TRINIX

Are you looking for a fully MS Project alternative, please don’t search any longer.

OpenProj :: http://openproj.org/openproj

This tool has all the functionality like MS Project with a big diference namely that this is open source software.

I tested the tool through and believe me that this is a keeper.

Description of the website says it all.

“The OpenProj solution is ideal for desktop project management
and is available on Linux, Unix, Mac or Windows. OpenProj is a complete
desktop replacement of Microsoft Project and even opens existing native
Project files. OpenProj shares the most advanced scheduling engine in
the industry with Project-ON-Demand. The OpenProj solution has Gantt
Charts, Network Diagrams (PERT Charts), WBS and RBS charts, Earned
Value costing and more. “

So if you need an excellent alternative for MS Project just download OpenProj and you will be delighted.

The tool is used by all the big Linux CEO’s so that’s a good indication about the quality of OpenProj.

I was in serious need off a way to manage my tasks and agenda.

I found a really nice solution by using the following free tools:

• Rainlendar :: http://www.rainlendar.net/
• Google Calendar :: http://calendar.google.com
• Gcal Daemon :: http://gcaldaemon.sourceforge.net/

I started using Rainlendar (http://www.rainlendar.net/).It’s a desktop calendar that behaves like a small widget on your desktop. And it looks not only really nice, it also is really good software for managing events and todo’s. I even bought the PRO license because it provides the functionality to automatically read my outlook agenda and make them visible in Rainlendar. So no double importing.

Because I have a work laptop and a personal PC, I needed something to sync all my events online so that’s easy to manage. I noticed that Rainlendar supports google Calendar, so that was the way to go. And through google Calendar it’s possible to seperate my personal and work calendar because we can make as many calendars as we wont. And google calendar provides the possibility to share your calendar. So I had my desktop calender and I had an online calendar all in sync. But I noticed really quick that Rainlendar only allowed read access to google Calendar. So I needed a 2-way sync solution between Google Calendar and Rainlendar.

After some playing around I ended up with GCal Daemon (http://gcaldaemon.sourceforge.net/). This is an open source service which provides multiple functionality. GCALDaemon is primarily designed as a calendar synchronizer but it can also be used as a
Gmail notifier, Address Book importer, Gmail terminal and RSS feed converter. This tool runs like a service which every XX minutes syncs in a 2-way manner a specific online gcalendar to an iCal format (ICS file). The only thing I next needed to do was just set my Rainlendar to use the created ICS files and my desktop and online calendars were completely in sync. I can create an event online that will appear on my desktop and vice versa. PERFECT!!!

The only things i’m currently missing is:

• a tool to make my Outlook agenda sync with google Calendar
• a symilar manner to sync my Rainlendar todo’s with an online tool like Remember The Milk or if only google Calendar would provide an online todo functionality.

If anybody has found a way to sync his Rainlendar todo or export his Outlook Agendo to an RSS or iCal format, please let me know.

UPDATE: I found a really good Outlook <–> Google Calendar tool. SyncMyCal adds a toolbar to your Outlook which helps you perform one-click synchronization between your Outlook and Google Calendar calendaring system. You can choose which calendars you want to synchronize and if you want to perform one way or two way update.

SynMyCal :: http://syncmycal.com/outlook_google_calendar_sync.htm

It comes in 2 version:

• SyncMyCal Lite: the free version , it has no automatic sync so you have to push the button on regeluar times
• SyncMyCal Pro: which has all the functionality available

This year I wanted to do something special for New Year. First I wanted to go to start the New Year in New York but do to my lateness of my decision all the nice hotels were booked allready so I had to look for a nice alternative.

I ended up with Paris (the city of light and love).

My plan was to go by car and stay max 24 hours without sleeping, just party. I googled some information and the told me that Paris was a really great place to celebrate the new year, especially on the Champs Elysee.

This is how it went down.

31 Dec Departure

Did my research on affordable parking space and what the nice clubs were to party.

Got up at 13:00, made breakfast, took a shower, got dressed. At 14:30 I Took my bottle of champagne and papers with my info and just got into my car.My tomtom estimated a 4 hour drive.

31 Dec Arrival Paris

After a 4 hour drive and with the necesairry traffic troubles in Paris self. I parked my car in the parking below the Vendome at 19:00.

The vendome was in walking distance of the Champs Elysee. The vendome is also a really nice neightbourhoud with all kinds of expensive boutiques. So I was sure that nothing would happen with my car. I started walking the direction of the Champs Elysee looking for some dinner. I passed a Starbucks, so I grabbed myself a nice coffee and went on. I didn’t really find something for dinner so I decided to grab a sandwich at the Champs Elysee. I arrived at the Champs Elysee at 20:00. There was already a lot of people present and you noticed that there was a special atmosphere. A lot of tourists with bottles champagnes and other kind of alcohol.

I grabbed myself a nice looking sandwich and with some time to kill I went to the “magical” tour eifel to see what was happening there. I arrived there and there was a lot of ambiance and again a lot of people. The squares in front of the eifel tour were full with peoples of all nationalities. The atmosphere was almost magical.

31 Dec?Paris Counting Down

It was almost midnight so I decided to go back to celebrate the new year on the Champs Elysee, because of the good reviews I read on the internet. When I went back I noticed a lot of police present. On every street there were like 5 vans with police. I arrived on the Champs Elysee at 23:45. The Champs Elysee was locked down and the street was one gigantic?moving mass?of people and with the lightning decoration it felt like that there would happen something magical. Everybody was getting more and more exited as time passed. At 23:55 people were all looking the direction the Arc the triomf. People were all preparing for a big party.

New Year Paris

Then it was finally time, the clock indicated 00:00 and it was a?new year. It was 2008. I stoud there ready with my bottle of champagne. But there was nobody who started counting down, no fireworks, no people kissing, no people opening champagne. We were all looking around awaiting for the banging of the fireworks. BUT NOTHING HAPPENED!!!!

It was already 00:10 and couple of people started kissing and 3-4 people opened a bottle of champagne but the majority of the crowd was still awaiting something, but nothing came. Then at 00:15 a group of people began fighthing. Then everybody just started to go away. So far for the big and special new year at Paris…

Disappointed from the anti-climax, I decided to go to the tour Eifel to see if there was a something going on. I followed the mass in the direction of the tour Eifel. I arrived at 00:45 and the people there were crazy. I walked around enjoying the atmospere. Around 2:00 I stoud at one of the feet of the tour eifel and I saw a large crowd moving to the middle of the square below the tour eifel and then quickly seperating. I tried to look what was going on and I saw that the police (in fool combar armor) was charging to the people in the middle. The people started to throwing bottles in the direction of the police. It felt like there was a war going on between the youngsters and the cops. I noticed also that everybody was really drunk and the people were getting more and more aggresive. Again disappointed of these events, I would find my club and start partying. The club was located at the Champs Elysee.

I arrived there 3:00, there were still a lot of people there and also a lot of garbage. The ambiance was totally gone when people start lighting the garbage on fire. Totally dispointed of all the events, I said to myself, enough is enough. This was everything except celebrating the New Year. I got in my car around 4:00 and just went home.

So far for my new year @ Paris. It was one of my biggest disappointments to start 2008 with and the biggest anti-climax ever.

On the other side it couldn’t get any worse so the rest of the year can only be better

I heard from a girl friend that at midnight there was fireworks at the tour eifel and that there was the place to be.

So my advice never celebrate at the champs Elysee.

My appologies for having not posted anything new for a really long time.

I was busy with my new job as Product Manager and that took a lot of (free)time.

But for 2008 I will try to find some more time to post.

Today I installed a tool “Companion JS”, which is a javascript / HMTL tool that is based on Firebug for Firefox with the main difference that it works in IE.

This tool is absolutely a “must-have” for all the webdesign IE users.

You all know the yellow alert sign when a javascript error occurs in IE.

When you double click it, you will get an window telling you what whent wrong and where the error is located.

But the default error handlers is totally wrong and incorrect.

This is why the Companion JS is so easy.

It provides much more detailed Javascript debugging details and it works perfect with IE.

It gives you the correct error on the right line and you can even click the error to go to the code view of the code.

You can find all info here: http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/CompanionJS/HomePage

Today I found this website on del.icio.us containing a list of websites that offers royalty free icons.

http://www.simplewebsurf.com/royaltyfreeicons.htm

“MemCached” is a
high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature,
but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating
database load.

In this howto I explain how you can very simply install it and make it aviable in PHP.�

You need to activate the RPMForge custom
repository (formely known as Dag Wieers): http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/rpmforge-release/

Grab your specific RPM and install it:

wgethttp://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-*.rpm

rpm –install rpmforge-release-*.rpm

yum install –enablerepo=rpmforge memcached

Now memcached is installed.

You can test it

memcached -m 512 -u nobody -vv

First, you start up the memcached daemon on
as many spare machines as you have. The daemon has no configuration file, just
a few command line options, only 3 or 4 of which you’ll likely use:

./memcached -d -m 2048 -l 10.0.0.40 -p 11211 -u nobody

This starts memcached up as a daemon, using 2GB of memory, and listening
on IP 10.0.0.40, port 11211. The -m switch specifies the amount of memory in megabytes. The -l switch specifies the IP to listen on and finally the -p switch specifies the port to listen on. The default port is 11211 and if your machine has just 1 IP you can omit the -l parameter. In the above example I set the amount of memory to 2GB. Of course you should use a sensible amount of memory. Making your machine swap to disk sort of defeats the purpose of a memory cache daemon. Note that it’s perfectly fine to run the memcached daemon on another machine than the one you’re running your actual PHP project on. You could even set up a machine totally dedicated to being a memory cache server. And if that’s not even enough you can set up muliple servers as well. The sky is the limit. Note: if you try to start the memcached as root it will require you to specify a user under which it should run with an additional -u nobody

Installation of the PHP MemCache extension�

cd /files/download/

wget http://pecl.php.net/get/memcache-2.1.2.tgz

tar -xvf memcache-2.1.2.tgz

cd memcache-2.1.2

phpize
&& ./configure –enable-memcache && make

Copy the memcache.so to the default module
directory.

vi /etc/php.ini

add

extension=memcache.so

/etc/init.d/httpd restart

�

If you check you phpinfo() you should a memcache section appear.

You can now fully use the Memcache functionality in your PHP.

References

http://www.danga.com/memcached/

http://dk.php.net/manual/en/ref.memcache.php

�

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Today I found this nice article to become a better web designer.

They are summed up in 50 key items.

If you are a web designer you should read this:

http://www.gosquared.com/liquidicity/archives/114

As a fan of open source, I can only agree what Vibhash (http://tech-tonic.net) is saying.

He made up a list of open source tools that replace expensive software tools.

The list is really rock solid:

http://tech-tonic.net/microsoft/25-essential-open-source-software-for-windows.html

So if you work on a Windows OS, you should consider using this software instead of buying all the expensive tools.

Some more icon news

You can download a whole range of Apple icons right from the apple website completely free!!!



http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/icons_screensavers/