Scattered Mind

Today, with the large amount of open source BPM tool out there, it is quite hard to select the right one for one’s environment.  Yes, you can get out a consultancy company out to make the decision for you, but I strongly believe in evaluating the products one selve if the resources and time is available, as the people inside your company knows what it wants and know what type of things it can handle.

Here are a couple of open source solutions you can start your investigation with.

1. Intalio ( http://www.intalio.com/ )

Probably the most supported and the one with the most testimonials behind it. Other advantages is the fact that there is a company behind it that can support it(at a fee of course). Other really cool tools and applications in their suites.

2. Active EndPoints ( http://www.activevos.com/learn/open-source )

I found this one, but have never really heard about the performance and the background behind it, first impressions though reading through their website indicates that they definitely have a winning product here.

3. ProcessMaker ( http://www.processmaker.com/ )

Very promising tool, with vendors like Toyota and Lenovo also using their technology, definitely something to not look at.

4. uEngine ( http://www.uengine.org/web/uengineen/test )

Has been registered on Sourceforge in 2003 and has since then just grown, think it might be too much Java focused at some points though.

5. Joget ( http://www.joget.org/ )

Best for last, Joget, simple and quick to use, think this might become a nice lightweight contender in the future.

So this is my list, please comment below if you have any other exciting BPM tools that you’ve run into that might be worth mentioning.

Back in 2009, Plaxo decided to stop their FREE offering, whereby you could sync your address book between your mail client and the Plaxo platform.

Since then they started hogging their online platform with all kinds of 3rd party applications similar to Facebook Apps, and they started leveraging and doing a lot of social stream on their platform.

Recently, Plaxo announced that they will be relaunching their platform, and will be refocusing themselves back to their core business, which is managing user address books and take them back to where they came from.

I see this as a great move, for them to focus on their niche, instead of trying to build a whole social website.

I think though they still can leverage from other social networks, with regards to getting latest contact information etc from the other sosical streams but they must not overdo social interaction within the Plaxo site, again – just keep to their focus niche.

I’m backing Plaxo on this one, maybe I’ll consider buying their paid-for products …

On one beautiful morning as I woke up, for some strange reason my “Entertainment” share on our Freenas home server was …. missing !!

After plugging in a monitor onto the machine and rebooting I found that the BIOS was not picking up the hard drive anymore.  Well, I thought this was the end of the drive, but it was peculiar that the drive was still spinning.

So, I contacted Piotr Kula, who is living in the UK now(was in South Africa for some time), and an old friend when he was here.

He told me that it might be that the firmware might have gone corrupted on the drive, and that it is actually still salvageable. He said that I will need to get a device to convert serial to ttl.

Great news for me, as our photos from the last 10 years was on the drive, and for some strange reason I have not done the “backup” thing.

I set off to find more information about this issue, and immediate came upon hundreds of articles with the same diagnostics I have found. Most of the drives could not be detected by the BIOS although the drive was still spinning, and most of all, it was certain models of Seagate.

Found this very cool video which actually explains the process very cool – (not embeddable 🙁  ) – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29FztWJVxbM

One thing that was a problem was getting the serial to ttl, or a direct usb-to-serial-to-ttl device.

After looking at various places, I found the ideal device at RS-Component in Kyalami, Gauteng.  The deivce is a USB->TTL converter, and very neatly done, with output pins for the Tx and Rx of the serial interface for a measly R106 (cheapest quote I got for data recovery was R4500!!!).

After reading a couple of guides and the YouTube videos, I managed to get my 500 GB drive and data back, what a relieve.  I still have to upgrade the firmware to the latest version still.

I found this “Wild West of IT” quite amusing and would like to do some other hard core tricks in the future, and have asked friends to bring me drives they thought were broken to see if I can learn myself even more about this unknown area of computer hardware.

Guide:

• The Solution for Seagate 7200.11 HDD on msfn.org

Today is a public holiday in South Africa called “Reconciliation Day“, which means a whole day of doing almost nothing.

Reconciliation Day is a public holiday in South Africa held annually on 16 December.  The intention is to foster reconciliation and national unity.  The holiday came into effect in 1994 after the end of Apartheid.

Before 1994, when the South African government changed the holiday to reconciliation day it was called “Day of the Vow” which was not an Apartheid holiday but an Afrikaans religious holiday.

In 1838, the Afrikaans Trekker commando bound future descendants to a vow to God to commemorate the day as a religious holiday, taking the day as a sabbath day and remembering this day where the Trekkers won the battle against the Zulus at Blood River.

In my family we still take the 16th as a sabbath but also believe in the morals and believes in the Reconsiliation Day that was brought to the forelight, but we won’t forget the past.

Source : Day of the Vow

Source : Day of Reconciliation

Here is an awesome site with a 360 degree view of the Voortrekker Monument.

Voortrekker Monument

360 degrees view of the Voortrekker Monument

Starting off with a single match stick and trading it for something of a little more value. This is the latest venture a few adventurous net entrepreneurs are taking on.

Telena Simpson, from www.onematchstick.co.za is the local South African trying to end up with office space for her business.  She started in June 2006 and already is currently on 375 T shirts to trade.  That is quite amazing, going from something worth almost a cent to something for thousand times the value in 3 years.

Apparently Telena was inspired by another similar project, called OneRedPaperClip, where Kyle MacDonald traded his red paperclip for a house in a couple of years – wow!
Kyle also wrote a book called One Red Paper Clip, which is availalbe at Kalahari as well where he covers all his trades up to where he gets his house, and now he is trading his house.

Truely amazing online endeavours taken on by these people, what do you guys think about this ?

I’ve been playing Battefield 2 online since beginning of this year, sometimes burning a few hundred megs of my cap each evening, running on SAIX Gaming Servers. Even on my 384 kb line through Cybersmart, I get decent pings like 60/70ms.

WebAfrica has announced that they will be launching their own free gaming service, which offers it’s ADSL clients to the “FreeZone” to game online.  This service will not affect ADSL clients of WebAfrica‘s monthly cap, thus saving dedicated gamers a lot of bandwidth a month to spend on other internet activity.

I think the fact that if your a client of WebAfrica and get the ‘bandwidth’ free to play online, is a great marketing weapon, which could help them launch with a large user base when they launch on the 10th of December.

Great new addition to GMail.
When working offline with the great technology Gears.

When working offline, usually you can’t add attachments whilst offline, but now you can, simply add the attachment as usual whilst offline, and it will add the attachment to your mail and when you connect again, it will send out your email with the attached document.

Unfortunately this does not work for inline images thought, but I reckon they will come up with a genius way around that soon.

This can become very useful, especially with the cellphone networks in South Africa dropping me frequently when on the road. With this feature, all mails go through the ‘Offline Outbox’ and send send the email and this will also result in messages not vanishing due to connection issues.

source

Virgin is launching there new airline route from South Africa to Australia, called VAustralia.

Yesterday I booked myself tickets on their maiden flight between Johannesburg and Auckland, with a stopover in Melbourne.
(I still don’t get the “FREE” stopover idea yet)

If anybody is planning on flying over, I’ll recommend you have a look at the flight costs for the launch of this new route which is on the 13th of March 2010. I bought tickets for 2 adults and 1 infant Economy for around R19000 return. Compared to some of the other airline costs this is quite low.

Our first concern flying with this new airline was the fact that it is a new route and would they be reliable. We were reassured by the call centre lady as it is falling under Richard Branson’s Virgin brand it would be top notch.
And they are using the reliable and standardised Boeing 777-300ER.

Look at this, a Boeing 777-300ER being put together very quickly 😉