CustomerCentrix

Opportunity for killer app?

As I was reading the September issue of Business 2.0, I noticed The $50 Million Giveaway article. In particular, the $3M - Social Networks Meet The Town Crier. When I have looked at Craigslist to which this idea was compared, I thought like many others that it was simple but functional. Not much fancy UI or features, just a nice idea that took off.

This idea could be implemented without a huge investment of time and possibly short circuited with the use of some open-source software. As we might expect, this was noticed by lots of others in blogs and articles on the 'net, including by a drupal developer. Drupal is the software that we are using for this site and others and seems like it might be a good fit for this project. The comment by the drupal developer is certainly overstated, that it would cost $1 and have the rest left over, but there is definitely some good stuff to start with.

Looks like there is a good bit more program information available than I saw with Yahoo. They also have a newbee service called Jumpstart. This was $299 and not promoted as well as the Yahoo service which cost less, so we skipped it. Both Yahoo and Google have voice over demos that you can watch to get an introduction.

On to the sign up process. This is interesting; I am a little surprised that I need to actually create my ad as the second step after selecting the target country and language. I am sure that I can change it later, so here is the first try without much thought:

Online Training

Our first step into advertising, this will be an attempt to both learn more about how to do this correctly and also to spur some LearnCentrix hosting sales. This was previously called Overture and includes ads in MSN, AltaVista, CNN, InfoSpace (and maybe others?) as well as Yahoo.

Although generally a do-it-myselfer, I decided to try the Fast Track for some of the additional features that are included. The sign up process for this puts you into a series of pages to fill out about your products or services. I chose an initial budget of $100-250 and keywords:

online learning
elearning

A very common way for programmers to build new software is to copy code that is similar to what is needed and then modify it to suit the immediate need. This works regardless of the level of experience or programming language. For significant pieces of code, copying is discouraged in favor of using language features (object oriented or procedural) for sharing code. But, when you just need a few lines that show you how to do a loop or whatever that you haven't done in a while, it often saves time to find a very similar loop that you or someone else coded last month or last year.

So, what could possibly be wrong with this? Well, the current example is a set of paging controls in a web application. Paging controls are those little arrows (and text) at the top of a table that has possibly more data than is reasonable to show to the user at one time. You use the controls to move from one "page" of data to another by clicking on previous, next, last, first and changing the number of rows that you want to see at one time.

Occasionally, I come across an article that really strikes me as a new concept. Although as I suspected, it is not really new, using a nested model was new to me as described in this article.

I didn't know what it was called, but I have been using the "Adjacency List Model" for tree structures in SQL for decades. The tradeoffs that I see are that the nested model seems easier for the basic queries, but much more expensive for inserts and deletes because every other node must be adjusted.

Good reading alon

can be found here.

I haven't spent a lot of time on designing CSS. But as one who generally picks up very quickly on computer and programming related topics, this is a difficult topic and one that Kevin has done a nice job with.

Why does building software take a long time and cost a lot? Sometimes a programming task works like this:

1. Programmer has a task to complete such as adding a fairly small feature to a web page. Task is estimated at 4 hours.

2. Although they haven't been revised in a while, unit tests are available for this page, so a good starting point is to look at the existing tests and determine what needs to be added or changed to test the new feature. (1 hour)

3. The unit tests that were previously created did not test the existing page, so new ones are created. (1 hour)

4. The new unit tests do not function as expected because the test data does not work. Thinking that perhaps the newer version of the library that builds the test data might fix the issue, programmer upgrades the library. (1.5 hours)

I decided to spend a little time today seeing if I could fix the queries described in one of my previous posts. The error affects Contacts, Accounts, Bug Tracker and Projects when an item is opened. The item displays and would normally show the related items below it, but instead shows an ugly SQL error like this one:

Error running count query for Project List: Query Failed:( SELECT count(*) FROM project_task where ( project_task.parent_id= 'c953abd5-f20c-c84f-7e2d-430101ed6ec9' AND project_task.deleted=0) AND project_task.deleted=0 )::MySQL error 1064: You have an error in your SQL syntax near '( SELECT count(*) FROM project_task where ( project_task.parent_id= 'c953abd5-f' at line 1

Google page rank moved from 3 to 4 within approximately 1 week of changing this site to Drupal site and adding a few blogging posts. Pretty cool! That gets me a little more excited about redesigning and promoting learncentrix. Other current page ranks for our sites:

www.learncentrix.com has PR 3
joyinjes.us has PR 0
michiganshirts.com has PR 0
michiganstateshirts.com has PR 0
abqcampbells.com has PR 0

I wasn't planning to spend any time with SugarCRM today, except that a couple of tasks came to mind that I thought I would save for later (on something other than a sticky note). Navigating from the Sugar home page to a Project Tasks gave me this error:

Error running count query for ProjectTask List: Query Failed:( SELECT count(*) FROM meetings where ( meetings.parent_id= '4e3532e4-9710-cfcc-9993-430122451097' AND meetings.parent_type='ProjectTask' AND meetings.deleted=0 AND (meetings.status='Planned')) AND meetings.deleted=0 ) UNION ALL ( SELECT count(*) FROM calls where ( calls.parent_id= '4e3532e4-9710-cfcc-9993-430122451097' AND calls.parent_type='ProjectTask' AND calls.deleted=0 AND (calls.status='Planned')) AND calls.deleted=0 )::MySQL error 1064: You have an error in your SQL syntax near '( SELECT count(*) FROM meetings where ( meetings.parent_id= '4e3532e4-9710-cfcc' at line 1