Best of Times

I’ve been doing a lot of project work lately and so have come back to something I’ve needed in the past – a good project time tracker 🙂 Now in the past, I’ve tried various software offerings. Of course, there are also online options such as SlimTimer or Toggl. But the thing is, I don’t like relying on online systems much, especially when I would have to be online to use the functionality when I needed it. Internet connectivity out here can sometimes go down suddenly and not come back for a while (sometimes weeks in one infamous incident :p). So, I’d rather have my tools on my desktop where I can access them quickly and always.

With the online stuff eliminated (or not even considered :p), I turned my attention to the desktop apps. And I tell you, there sure are a lot 🙂 But the thing is, all of them fell short in one respect or another. My personal favourites were TimeStamp, Easy Time Tracking Pro, Activity Time Tracker and AllNetic Working Time Tracker. Each of them had their own strengths and weaknesses.

TimeStamp is freeware and the source is included. So if need be, I could modify it to work the way I wanted it to. However, the interface was clunky (probably because the author was using freeware components so that he could keep the source open) and it didn’t have support for multiple tasks for a project. Or rather, it did have support for multiple tasks, but I didn’t like the way it did timings since you couldn’t get individual time blocks for each task. Plus, it had this whole thing about "slack time" that I didn’t really like :p

There is a free version of Easy Time Tracking (ETT) but what I downloaded was the pro version but I believe either would have suited my purposes. ETT is a solid application and it appears to have everything you might need. It allows you to manage multiple customers, projects and tasks for projects. You can set rates at the customer, project and task level. However, each time you start a timer, you have to specify which customer, project and task the timer is for – it will not take the current selection into account. However, you can pause the current timer at any point and restart and it will add multiple timing records for each time chunk. But the interface to do all this was clunky as you had to right-click on the system tray icon, get a menu and select your option from there. The other issue with ETT was the fact that it does not support multiple files/databases – all your project and customer information has to go into one pre-set database. So I didn’t like it overall :p

While ETT looked big, complicated and all-encompassing, Activity Time Tracker (ATT) went in the opposite direction 🙂 It’s compact, looks colourful and presented all the relevant information in one screen. But at the same time, it had client management and projects but not tasks. However, you could attach a description to each timing block and so link together multiple time blocks as one task. ATT did remember the currently selected project (and allowed you to switch projects via the tray menu) but starting/stopping the timer was cumbersome since you had to do it via the tray menu. There was no rate information at the customer level but you could enter different rates at the project level but it was all for the default system currency – you could not specify different currencies. ATT had some detailed reporting and a time sheet wizard to generate your time sheets for you but it too suffered from the same issue as ETT – there was only one single database and there was no way to change that.

AllNetic Working Time Tracker (AWTT) was probably my favourite out of the lot. Their website might not look very professional and be a little chaotic but the application was great and very simple 🙂 It provided support for individual project files (you could save as many as you wanted), projects and tasks within each project. There was no client management but since you could have multiple files, I assumed they were looking at somebody maintaining one file for each customer/client. There was a rudimentary billing system which kept track of whether specific tasks/projects had been settled or not and it keeps track of the currently selected project/task for timing purposes. However, AWTT has nary a sign of rates anywhere! You can’t specify rates and you certainly don’t see a sign of rates or currency in any of the various reports it can generate. What I did like about AWTT though was the fact that you could assign hotkeys to start/stop the timer and the nifty little hint window it popped up when you hovered over its icon in the system tray. Unlike normal tooltips which show only the app name or other little bits of information, AWTT actually pops up a tiny window where you could see all the project time totals for today, yesterday, the week and the month at the overall, project and task levels. You could also start and stop the timer from there as well. Overall, I loved the features and interface of AWTT but the fact that there was no option to enter rates (or currency) was a deal breaker.

Given that I didn’t like any of the programs I looked at, I decided to write my own. I had actually begun work on this app sometime ago and had called it Loafer. (If you notice most of the time tracking apps had really long names – I wanted something short and easy :p) I’d done about a day or two of work on Loafer and had then stopped but started again a couple of days ago. After several days of work, I have a usable app which allows multiple files (for separation of projects by client), projects, tasks, billing rates at both the project and task level and multiple currencies 🙂 I’ve integrated most of the features that I really wanted and I’m quite happy with it. It’s still a bit rough around the edges and I do need to do some more work on it and to add in reporting but once I get it all together, I believe it would be a pretty neat app. If anybody wants a copy of it for evaluation purposes, I can send you a time-limited version but I’m not sure I’m going to give this one away 🙂

Boosting Joost

Over at LinkedIn, where I’m a member, I heard about this new service called Joost. It was still in beta but the aim of the service was to provide television on demand, for free, to all users via the Internet. Sounded like a good idea to me and so I wanted to join in and see what the service was like.

Only thing is, Joost is in beta at the moment, as I mentioned, and you needed an invite from an existing member to get in. Fortunately, LinkedIn members were there to help 🙂 Mat Morrison from digital marketing strategists, RMM London had some invites available and was kind enough to send one my way when I asked over at his blog. (Incidentally, I’ve got invites now and if you want one, ask away – you might have to link back to me but I’ll give you an invite :))

The Joost download was not very big and the install went through fine. The video streaming is pretty good, even with the crappy broadband connection you get here in Sri Lanka. The playback is a bit choppy but since Joost appears to cache the program as it is being downloaded, you can simply let it play in the background at the standard choppy rate (if your Net connection is as bad as mine that is) and then play it back when it has a good chunk downloaded.

Actually, the caching goes beyond that. Let’s say you shut Joost down while you were in the middle of playing a show or a song. The next time you connect to Joost, it will continue on from where you left off and it appears to have the cache for the segment you already downloaded intact. I liked that because I can watch a long show without having to go through the download again 🙂

There’s some Indian content on Joost as well and so I’m getting my Hindi music fix :p They even have a couple of shows from the Sci-Fi channel (not available in the US or Canada via Joost though) but that’s where I ran into my first snag. I’m not sure if it’s a Joost issue, a Vista issue at my end or something else (like not enough disk space) but everytime I tried to cache one of the Sci-Fi channel shows, Joost would crash out half-way through. Hopefully, they get that kind of thing sorted out (if it’s a Joost issue) and I can enjoy my television to the max 🙂

Note: If you want a Joost invite, you will need to let me know both your first name and last name as well a valid e-mail address since Joost requires these things to send out an invite. (You don’t have to put the e-mail address in the comment – if you give your valid e-mail address when posting the comment, I’ll be able to get that even though it’s not displayed along with your comment.) If you don’t want to leave those details in a comment, please e-mail me directly 🙂

Due to the number of people asking for invites without providing the details requested above, please note that I’ll be ignoring any requests without all the necessary details.

Putting the zing back in sting …

Recently, I’ve been running across a supposedly new compression format over and over again. The format? WinZix or rather, .ZIX files. The name and the extension seems to indicate that they are trying to capitalize on WinZip’s popularity and market share. Their website claims that they have the "ultimate compression". The truth? Now that’s a bit more tricky :p

When I first heard about WinZix, being the software junkie that I am, I was tempted to download it and try it out. However, the name and the way it was branded made me hesitate. I decided to check it out first. There wasn’t much online about WinZix though. There were people claiming that it contained trojans and that it messed up their systems. There were others claiming that it didn’t compress any files at all and in fact, it increased the size of a file that was compressed with it. However, these were all claims made on the Net and you know how that goes :p

So, I downloaded a .ZIX file myself – not the program but a file supposedly compressed with WinZix. I then opened the file in a hex editor and noticed that it had a file header which identified it as a WinZix file. But what was more interesting was to see a ZIP file header a few bytes further in from the WinZix file header 🙂

Now, most files contain a file header (or a signature) which identifies the file type and allows the corresponding program to determine whether it’s a file format that the program works with. I knew the ZIP signature since I’d worked with ZIP files before. Being paranoid by nature, a thought flashed into my mind at this point – what if the WinZix folks weren’t actually compressing files but taking standard Zip files and wrapping it with a new header so that WinZip (or any other program working with Zip files) will not see it as a Zip file?

I decided to test out this theory. I deleted the first six or seven bytes from the WinZix file, removing the WinZix header but leaving the ZIP header/signature intact. I then tried to open the file in WinRAR (which supports ZIP format) and it opened up fine and I was able to extract the contents of the ZIP file.

So there you have it 🙂 WinZix is really a phoney. It doesn’t actually compress any files and certainly might have trojans or backdoor programs or viruses embedded in. Or it might simply be a way to cash in on people’s gullibility and make some cash since apparently they do say that they include adware in their EULA. Whatever else it might be, a compression program it is not :p

Worlds galore

Notwithstanding their popularity, I haven’t been much of a one for MMORPGing. About the only Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game that I’ve played consistently in the past has been Puzzle Pirates 🙂 While I loved the puzzles in Puzzle Pirates, the monotonous nature of having to play the same puzzles over and over again finally got to me and I gave up.

Since then, since most MMORPGs are fee-based (and because I just didn’t have the time to devote to them) I’ve stayed away from them. Stayed away that is, till a couple of days ago when I read about Second Life. I downloaded the client and tried it out but found it to be utterly boring – not to mention very, very slow :p If you want to have a virtual life pretty much the same as your normal life, Second Life is ideal – all you do is find a job, build a house, talk to people … that kind of thing – boring :p I uninstalled Second Life after the second time of trying it.

But, my appetite whetted for online games, I went in search of other games to try. That was when I came across Pirate King Online. I loved the colourful, cartoony graphics and since the game said that it was going to be free for ever, I decided to give it a try. Of course, the client turned out to be 300MB and it took me about a day (with the slow broadband we have over here :p) to download it. Once I downloaded the client and installed it, it found more updates on the server and started downloading those. Once that was done, I was finally able to get in and I must say, I really enjoyed what I found in there 🙂

It’s an interesting fantasy world full of creatures to fight, skills to unlock and lots and lots of quests. This is the kind of game that I actually like. One where there are set missions and you have things to do and ways to level up. Of course, if you want the usual virtual life stuff, I believe you can set up a stall and become a merchant or offer other services. But for the moment, I’m content to simply play the various missions and to level up 🙂

Shameless plugs

I meant to write about .NET 3.0, which has dropped by the wayside for the moment (for me personally) due to the fact that there is no really capable IDE to do development in and I’m too lazy to download the 4GB or so of files necessary to run the CTP of Orcas (the next version of Visual Studio) as a virtual machine 🙂 I also meant to write about Ruby and Rails, which I’m actually beginning to like as a development environment for doing web-based work because of how fast you can get off the ground.

I would also have liked to have written about Eclipse, which I’d taken a look at many times over the years as a possible Java IDE but had always given up because it didn’t appear to be ready – it seems to be ready now, or much closer 🙂 I particularly wanted to write about RadRails which integrates nicely into Eclipse and provides you with an amazing IDE to do Rails development in :p I might also have liked to have mentioned the fact that Eclipse also appears to have plugins for PHP and some of the other languages out there and is now on my list to be looked at as the development IDE of choice. But I haven’t actually tested out PHP or the other plugins :p

So, I think I will content myself with a simple blatant plug for something else totally not development related 🙂 There’s this link on the sidebar for another site of mine named, "Honest, the Martian Ate Your Dog". It’s the first iteration of this novel I’m working on and I’m putting up a few new pages every week. Some people seem to like it. So go on, take a look and let me know what you think 🙂

Railing at .NET

At around the same time I began developing an interest in the .NET 3.0 framework, my friend Nigel contacted me regarding a Ruby project that he was involved in named Hobo 🙂 I had looked at Ruby several times before (just as I had looked at Python and a few other languages of that ilk :p) but the fact of the matter is, I’m a desktop developer mainly. While I do enjoy coding for the sake of coding, what gets me going most of the time is to be able to develop a completely new UI that just rocks and to be able to tie in functionality to that UI that makes it not just a pretty face 🙂 I just can’t do that kind of thing with web apps. They are just too stable, too boring – at least for me 🙂 So I save the web apps for when I get paid to do work and I do most of my development work in my spare time for the desktop.

Now that’s not to say that I don’t do web apps development. On several occasions, I’ve developed web apps to fill a need that I had. But most of the time, my personal needs are more for desktop apps than for web apps. However, in the course of our discussions, Nige said something interesting – or at least, something that got me thinking and something which prompted this post 🙂 He said that "desktop apps were going the way of the Dodo". Of course, it’s possible that he was just being facetious but the remark struck me the same way Larry Ellison‘s championing of the thin client a long time ago (in computing terms that is) did 🙂

Just like desktops are not going away any time soon to be replaced by thin clients (or network computers), desktop apps are not going to be suddenly supplanted by web apps. There is a place under the sun for both. There are times when a server-based solution would work for you better than a desktop one and then there are other instances, that it would just be plain foolish to go for a web-based solution just because you thought web-apps were the greatest thing since sliced bread :p For instance, I know that a lot of people think highly of services like Writely (now renamed to Google Docs & Spreadsheets) because you can have your document online, share it with anybody and be able to access it from anywhere. Call me paranoid but I don’t like online services for document editing – at least not as my primary access point for said document. I’d rather have it on my own hard disk where I can take the damn computer to a technician if the thing breaks down, or I can simply login and copy the data even if my Internet access is down.

Of course, the flip side of the coin is that Google probably has better backups and better disaster recovery in place than I do 🙂 But on the other hand, Google might not be the best case to argue the scenario of web-apps vs. desktop apps. What about the roll-your-own type of web app? You deploy it on your webserver (hosted elsewhere) and put your data on it. Are you going to be completely sanguine in the belief that your data will be safe and accessible from anywhere, any time you want? I know I won’t be – but then again, as I said before, I’m probably more paranoid than others :p

In the end, I guess whether you go desktop or web-based, the decision will depend to an extent on personal choices and other factors. But I don’t believe either web-apps or desktop ones will die away anytime soon 🙂

Just desserts or just desert?

They say that a fool and his money are soon parted. But there sure do seem to be a heck of a lot of people who seem to be interested in expediting the process :p I’ve written before about literary scams and financial scams but the latest one I’ve come across is a recruitment scam 🙂

I’ve been looking into jobs in Dubai because we would possibly like to move there – my sister lives there, the place seems to have the latest techno-gadgets, better access to books and movies, so what’s not to like, eh? 🙂 Anyway, in the process of looking at recruitment agencies and possible places to submit my resume, I ran across JobsInDubai.com. I came across the site via web search (or because some other site listed them) and at first glance, it looked legit enough. So I used their online form to apply.

The next day I get an e-mail from them – my CV was a perfect match for a job they had listed! All I had to do was fork out $74 (it’s *only* $34 if you are in the US or Canada and free if you are in the Gulf BTW) as a refundable deposit and I would be on my way to my dream job. Now when somebody starts asking me for money (especially for something for which they should be getting payment already), alarms go off all over the place. You should be in my head – it’s kind of like a scene from "Mission Impossible" :p

So I did some digging and guess what? JobsInDubai.com are famous – and not in a good way. There are many posts about them online – like this one, or this one. Neither of those articles come out and say that JobsInDubai.com are scammers – they hint that perhaps they might have reformed. However, my experience plus what these articles say (and what I found online) leads me to believe that they have not reformed and are in fact, actively working on scamming people.

For one thing, there is an interesting tactic they employ at any blog or site which comments about JobsInDubai.com – you soon get somebody named Beanster (or some such name) and Nofel Izz (the owner/founder whatever of JobsInDubai) turning up to defend the company. Beans says he’s just a bystander – but seems to know a lot about JobsInDubai and their current location etc. Nofel will respond to the accusations but will never address any of the central issues such as why they charge money and how come they claim to operate in the UAE and Canada (and as far as I know, it’s against the law in both places for a recruitment agency to charge a prospective employee money) but are not abiding by the laws of the country.

Both these individuals claim that the negative comments about JobsInDubai.com are made by employees of other (non-fee charging) recruitment agencies in the Gulf. That this is just plain underhanded business tactics. Now I’m not affiliated with any of these other employment agencies. Heck, if I was affiliated with them, I wouldn’t have found out about JobsInDubai.com because I wouldn’t have been searching for Gulf jobs :p

The other thing I find interesting is that Nofel in his interview with "Windows" magazine states that under their new mode of operations, they don’t actively submit resumes to prospective employers. Instead, they simply enter your information into their database and prospective employers can pay them Canadain $195 for 500 resume views. But in their e-mail to me, they claim that my resume is a perfect match for a job they have available – implying (though not actually stating) that my resume would be submitted to this prospective employer. Smells a bit like the fish market? Yeah, I got that pong too :p

Updates about being inundated

I’ve been meaning to update the blog for a while now but what with a trip to Dubai (from November 8th to the 10th) where we went gadget hunting, the setting up of the said gadgets on our return, work, doing some web server stuff for some people I’m working with and so on, there hasn’t been much time for updates. Finally, I’ve found the time to put up an update and to also mention a few things that I wanted to mention before.

The first thing is that I’ve put up a new blog called "Honest, the Martian Ate Your Dog" 🙂 This is basically a serialization of my novel – the one I’ve talked about here before. As I’ve mentioned before, I plan to rewrite the novel almost totally. But there are some people who read this version and liked it very much. Since this version will probably never see the light of day in any other form, I decided to serialize it online weekly and see if anybody else likes it 🙂 If they do, then I’m happy. If they don’t, well, nothing lost.

The other thing of note probably is the fact that I have been dragged back into BlogShares :p A long time ago, I used to be really involved in BlogShares. Then I lost interest and I believe the site itself crashed/was down. Then it was revived again and I discovered that my old user ID no longer worked. So I signed up around the beginning of this year but didn’t really get into it at that time. I was reminded of BlogShares again by Simon, who made a passing reference to is somewhere or other online, and so went back and checked on my account. I was surprised to find that my stock had gone up a lot and so got back into the game in earnest 🙂 Of course, it became even more fun when Laurie decided to join in – but for a while, they tagged us as cheaters because we both came from the same IP and were doing a lot of connected deals :p

The IQ-drop factor – an anatomy of a scam

When money is involved, people seem to suddenly drop at least 50 IQ points. This is probably the reason that so many scammers still exist (and even flourish) amongst us. No, this is not about scamming agents this time but about real life scammers :p

In Sri Lanka at the moment, Seagull Softwares (yes, indeed, they called themselves "softwares" :p) is major news. This is because some guys from Seagull Softwares ran a Ponzi scam on a lot of people over here and absconded with a boatload of money. There are varying accounts as to how much actually was taken but one of the figures thrown around is 300 million rupees (which is about US$ 3 million) – not a bad haul.

The scam itself worked like this. These people say that they’ve got some sort of BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) venture and that you could earn money in your spare time by helping them do data entry. To get a job, you have to buy a slot at US$ 65 a year. Each slot is supposed to pay you back $40 a month if you did the assigned work. You can get as many slots as you want. The work? Apparently, you have to sign into their server and you get a job per slot. The job is basically a keyword (or a set of keywords) and you have to go online and find information relating to the given keywords, compile it all into an Excel spreadsheet and upload to their servers.

I first heard about this from a friend of mine. I was suspicious since I don’t like "jobs" where you have to pay to work. My friend told me that he knew somebody who was doing it and had already recovered their investment within two months. I still didn’t like it. Why would anybody pay you to find information via Google when they could do the same thing themselves? A few days later, my Mom told me that there were relatives in our family who were doing the same thing and earning a fair amount of money because they’d bought 10 slots. There was apparently another relative who’d bought a 100 slots (or some such large number) and was employing other people to do the work for him. He was paying them about $250 per month (on 10 slots I believe) and keeping the other $150 for himself. So again, good business and apparently paying well.

My Mom was like, "why don’t you do this too?" I said that nothing which sounded easy ever was. Her response was the motherly equivalent of a raspberry :p She wanted to know how come there are so many people making money if it was a scam. I had no response. I went online and checked and there were just two entries that I could find which talked about these people and even there, they were asking for more information rather than enlightenment. The website (for there was a website at that time) was rather crudely done and was registered by some guy in India. I decided that I wanted nothing with them.

Last week, the news broke. Apparently the police were investigating an Internet-based scam operation which sounded a lot like Seagull Softwares. But no name was given and no details. Yesterday the papers were full of it. I went online and suddenly there are lots of sites, all talking about how they were defrauded or how their relatives were defrauded and how they’ve lost everything.

I feel for these people. Some of them are retired pensioners who used their savings in the hope of making more money. Others are schoolkids who begged or borrowed the money. There are people who’ve invested millions hoping to run sub-contracting businesses. I feel sorry for them but I just can’t help wondering, what is it about the human race which makes you lose sight of everything when some money is waved in front of your face? They say that a crocodile’s eyes close when it opens its mouth (this is part of some folk-tale – not sure about the accuracy of the statement :p) – people seem to be like that. People’s eyes close when their mouths open wide in greed.

After the whole Seagull Softwares debacle, there seem to be new scams and new twist rising out of the ashes. There is a mysterious organization which says that it is trying to gather information about the victims of the scam and wants all their personal details but nobody seems to know who they are. They seem to be very insistent that people send them information on the sites where the scam is discussed. There’s also talk of all the scammed people getting together to have a meeting in front of the Seagull offices today. Others have all sorts of weird theories as to why (and who) perpetrated the scam.

Sure there is a lot of brouhaha. But unfortunately, I have a feeling that a week from now, this will be forgotten and the same people who fell for this one will be lining up for the next great thing. Such is the nature of humanity.

The return of scummy scammers

There are some people who would do anything to part you from your money. They would even go so far as to warn you about other people who might try to mislead you about the first bunch of people :p It’s kind of interesting to watch as an exercise in misdirection. However, it is also alarming when you consider the fact that those not of a suspicious bent (or of a more gullible persuasion) could actually fall victim to these lying, cheating scum.

Who am I talking about? Scammer agents, of course 🙂 First, there was the Top 20 worst agents list. Then there was Barbara Bauer kicking up a ruckus about AbsoluteWrite.com and getting the plug pulled on them back in May. Now it looks as if the scammers are taking a different tack – they are banding together to bilk more gullibles of their money and at the same time, appear legitimate by creating their own association of agents. This new association, named the International Independent Literary Agents Association appears to be unable to count, let alone represent anyone. They have a Top Ten literary agent list which has only nine agencies listed :p And guess who heads the list? The self-same Ms. Barbara Bauer Ph. D. who was the star in the AbsoluteWrite drama and who also appears prominently in the Top 20 worst agents list.

Of course, the IILAA has lots of stuff to say in their defence 🙂 According to them, there are a lot of hate sites out there that are intent on besmirching the names of agents. (Of course, their message would be more accessible to most people if they took out that annoying background and the text which melds into the background – but then again, they’re professionals, so what do I know? :p) Basically, the people who investigate agents and ferret out the scammers are doing so because they have an ulterior motive. They apparently have an agenda. Of course, the IILAA never states what this agenda might be. They certainly do know how to get people’s paranoia working. Maybe they should work in political propaganda rather than spending 20-30 years on being agents and not selling a single book?

Yes, they do have a Coming Soon page where they say they’ll list the "newest sales by their members" – I’m really waiting on that one, good fiction is hard to find these days :p