Of course I’ve evaluated many proprietary and open source time tracking tools over the years, but so far, none of them managed to fully convince me.

Today, I’ve just stumbled over Kimai – an open source, web-based time tracking tool written in PHP. And so far, Kimai looks promising. Installation is dead easy – just make sure you’ve compiled PDO support into PHP (Gentooers: enable the PDO flag for dev-lang/php and remerge php), else the nice web-based installation wizard will abort without printing any error message.

Once you’ve logged in, you’ll be presented a very clean, intuitive GUI where you can setup customers, projects and tasks. On the top-right there’s a big push-button to start/stop/pause the time tracking.

During my quick evaluation, I haven’t found the functionality yet to export the timesheets, but as far as I know, such functionality will be provided by extensions that can be installed. Let’s see. [Addition 20091009: There's a stats extension quick-hack for Kimai 0.8.x that can be used to list and print selected reports. To use it, simply download it, extract it in the extensions folder and navigate to {Kimai install folder}/extensions/stats/]

Here’s a screenshot of Kimai 0.8.1.890:

Kimai 0.8.1.890 Screenshot

With the currently still very limited feature-set, Kimai doesn’t compete with full-grown project management solutions (I’ve recently seen a quick demo of a very sophisticated and cool, Django-based project management solution I’m not allowed to tell any details about yet). But it looks like a promising start. I hope the Kimai project will gain momentum, grow and mature as there’s definitely a need for open source time tracking tools – particularly web-based ones.

P.S. I haven’t had the time yet to audit Kimai’s source code, but if the orderly, clean GUI is any indication, it can’t be too bad.

Facebook, with currently more than 300 million active users, also uses  a 64 bit unsigned integer for storing user IDs and expects Facebook applications to be able to handle this. Of course, 300 M user IDs would still easily fit into a 32 bit unsigned integer, but Facebook already goes beyond the 32 bit limit by issuing 15 digit UIDs like 100′000′xxx’xxx’xxx to registered test users (which allows Facebook to better distinguish between test accounts and real accounts).

Now if you happen to use Django to build your Facebook application, this fact needs special attention as Django doesn’t support 64 bit integer field types for its ORM models by default. As a Django developer, you could thus resort to using a CharField for storing Facebook UIDs (which would be odd) or, better, define a custom model field you can use in your models instead of IntegerField. Fortunately, Django offers an elegant way to define custom model fields. You can write your custom PositiveBigIntegerField by simply subclassing (extending, inheriting from) models.PositiveIntegerField:


So, in your models.py add the following code:

from django.db import models
from django.db.models.fields import PositiveIntegerField

class PositiveBigIntegerField(PositiveIntegerField):
    """Represents MySQL's unsigned BIGINT data type (works with MySQL only!)"""
    empty_strings_allowed = False

    def get_internal_type(self):
        return "PositiveBigIntegerField"

    def db_type(self):
        # This is how MySQL defines 64 bit unsigned integer data types
        return "bigint UNSIGNED"

class Mytest(models.Model):
    """Just a test model"""

    huge_id = PositiveBigIntegerField()

    def __unicode__(self):
        return u'id: %s, huge_id: %s' % (self.id, self.huge_id)

(NB: The “Mytest” class is just for testing the PositiveIntegerField definition, it’s not part of the PositiveIntegerField definition.)

Note that this solution only works for MySQL as a database backend (as MySQL supports the “bigint UNSIGNED” data type for columns which isn’t defined in the SQL standard).

For testing, define a “Mytest” model as shown above and execute “python manager.py syncdb” to create a new myapp_mytest table with an unsigned bigint(20) column named huge_id. Register this new model “Mytest” in admin.py, restart runserver and you’ll be able to enter 64 bit integer values through Django’s admin application.

The only minor “issue” is that Django admin’s CSS class (.vIntegerField) used for HTML form input fields representing integer values defines the width as “5em” which is a bit too narrow to display the entire 64 bit integer. This can be adjusted however (e.g. by writing your own ModelForm and telling ModelAdmin to use that, see the Django admin documentation and the Widget.attrs documentation).

P.S. Note that for Django to be able to access and use a “bigint UNSIGNED” data type, you don’t necessarily need to define a PositiveBigIntegerField and adjust your models. Instead, you could simply adjust the column type in MySQL accordingly as a quick-fix. If you use syncdb (like most Django devs) and want it to create your tables and columns correctly however, defining a custom model type as described is the way to go and strongly recommended for consistency and QA.

postfix greylisting on gentoo (postgrey) | andreas d.’s.

Let’s hope that this, in conjunction with other anti-spam measures, will do it for a while.

Non-spammers shouldn’t experience any problems due to this change, but if you do, please contact me using Skype (mettlerd), phone or SMS.

A screenshot of Lx-Office ERP 2.6.0 beta 1 showing the XUL menu:

And here’s a flash video of Lx-Office ERP 2.6.0 beta 1 showing the XUL menu in action.

Lx-System (the company backing Lx-Office ERP) and LINET Services host a public demo of Lx-Office ERP 2.4.3 (user: demo, password: demo).

To install Lx-Office ERP 2.6.0 beta 1 on Gentoo, follow these steps:

1) Set up a local portage overlay (e.g. at /usr/local/portage), if you haven’t done so already.

# mkdir -p /usr/local/portage

In /etc/make.conf, set

PORTDIR_OVERLAY=/usr/local/portage

2) Download lx-office-erp-2.6.0_beta_p1-r1_plus_dependencies.tgz and extract it to your local portage overlay

# cd /usr/local/portage

# tar xzvf lx-office-erp-2.6.0_beta_p1-r1_plus_dependencies.tgz

3) In /etc/portage/package.keywords, add the line

www-apps/lx-office-erp ~amd64

(or ‘www-apps/lx-office-erp ~x86‘, depending on the architecture of your machine)

4) In /etc/portage/package.use, add the line

www-apps/lx-office-erp vhosts

5) Install Lx-Office ERP on your system by executing

# emerge -av lx-office-erp

Depending on your current portage settings and installed ebuilds, you may need to unmask additional ebuilds.

6) Use webapp-config to link your Lx-Office ERP installation to a specific host, e.g. by executing

# webapp-config -I -h localhost -d lx-erp lx-office-erp 2.6.0_beta_p1-r1

7) Follow the steps displayed on the screen to setup and configure Lx-Office ERP. Some of these steps might be automated in a later release of the ebuild.

8) Have fun using Lx-Office ERP on Gentoo! :)

(These ebuilds are sponsored by my company Printscreen GmbH, dedicated to the developers of Lx-Office ERP and Gentoo and released for free use under the terms and conditions of the GNU GPLv2 license.)

The solution: Simply create a new procmail rule that copies (that’s what the c stands for) any incoming message to a special folder (I named it “mobile”; note that my postfix uses the maildir format to store messages):

:0 c
.mobile/

Preferably, this rule should be placed after the spam filtering rules (you don’t want to pay for spam on your mobile, do you? ;) and before the normal procmail mail filter rules (which move every incoming mail to the appropriate subfolder). You can also use a dedicated rules file for every group of similar rules. For example, I include the files spam.rc, mobile.rc, lists.rc (with their according rules) in the main .procmailrc config file.

Now every mail that wasn’t filtered by the spam filter gets copied to the “mobile” subfolder of your inbox prior to getting moved to the appropriate subfolder (by the rules in lists.rc).

On my e61i, I hence only need to subscribe to the “mobile” subfolder in order to catch all incoming messages. As you can’t unsubscribe from the inbox subfolder itself, you should set the maximum number of caught new inbox mails to 1 (which is the minimum) in order to avoid fetching things twice. You can further configure that only headers are fetched to minimize the amount of data[1] that is automatically downloaded with every mail check (also: switch off polling if you don’t need it).

Note that another advantage of this solution is that you won’t tamper with any of the original messages (that are either in your inbox or in any of its subfolders). Some might call this a disadvantage though.

That’s it, have fun! :)

[1] I pay 0.10 CHF per 20 KB, i.e. 5 CHF (5 USD) per MB (which is incredibly expensive as I currently don’t have any flat rate data plan -> please don’t send me a mail bomb just for fun, else I’ll have to write a more sophisticated procmail rule that only copies messages < 100 KB to the mobile folder)

This new job is ambiguous. I don’t have a job title. The company doesn’t have a name. At the moment, there are only three of us. We don’t know what this will become, we only have a general direction. My office will be at my house… in Austin… and in cyberspace on IM, Twitter, Facebook… To many, this recipe might spell fear. To me, it’s comfortable. I thrive in the unknown–no rules, no baggage, no momentum to pull us into mediocrity. We get to build this from scratch in a thoughtful and disciplined manner. It’s my opportunity to bring my engagement ideas to life and the perfect time to leverage my background to apply a design thinking approach to the way we, and our clients, do business.

I had the joy to experience the reviving entrepreneurial spirit at yesterday’s public beta launch party at the Wuala office in Zurich. And I experience it daily when working for my own company – Printscreen GmbH. A great feeling indeed, and inspiring others, too.

Thanks a lot to the notary and the jurists at HRA Zurich who made it possible!

(Bloggy Friday will start at 8 PM, guess where ;)

[UPDATE 20080802: I probably can't be there due to military service :( At rather short notice as they managed to send the march order to an address that doesn't exist. No comment.]

Personally, I highly enjoyed the TechCrunch Meetup in the Bluewin Tower in Zurich West and the gathering in the “Besame Mucho” lounge afterwards and met many interesting people. I wasn’t quite ready for releasing news about my company Printscreen GmbH (iG) yet, but it was nonetheless a great opportunity to network and chat with other entrepreneurs, organizer Mike Butcher, some of the co-organizers and media people. All in all I had the impression that a lot is going on again in the Swiss IT/web startup community (not limited to the roughly 40 startups officially presenting).

So, many thanks to the organizers (TechCrunchUK, Wuala, Doodle, NewsCred, Sandbox) and sponsors who made this all possible! Of course I hope there will be a second edition of the TechCrunch Meetup Zurich soon (it was so well organized and such a nice event, I’d like it to become a recurring, regular event in the Swiss IT and startup scene).

Links to some other posts about the meetup (incomplete and in no particular order):

• 40 start-ups at the first TechCrunch Zurich meet-up (wua.la)
• You Have Three Days To Check Out Wuala’s ‘Social Grid’ Storage (techcrunch.com)
• TechCrunch Zurich Meetup – The Videos (cocaman.ch)
• TechCrunch Zurich Meetup – The Recap (cocaman.ch)
• TechCrunch Zurich Recap: We Really Do Have Startups Here! (centernetworks.com)
• TechCrunch Zurich Meetup: Impressionen (doodle.ch)
• TechCrunch Zurich Meetup – keine richtige Nachlese (hogenkamp.com)
• Die Web 2.0-Gemeinde trifft sich im Bluewin Tower (bluewin.ch)
• TechCrunch Meetup Zurich: Die Startups (netzwertig.com)
• TechCrunch Meetup Zurich: 40 Elevator Pitches im 15. Stock (netzwertig.com)
• TechCrunch Meetup Zürich: Impressionen vom Event (netzwertig.com)
• tczh: 20 seconds of fame/shame (benkoe.ch)
• Das Techcrunch Meet-up in Zürich (bloggingtom.ch)
• Poken is Touch and Connect Social Networking (techaddress.com)
• Techcrunch I’ll take you there (digitalmoneyworld.com)
• live interview with Mike Butcher Techcrunch UK (digitalmoneyworld.com)
• Tech Crunch live startups. (digitalmoneyworld.com)
• TechCrunch: Du hast 20 Sekunden! (cassiber.com)
• Techcrunch Meetup Zurich (remo.fm)
• Techcrunch Zurich Meetup (trigami.com)
• TechCrunch – über 40 Internet-Start-Ups treffen sich in Zürich (faircustomer.ch)
• Techcrunch.uk event @ Zurich (Switzerland) (klewel.ch)
• Lessons learned from TechCrunch Meetup Zurich (zanox.com)