What's up OpenERP training - Drupal Camp at Louvain-La-Neuve

This week I followed my first Open ERP training - this was kind of chaos at the beginning, but I learned a lot. Yet there is still many things to learn and do before feeling completely conformable.

Giving a course on such extended and modular product is difficult (so I pardon them) and I am thinking about developing my own training program/material/solution. You can expect more on this blog about Open ERP. I am not saying it is perfect but it is really an excellent product for managing small to medium size companies in a very large number of sectors - services, manufacturing, distribution... Still I regret the Python stuff but I must admit there is no such product in Java.

This morning there was a DrupalCamp near my location. Not that much people but it was a first attempt to organize such an event in the french speaking part of Belgium . I think they could have attracted more people just by sending the conferences program more in advance -- 2 days is very short.

I attended a few sessions - top 25 modules (interesting). A presentation about government/administration usage of Drupal (see for example http://premier.belgium.be/fr). Per say, nothing exciting except a sentence from this civil servant who think that government should provide as much data to citizens so they can build mash-up and invent services. It remains the question on how do that... micro-formats (e.g ical, vcal), rdf and rdfa - http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/ are part of the solution - at least a start. I will call that pragmatic semantic web... as a foundation for digital democracy.

The last session I attended was about building Web 2.0 apps with Drupal. Not excellent mostly because they tried to show an evolving usage case, not in line with the announced title and not fittting the one hour format.

Replacing my old mobile 5140i

I am using two mobiles, one for business usage is a Qtek 2020i. Something that people call now a smartphone and was called a PDA when I bought it. It is still fine for my usage, although the sound is not very good (a shame for a phone)- but I have an excellent Ericsson wireless headset. The second was my Nokia 5140i that I use in common life because I think the Qtek is too big, and I have always a fear to break it. The 5140i was a so called outdoor model capable of resisting shock, dust and water splash. It did its job very well. Unfortunately I took it so often with me without special care that the screen got scratched at a point it became unreadable under sunlight.

So I decided to replace this Nokia. Obviously I started by looking at Nokia so I don't have to re-learn the software...

Is it worth an article? I think so. First the Nokia catalog is very, very,very large, the time they had a few models (when I bought my first model a 2110, I think there was only one) is gone.

Choosing between them is exceptionnaly difficult and if not enough complicated Nokia put you in the middle of the list, models that are not yet available.

Second surprise, you can search the catalog, only if you have Flash. I think this is a ridiculous usage of Flash. No problem to require it for illustration, video, animations, but why for searching ? Ajax stuff would do much better with less requirements.

Next, the list of criteria is very incomplete. I know I am a mobile dinosaur, but I don't care that much about RDS Radio, MP3 etc. I want outdoor/robut/water resistent, loudspeaker, USB interface and if possible Bluetooh. Well none of my criteria are in. I think they need a serious update. Specially that recent model basically have most of it...

Finally the most missing info is... PRICE ! What a hell is this. For each mobile I had to google searching an online vendor &@"%!

All of that to realize that there is nothing like an outdoor water resistent phone. So they give up, you may have everthing at Nokia but a simple solid robut phone !

So done for Nokia. I remembered having seen a similar phone from Samsung. I found in fact two models B2100 and B2700. The web site is nice but does not tell (sell) you that much.

So google again and I found http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_b2700-review-279.php. This is a very well done web site. I must say I have been impressed by this mobile, falling and falling, squezed by car and finishing under water in a sink. That's my phone !

So I moved to the biggest mobile phone shop of my area (Cartronics). There, basically you can find any model on the market. Unfortunately, there are so many phones on the market that I could not find an exact explantion of the differences between a few Samsung models.

More important, the vendor ignored what USB was and (after explanation) though bluetooh is sufficient (still not current on a desktop / corporate machine). This is specially strange as this phone is showing a micro-USB connector which is becoming a standard and could become 'the' standard for power loading... Its explanations about sync where not convincing - telling me this was only very basic... But as written before I don't need much more. So I decided to buy one two see (thinking buying a second with a different color for my wife later).

I was then passed to antoher vendor who had the kindness to open the box. There, surprise - a cd with software (good) ... and the USB cable (very very good). So this was definitively picked as my new outdoor phone....

Twitter - future - if any ?

The Iran crisis put some spotlight on Twitter. Getting in touch quickly is a good thing. I still don't understand why the Iranian government has not been able to shutdown quickly access to it.

Anyway sending small messages has an interest, but why should it be on a different service than a 'normal' blog. Of course the short format help reading on mobile access, does it means we will have two separate cyber world a short and a large (screen oriented). Does it mean the apparition of a kind of Novlang posting as for the sms (most of them being non sense in my opinion). I think there is a need for micro-blogging to converge with other tool.

Also the twitter business model fall short.

I am not alone to think about it : http://www.webguild.org/2009/06/twitter-will-be-obsolete-in-a-year.php

JavaFx 1.2 is out

I still don't believe in the JavaFx stuff - too bad, too late and not relying on the Java strong use in enterprise. Anyway the vesion 1.2 is out. Clearly they don't care that much of compatibility and you will recompile your code:

"The JavaFX 1.2 SDK release is not binary compatible with the JavaFX 1.1 SDK. This means that your application and all libraries that it depends on must be recompiled with the JavaFX 1.2 SDK."

Things like that, happens. But this confirm my opinion that SUN push out this product (as they did for Java) without finishing it.

My humble advise: wait for JavaFx 3.0 - if it exists.

Otherwise it seems to move to the right direction -- but at senator speed -- they now support text controls (hard to call it an innovation) and seems to support Linux (not sure what it means in this context).

There are obviously many other changes. Mostly in the graphical area, so they seems to continue competing with Flash...

What has not changed however is a clarification about why one would really desire using it.

http://java.sun.com/javafx/1.2

Spring for Python - Yes they can !

I could not believe my eyes... SpringSource did it again... translating parts of its framework to Python -- including the IOC ! Ok I am convinced, I will give a serious look at Python.

By the way, my OpenERP on my Ubuntu is fine. I will go through Python tutorial (I bought already two book in french, but I found them not that good) and build a first development environnment.