It is a very interesting market out there. Consumers have the choice between the some huge heavyweights, such has the Apple Iphone, Blackberry Bold,Blackberry Storm, and for the enthusiasts of Palm the Palm Treo. For those people looking for something different, AT&T has the Fuse (HTC Touch Pro), T-Mobile has the G1 made by HTC. And I am sure there are plenty of others that could be categorized in this smartphone market.

I currently have an aging Palm Treo 680, yes I am a Palm advocate. I think they create a great product, or should I say, used to. The Palm hardware and software is becoming outdated quickly, missing the higher res screens, better interfaces and better connectivity found on all modern smartphones. To qualify a modern smartphone, at least for power users, it must have 3G or other high speed network, WiFi, lots of memory, a keyboard (either virtual or physical) and most of the modern ones are also including GPS. My Treo doesn't have 3g, it doesn't have wifi, it doesn't have GPS, but hey, it does have a physical keyboard, and enough memory to store the apps you need.

I am wanting a new phone badly, but can't find one that fits my needs / wants. I don't want the Windows Mobile OS, which really blocks out a lot of the smartphones being developed now days. I would prefer a physical keyboard, but I might be able to get by with an iPhone like keyboard. And I want to be able to control the apps on my phone, not be dictated to which apps I can use on my phone. As you can see this crosses the iPhone off, Blackberries aren't as bad on the app side, but I really dislike the idea of using the BIS for my personal e-mail, especially since it is really just a one-way sync. The Android looks cool, but I really questions how good it is going to be. Don't get me wrong, I really like Google, and they come out with some great ideas, but their products seem rushed and never polished. They just don't seem stable enough. And then you got Palm, using the same OS base for 1901 it seems. Their interface hasn't changed much, but it really hasn't had a need to. But the bad thing is, the underlying components to their OS hasn't changed either, which is killing it, a slow painful death. They have known for years that high speed internet was coming to phones, but yet their OS can't handle 3g or wifi ... WHY Not, this isn't new technology. It is sad, They've been producing the Treo's now for almost 5 years, but not a single change to the OS in that time, okay, maybe small changes, but nothing significant. Microsoft has released two new OSes in that time WM 5 and WM 6. Palm in that time has sold their software side, bought it back, rumors of working with Access to create a Linux based OS was out there, and now we sit here , the fourth quarter of 2008 with nothing.

And now I sit here, with my Treo 680, which needs to be rebooted about once a week, and I have to reboot the reboot each time because it doesn't boot up properly on the first boot up. It freezes on my in the middle of conversations. If I have a call come in while on the other line, and hang up with the original caller to answer the new call, I can't. It doesn't respond until the caller has been sent to voicemail. It is crazy how many bugs are in the OS.

So what am I do, I need a phone. I am on the AT&T network and really don't want to switch. The Bold looks cool, and it could work, but I don't want to pay for a BES connection to get my IMAP mail working. The iPhone could work, but I have Apple telling me what I can and shouldn't load on the phone that I bought. (Why people put up with this, I have no idea, if Microsoft only let you load programs they approved on your desktop .. would you like that). Palm's OS sucks, Windows Mobile sucks. Symbian's are okay, but their aren't any cool phones out there .. It looks like I am stuck with my Treo 680 for a while. Maybe the iPhone 3 will change things. Maybe by the time AT&T adopts the Android it will be proven as reliable and viable option. Maybe Palm can fix their OS and even better, have it be Linux based.

The final day is almost upon us. Stacey and I are about to close on our First house. We are both so excited. Closing was originally set up for the 31 Oct, but because of some weird issues with our interest rate, we are having to close on the 30th. Not too big of a deal, just a bit of a hassle. But that means on Thursday evening, we are going to be new home owners.

I will have to work on getting pictures up, which means I need to start looking into photo galleries, but that will came later in time. Right now we have to finish packing for the movers coming out 7 Nov, I can't wait!

Just found a a contest site with a chance to win $1000 cash. They are calling it Project No Name. The site says that two companies are coming together and are wanting a new name. So they are holding a contest, and if they select your name, you win .. that simple.

It's pretty cool to see companies using the internet for things like this. I had to Dig it http://digg.com/design/Project_No_Name_Wants_You !

I've started to use Redmine a bit in my personal business to help manage the few projects that go through my doors. A buddy, Brian Wigginton, turned me on to it. We have spent several nights looking for a good app that can manage, tasks, issue and project workflow from beginning to completion. After trying out several different ones ( i.e. OPProject, Trac, Achievo, and even dokuwiki ) based on multiple technologies ( i.e. java, python, php, and ruby). We ended up with Redmine, which is based on Ruby on Rails. The install wasn't too bad (we spent most of the time working with phusion passenger, which being a fan boy of mod_fcgid, I highly recommend.) The database design seems pretty straight forward and it has all the features we were looking for.

OnePoint Project (OPProject) was an amazing it. It was java based and we deployed it over a tomcat-6 server. For a strict project management app, I think this one wins hands down. The interface is clean and sharp. Even know little about Project Management, I was able to find my way around the system and get some basic things set up. It manages resources and time. And again, the Gnatt charts were very easy on the eyes.

Trac is more of a software management portal. It is based on python, and I deployed it in the past using mod_python (before I knew about mod_fcgid). It is a very strong app for managing software development. It has a strong integration between the repository, bug tickets, and a wiki. It was missing a few of the project managemenent aspects we were looking for, but it works great for basic management of software development.

Achievo describes itself as a flexible web-based resource management tool for business environments. And I would have to agree with that. It doesn't tie into a software repository like Trac does, but it does provide more project management tools such as gnatt charts. One piece I did like, was it's ability to add clients, and manage projects and task for assigned to those clients. If we were looking for a general business or department management tool, this peice of software would of probably won out.

DokuWiki is just a wiki, with the ability to add plugins. We started using it in the interum as we were trying to find a software package for us to use. You could use this as a basic project management for a group of people, especially a decentralized group. Collabrating on pages for ideas, managing picture, and providing revisions is essentional. There wasn't any strong project management tools, but getting going, it was extremely usefull. I love the fact that it doesn't use a database for it's wiki pages and revisions, but instead plain text. This has always been my love of dokuwiki, and will always make it my first choice for small to medium sized wiki's.

Redmine is really a plethora of applications rolled into one. It provides Repository integeration, bug ticketing, wiki, forums, customer management (via plugin), and project management tools. We are able to track our time for each project, and with a plugin, see a resources time across all projects. We have a wiki, document section, and file upload for each project. Wiki pages can cross link to other projects, and any one section can refernce another. I.E. a wiki page can reference both a ticket number and a repo revision. We are also able to provide some basic project planning through gnatt charts as some of our customers request. Security is strong, and development still seems very active.

We've been happy with our initial testing of Redmine, and look forward to really running it thorugh it paces on our next project. I've also started installing Redmine at my office as management is now starting to ask for project schedules on some of my long term projects .. woohoo :/. With our personal install, we were able to get LDAP Authentication working with our Zimbra server. At my office, I am trying to get it working with Active Directory. It seems to be working, but is failing on the search. Debugging Ruby is something I am new at .. which is a topic for another post another day!

The trip is over, and I am already back to the dail grind. It was a nice relaxing vacation. I wasn't ready to come back, but I don't think my wallet could handle another few days down there between the swim up bar and the casino at night.

Seems a lot has gone on in the OSS world, I am trying to catch up on everything. New drivers, new software, new blog post ... oh my.

Tomorrow morning, less then 10 hours from this moment, I will be on a plane to the Bahamas. My wife and I will be there with her family for 5 days. I can't wait!

I don't know where last week went. I had about 10 things to write about, but nothing come of them. I've got to get better about at least jotting down my thoughts throughout the day, as I can't remember anything right now.

I've looked at a few software packages. Played with a few other programs, nothing huge. I went to a FWLUG (Fort Worth Linux User Group) meeting on Saturday, It was my first meeting, and a good one, the presenter talked about building your own Live CD. During the presentation there were some down times, and during those time I fixed my AIGLX / GLX issues. Not only did I need the git versions of mesa, drm and ati drivers, I also needed the git version of xserver. Everything works like a charm now. I am back on Compiz-Fusion. I was on Openbox (can't stand metacity) and I was happy, Openbox with xcompmgr maeks a very nice app. I just missed my expose and scale plugins. Other then that my compiz settings are pretty dry, and my emerald theme just mimics the *Box style with a bit of transparency.

The other cool thing is I was able to score a DEC Alpha while I was there, at no charge. I am pretty stoked about that. I can't wait to test out VMS (currently installed) for a few minutes before I wipe it and load Gentoo on it. That should provide some interesting discoveries, I can't wait.

I have also been looking into getting a 3G card for my laptop. It looks like all the Sierra Wireless cards work with linux, they even provide the code for the modules. But with this , my wireless bill goes up another 50 or 60 bucks a month .. great. I've been looking at the iPhones, but I have some outstanding issues with their design and Apples and AT&T's philosophy on how they are running things. One issue is they don't allow you to tether it to our laptop to use it has a modem. Luckily, you can't keep a good tech down, and people have found several ways of allowing you to connect to it. Despite Apple's effort to thwart people from loading 3rd party software on the phone. That might be enough to have me think about getting one!

After all of this, I am leaving for Vacation in 4 days and a wake up. I'm can't wait, we are going to the Bahamas, Nasau to be exact. It will be good to get away. I am afraid it will be a long week trying to wrap everything up before I leave the country .. which stresses me out just thinking about it. Oh well, heres to a good and short week.

And now I have more proof. Thanks to my dad for passing the link along.

http://www.kevitivity.com/geeksquad.html

Unbelievable. This sort of thing erks me so bad. There are people in the IT business that give all of us a bad name. The ones that understand the issues top to bottom, enjoy what they do, and bend over backwards trying to get people working comfortably on their PC's. Why would you cut the cables, why? The only reason I can think of is trying to hide what you really did!

I've had my own personal issues with Best Buy. I've had several instances where personal friends and friends of the family have gone to Best Buy with a "Hard Drive Crash", and where told all the data is unrecoverable. I end up getting wind of it, and take a quick look only to find out that a quick restore from an XP disk fixed the problem. Or even better where that wouldn't even work but hooking it up to another Windows box was able to open the drive and view all the files. The most common type of recovering for me is hooking it up to my laptop and pulling off all the data inside Linux. Yep that's right, using Linux to recover all the lost for a File system failure. There are livecd's that provide the same functionality.

This is just ridiculous. And yet another reason I boycott Best Buy and refuse to do business with them to the best of my ability.

I've looked into this before, but haven't done nothing about it. I am starting to look back into it a bit more heavily. My only requirements are something that works the I think it should (that's such a clear term isn't it) and that it's open source. If there is a commercial backing to it, even better as I to find something for my company also.

Basically my requirements are pretty open .. pun intended. I've started off by trying to define what all I need out of a DAM (Digital Asset Management). I think this is part of my problem, DAM's are relatively new and there isn't a lot out there about them. Even the term itself is open to interpretation. Personally I am looking for something that will manage personal photos, business pictures, images, documents, and movies. I am looking for it to support applications / files from not only the open source Gimp, Inkscape, Open Office, etc but also the entire Microsoft Office product line, Adobe's products, and source files. It doesn't necessarily have to be able to read these, just be able to handle revisions of each.

I haven't really look in the commercial world I know Adobe as a product which can do DAM, but what it can all handle, I don't know. Open source wise I have found a few programs. I have found Alfresco, OpenEdit, and Razuna. Alfresco will do it, but it is built to be more then just a DAM, but designed to handle workflow and processes also, the default interface is very powerful and actually intimidating. I've looked into, and believe it is more then I am wanting right now, and it would take a lot of work to get it to a point where I could / want to use it. I am still reading up on Open Edit and Razuna. I am opening to find some more features I want to help narrow things down.

As you might of noticed I name the post Part 1, I plan on this being an on going discussion and letting me get my thoughts out of my head and on to paper.

Do you have any ideas or thoughts about what I should be looking for or at?

Is such a thing possible?

As me and my Wife are planning for a house, one of the real facts about credit cards hit me, variable interest rate. I had a credit card holding my debt from my college years sitting there I was making about twice the minimum payment and had never been late. One day I notice my interest rate sky rocketed .. I was a bit shock and when I called for an explanation they didn't have one besides, we just decided to do it. I've been with the company for over 3 years, I was pissed

So now we are working on budget, one that will by off the debt I've been ignoring. What sucks is we have gotten away from credit cards completely about 1 1/2 years ago, but never focused on paying them off. Now we need to and doing so will defiantly help us out in the long run. It is just going to be a long bumpy road until then.

We've created a budget, and we were realistic with it, we left in money for a dinner every now and again, for this or that. But we have cut out are cleaning lady, we are going to cut back on our satellite subscription, along with other things we can think of down the road. Hopefully in 6 months time I will be able to report back with favourable conditions.