Award Sounds

Background

I've been busy recently evaluating Web Application Frameworks for a current project. It's a simple idea and I wanted to use an up-to-date framework rather than code everything from scratch. Here's a quick breakdown on what I found.

I've written before about using OpenProj as a suitable open-source application for project management. Now that I've more chance to use it in anger (e.g. with projects consisting of over 200 tasks), I've noticed a number of anomalies. Mainly these occur in the scheduling.

I posted earlier about a diagram of vtiger's data schema. The actual scheme is referenced at vtiger's wiki.

It is not an ERD (Entity Relationship Diagram) nor is it a Class Model. That's what I was originally looking for since I spend more of time working at the logical or conceptual levels rather than the physical.

What's Vtiger?

Vtiger is an open-source CRM suite, originally forked from SugarCRM due to the commercial activities of the SugarCRM team. Vtiger aims to be open-source, although it does have the possibility of purchasable extensions, much like Joomla. There is a lot of history in the fork, much of it best left alone. The main point to remember is that SugarCRM and Vtiger are released under different licences. You need to check that the functionality you require is available under the licence you wish to use.

Although not listed on the vtiger website, it is possible to install vtiger CRM on Mac OS X. I'll briefly describe the steps I went through to get it to work.

I was curious about the relationships between Contacts, Accounts, Leads and Potentials, so I needed a reverse engineering package.

Fabforce Designer/MySQL Workbench

FabForce Designer was a great little application on Windows and seems to have stagnated a little under MySQL's auspices. It's recently been released for OS X, but the recent release requires 10.5 (Leopard) and I'm still on 10.4 (Tiger).

60 is the latest production from Spinneyhead Presents at Venn.tv.

I've been busy on a few other sites recently.

I took the decision to start splitting out the information on Award Sounds into more specific sites.

alancward.co.uk features my photography and I'll continue to post photography-related articles over at that site from now on. I'm just building up that site now, so it may be a bit sparse this week.

How would you process map a cup of tea?

I once had a recruiter vet me based on whether I could process map a cup of tea. I think he was new to the job and was fed a script from his client.

What's the actual answer?

Firstly, a cup of tea isn't a process. You can't map a cup of tea. It's an object, not a process. You can process map the process of making a cup of tea, but not the cup of tea itself.

The industries of Stock Photography and Stock Music have a lot of similarities.

Stock Agencies

Both rely on artists submitting their creations to agencies. The agencies are changing the way in which the artists interact with the customers of the art. Importantly for the artist, the agencies are devaluing the art resulting in the art becoming commoditised. Unfortunately, the artist is at the end of the chain and is also becoming commoditised.