of a century young ;)  I like looking at it that way as it feels like I've achieved something of great magnitude and, of course, my ego feeds on stuff like that :P

We had friends and family over for an all-day-braai which turned out really well.

I know also have more money to put towards my guitar which I've only made 1 payment towards so far.

That's all, I just wanted to share how old I am.  And now back to our regular programming!

I'm experimenting with the following code which will basically mirror my attachments and avatars on my forum onto my Amazon S3 account and serve them from there on subsequent requests.  If you want to do something similar (it can save a LOT of bandwidth!), copy this code in after around line 1047, in Sources/Display.php...

NB:  This code requires the S3.php file available here.




Next I'm going to look at probably a whole TWO lines to add to my .htaccess file to redirect direct requests for images in my forum theme to my S3 Amazon account.

My server in The States was hacked by mistake by Alexa's web-crawler.  You see, if you have the Alexa toolbar or, like me, Quirk's SearchStatus plugin installed, then Alexa will crawl the pages you browse.  Maybe not all of them, maybe only pages from domains it doesn't already have indexed but, nonetheless, it will crawl them.

The problem with that is that some parts of the net aren't supposed to be indexed.  It used to be considered safe to put something up without linking to it or telling anyone about the URL.  If you did this, it shouldn't be accessed by anyone as, if something isn't linked to on the internet, for all intents and purposes, it doesn't exist!

Well that doesn't count any more :P

The problem is that the admin interface I use has a well-known bug wherein it doesn't properly check your login credentials before giving you access to administrative pages.  And that's basically how they h4xored my server.

Their crawler accessed my admin interface and proceeded to "crawl" the deletion page for one domain and the suspension pages for 2 others.  Fun stuff for me ;)

Luckily I picked it up about an hour after it happened so I've been in touch with them and let them know about what's happened and I've fixed my server but boy was I shocked to find Alexa at the other end of my h4xoredness :D

Just goes to show that you shouldn't be lazy in patching your server.  Security by obscurity is no security at all.

5. Get wet. Cooped up indoors for far too long? Maybe you should hang out near a wet spot. "The air around bodies of water is full of energy-enhancing ions that help bring oxygen to the brain," says Dr. Pierce J. Howard, author of The Owner's Manual for the Brain. If the beach is a long way off and there's no pool near you, just open the bathroom window and get into the shower. This "wet session" helps energize and soothe your brain, which, in turn, leads to having clarity and a more positive view on things.

Five Happy Treats for a Stress-Free Life | Simpleology Blog

Who knew?
Right, I'm off to go have another shower :P  You lucky coastal bastards can go take a walk on the beach.  No wonder you're always so happy-go-lucky ;)

Wot? Me? Jealous?  Never!