About 18 months ago, I investigated Saasu and Xero as online accounting software solutions. Since then, it seems Saasu has improved (I remained on their newsletter subscription since the trial) and so decided to check this out. Actually, I only checked out the points that I care about, so this isn’t a comparison so much as a how-my-opinion-of-Saasu-has-changed.

1. Due dates on invoices

I can’t see how to do +14 terms in Saasi on a per-invoice basis. I know in Xero, you can just type in”+14″ and it adds 14 days to the date in the invoice date field. The terms / date due box in Saasu doesn’t actually allow the + character, so you end up with “14″ if you try this, and it auto-completes this to “14th of the current month”.

2. PDF invoice layout

Setup of printed invoices seems more standard in Saasu than Xero to me. Saasu will print all items, ex-GST, then a total ex-GST. Then the GST amount, and the total including GST. Xero prints all items inc-GST, the total inc-GST, then the included GST amount. This is strange, because when the invoices are viewed on screen in Xero itself, they do it like Saasu does, but the printed versions are different.

3. App latency (or, site ping)

Xero have a host right here in Perth, Western Australia, so I can get mad pings to them. Saasu claim to store data in Australia and the USA, but I can’t figure out how to access the Australian site. As such, I’m stuck with 300ms+ pings to their Rackspace servers in the US. When you are trying to convince people to move from a desktop application, that is just too much of a delay between clicks. 150ms would be acceptable, so Japan. 80ms would be fine – so over east somewhere (I have arranged cloud hosting for Perth people over east before with no latency complaints).

4. Complex user roles.

What I am referring to is what MYOB calls security, Quicken has a similar feature. It is the option to limit a user or group of users to a specific set of tasks. For instance, you only want accounts payable people to have access to AP, marketing people to have read only access to all sales, etc. In Xero, you can only restrict access to 4 sections: bank reconciliation, invoices (accounts payable and receivable), create reports, and view reports. That means, your accounts payable people will have access to the accounts receivable as well (and if they have write access to payables, they will have write access to receivables as well!) and your marketing people will have access to reports on all sections. I did email Xero about this about 12 months ago, to which I got a response that it was not possible to limit roles any further but it would be passed on as a suggestion. 12 months later and it hasn’t been implemented, so I guess it’s not that high on the priority list. Why am I slamming them so much on this? Because the competition has very fine grained control (both on and offline competition).

5. BAS summaries

Both seem to do this well. Saasu will give a much more detailed report though, even going as far to include the PAYG Installment items (Xero doesn’t give this, you have to go and look it up manually). The added information in Saasu does make it MUCH more cluttered though, and that’s pretty much the story between the two. Saasu seems better for those who know what they are looking for, Xero is easier to setup and use for those who can get away with what it offers.

UPDATE: I sent an email to Saasu to ask them how to get access to the Australian site (i.e. the site hosted in Australia, as they quite clearly say they store customer data in Australia on their sales material: http://www.saasu.com/pricing/ – “Security and Data”). The response I got was:

(1) They do not allow customers to select which region of hosting they want to login to.

(2) They don’t provide direct access to customer data at a specific location (i.e. requesting the customer service team to give us access to the data stored in AU is denied. More than likely, a direct request for this would elicit a response of “the data is the same as the live data, just access the live data”.)

(3) They will not provide evidence of 3rd party auditing to demonstrate that the data is in fact stored in Australia, as they have not received a request that would consider it necessary, nor did they choose to disclose any additional information as to why customers are not allowed access to this information.

I have several problems with this an so still cannot recommend them in the course of my professional job.

With (1) and (2) it effectively means that they do not have local hosting of the web application, as even if they do, customers are not allowed to access it. The hosting is in the US to a Rackspace cloud.

With (3), the only evidence they provided was a quote given by them, Saasu, in an article written on Techworld (http://www.techworld.com.au/article/391667/home-grown_cloud_storage_service_launched/):

“Sydney-based SaaS accounting business, Saasu has moved some of its local storage to Ninefold’s Cloud. The company’s CTO PaulGlavich said Ninefold storage augments the main hosting provider and forms part of the data replication cycle.”

 

“Saasu has multiple geographic locations around the world where data is replicated for security and redundancy purposes,” Glavich said.”

Now, I’m not paranoid, and I do think they are replicating the data, however, I find the sales information incredibly misleading and I do wonder how quickly they would be able to get the application back online should Rackspace have issues, or should the connection Australia has to the USA get interrupted (either by accident, intention, or legal policy). If they are just replicating data, and have zero infrastructure for the application (which would explain why customers can’t access it directly), I expect it would take some time to roll out infrastructure and restore that data onto a new cloud service.

I also find the reactive attitude to 3rd party auditing surprising given that this is a SaaS company dealing with one the of the most important and difficult to replace types of information with businesses (their accounts). I would think a proactive approach to auditing would make a lot of sense, and be a marketing boon when trying to sell companies on SaaS accounting systems.

It would seem to me that the marketing dog is wagging the business by the tail in this instance. The Sydney based company really does make it seem on the pricing material as though they have hosting here, which they technically do, but customers can’t access it. I can’t flaw it from a technical perspective with the way it’s written, but it does seem misleading to me. I read it as “multiple hosting locations — if one goes down you can still access the others”, but I’ve been given no information to support this. Somewhat disappointing.

Just stumbled across an article on the Australian Customs website from 2002 announcing an amendment to the Prohibited Imports act. The highlight from this:

As a result of an Australasian Police Ministers' Council (APMC) resolution to
develop a uniform prohibited weapons (non-firearms) list, the definitions of
10 existing items have been amended and 13 new items have been included in
Schedule 2.

The definitions of the following items have been amended:

Item 9 - daggers
Item 12 - electric shock devices
Item 13 - acoustic shock devices
Item 18 - blowpipes and blowguns
Item 18A - blowpipe and blowgun darts
Item 18C - pistol crossbows
Item 19 - flick knives
Item 19A - knuckle dusters
Item 21 - goods incorporating a concealed knife, spike or blade
Item 23 - shuriken throwing irons or star knives

ZenOSS is a great monitoring tool we use at work. Unfortunately, it lacks some really simple improvements that would make a huge difference in time-saving for me (and I’m sure I’m not alone).

1. A ‘next update in’ count (doesn’t have to be live, can reload when page is refreshed)
This should be on each device’s graph page to indicate when the next poll time for that device is. Alternatively, for complex devices, there could be an option to print it onto the graph image for those units that are polled at irregular intervals compared to the actual device. Obviously there are circumstances where this wouldn’t work, but they are exactly that: circumstances where this wouldn’t work. Most of the time it would, and it makes debugging easier.

2. Graph “pages” i.e. tabs within the graph section.
Some devices we monitor have *a lot* of graphs. It would be great to be able to say “this graph tab holds the summary information” and then create another tab for lower level detailed info.

3. The ability to view last polled data source information in it’s raw state. Normally, the data source information is processed into data points to be stored into the graph. It would be nice to see the raw output before it was processed for debugging purposes. Obviously this would have to be stored in a new location as RRD files won’t cater for this, but even if we just store the last 5 events, it would be massively useful for debugging. Both Naigios and Hyperic HQ allow some sort of means of doing this.

They are the 3 that are bugging me right now because they seem rather simple to implement (i.e. not many dependencies to worry about)

Listing on eBay is, for the most part, easy and self explaining. I have recently run into a problem that was the complete opposite, and the response from eBay on the solution to this issue being just as unhelpful.

The situation is this: I listed an ex-SBS2003 license for sale on eBay. Someone asked me if it was the Standard or the Premium version and I realised I had forgotten to mention this. I went to edit the listing to correct this and found myself with 2 description displays: One help the description, and the other was a blank field. The actual description seemed uneditable, and the blank text box was editable. I thought this must be a glitch in the browser as there was no indication that it was normal for eBay to do this and there was no eBay notice that the description could not be edited. To this end, I repased the entire listing into the editable box. I saved the listing and found that I now had 2 almost identical descriptions in the eBay item: It had added my ‘edit’ to the end of the original listing!

I realised then that it must be because the listing was uneditable, but additions were permitted (this is confusing to me and it was not made clear on the page – the the picture). I used the live eBay help to talk to someone and have them remove the edit (addition) I had just done with the intention of just posting a piece of text underneath it to say that it was the Standard version. The paraphrased response from the eBay person: “What you have done is confusing to buyers. You need to end the listing early and relist it”. The item already had bids and I had literally done the edit 5 minutes before, and no bids had been placed since. It seems, like most companies that do not integrate their support team into the rest of the company, that there is a scripted set of actions their support people can perform.

I was actually going to paste the whole transcript here as the chat transcript was supposed to be emailed to me. I did get an email. In the email they say they “attached the complete transcript of the session with this email”. There were no attachments. There was no transcript further down the message. Further down though they do have the message: “Please don’t reply to this message. It was sent from an address that doesn’t accept incoming email”. Great, I can’t even reply to the email to ask what happened to my transcript. Thanks eBay, you’ve been most unhelpful today.

A couple of months ago I ordered a folding knife from a store in the USA. The specific knife is the SOG Twitch II TWI-98. It has this cool kick feature whereby you manually flick it out halfway and the spring takes over the rest. It isn’t push button i.e. you can’t just hit a button and it flicks out, so I thought it wouldn’t count as a flick knife. It is important to note that folding knives are not illegal in Australia (you can but them here but the range is sucky) but flick knives are.

Anyway, 6 weeks went passed and I didn’t receive my item. I received a warning letter from the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service telling me that they had seized my knife as contraband under Schedule 2, Item 19 of the Customs (Prohibited Imports) Regulations. Now, when I went to the SOG site and looked at the videos of the knife, they probably have good reason to call it a flick knife.

Several aspects of these regulations bug me (including the obvious ‘I didn’t get my knife

1. Forfeited items are scheduled for disposal by Customs where ‘disposal’ means destruction.

Why?? If the item was legally exported from the country it came from (i.e. the forms are correct and match the item which means that the country it was exported from knowingly allowed it to leave the country) then why not just Return to Sender? It enforces the Australian law and prevents unnecessary expenditure of Australian tax payer money (for the destruction) not to mention the fact that it means less landfill. For me, I probably could have got a refund for the item (not the postage of course) which would mean that I didn’t waste my money on unknowingly importing contraband.

2. The amount of items prohibited for import in Australia is just ludicrous.

Item 29A – we are not allowed to import body armor that is capable of being worn on the human body that is designed to protect one from a weapon. Right, so we’re not allowed to import weapons, so someone thought that it would be a good idea to stop people from passively protecting themselves. I’m missing the point.

Item 19 (I’m quoting this one verbatim):

"Goods to which, or to the coverings of which, there is applied a representation

of the Arms, a flag or a seal of the Commonwealth or of a State or Territory of

the Commonwealth or a representation so nearly resembling the Arms, a flag or a

seal of the Commonwealth or of a State or Territory of the Commonwealth as to be

likely to deceive"

Aren’t most shirts / flags / hats / apparel that hold the flag symbol on them sold in souvenier stores made in China and imported?

Item 18C:

"Crossbows that, when discharged, are capable of causing:

(a)  damage to property; or

(b)  bodily harm;

other than toy crossbows"

We can buy hunting crossbows here (WA) without a license, why are we not allowed to import them?

Big sigh at being an Australian and still feeling like I have no control over what legislation comes into effect.

EDIT: It came to my attention that either the legislation has been changed such that a huge chunk of the list of prohibited imports has been moved, or the Austlii site is doing something strange to Schedule 2. I suspect the former. Here is a PDF copy of the entire Customs Regulation Act 1956.

A couple of weeks ago we had a power blackout for about 5 hours. During that time, the UPS kicked in for the main server, which eventually shutdown. The other servers / devices went out with the initial power outage. When the power came back on, it spiked: it came back on, went off, then came back on again in the space of about 3 seconds. The 2nd time it came back on, something in the comms rack exploded. I mean, physically and audibly exploded. The whole office filled with (silicon) smoke. I thought it was the UPS at first, but the main server was operational. I shut everything down as I couldn’t identify the problem and couldn’t see / breathe to be able to do any diagnosis.

The next day I powered the systems up one by one to see what the damage was. It turns out that the VOIP server had burned out (wouldn’t turn on). After pulling the server from the rack and opening it up, several interesting physical signs were evident. In most cases of power burn out, I usually just see the power supply burnt up. In this case, the mainboard had blown with no physical damage (I have seen this also) but what was interesting was the HDD: one of the chips on the HDD was visible charred (browned) and physically cracked. I didn’t take a photo of it at the time as we needed to get the server back up. After opening the dead power supply, it was evident where all the smoke had come from: One of the capacitors had exploded. All that was remaining on the PCB was 2 metal posts that are normally inside the capacitor to give it rigidity. There were capacitor bits rattling around inside the case as well as some kind of stringy compound which I am guessing is used as insulation between the plastic exterior and inner dilectric shell.

This wasn’t all that was fried: The VOIP card that was being used an extra power plug (4 pin molex). The power had obviously gone down these and fried the HDD, and one of the caps on the VOIP card had blown. This was not as bad as in the PSU; it was a typical exploding head. I took a photo of this one as the card still pseudo-operated (there was a very bad crackle on the line probably because the ripple could not be smoothed as the cap was dead) and we used it until we could get a replacement. The new version of these cards doesn’t use the extra power connector so if this happens again we should be safe (the rest of the hardware is ex-production hardware anyway – yay Asterisk low-level hardware requirements!).

Recently I have been working with a company called CBS Radiant Heating Systems in Perth, Australia. Now, excuse the marketing blurb, but they do radiant heating products with one of the main products being a carbon film that is rolled out either underfloor or in the ceiling to perform floor heating / ceiling heating functions. My question is: How effective is this? I can read the material on the website, but I’ve not actually met anyone with it installed. Well, the owner has the under-tile heating installed, which seems neat (heats your feet when you walk on it ) but I’m not sure about the ceiling heating. Maybe I’m just so stuck in my traditional ways of gas heaters, in fact, that’s definitely what it is and that’s why I’d love to hear anyones experience with ceiling heating.

Yeah, ok, it’s a bit of a gimmicky title

With my recent escapades into VOIP though, it quickly became annoying for me to have a desk IP phone and a softphone on my laptop, as well as my normal mobile and landline. Well, asterisk can route the landline as I want, so I guess that doesn’t really count. But given that I use my mobile for almost all of my calls (it is the number I hand out), it’s still annoying to have to swap phones.

Enter Siphon (click for screenies), a VOIP client for the iPhone. It is a real client, not a proxy like Fring (took me a while to figure that out :/). This means if you have a local Asterisk setup, you can use the local IP and actually get a reasonable latency The call quality is perfect with Siphon too. And it plugs into the addressbook in the iPhone, even better. The only down side is that apple don’t allow background applications to actually run on the iPhone, so incoming VOIP calls do not get routed through unless the application is left open. Oh well, it’s still a cool app

I wonder if I will have problems remembering when I’m calling someone over VOIP and when I’m calling over the mobile network given they are both made with my mobile phone device now…I don’t really want to spend an hour on the phone to a landline thinking I’m talking over VOIP only to discover a bill for $60

Another glaring oversight of having a Mac, and one that I think should be exploited by those making parodies of the Mac v PC ads

I have a mac, therefore, I can do “everything” out of the box…except resize an image. Or create an image. Or, edit an image in any way. There is no Mac equivalent to MS Paint. Not that paint is very good, but at least in a pinch you can save a screenshot to paint and then resize it. Sure, the Grab utility in Mac OS X is great, but it’s not very much good to me at full size. Ohhh, right, I’m supposed to buy Photoshop, because that’s the only well known program that PC users are going to recognize that is also on a Mac that can edit images. Or I Google a lot and find a bunch of new programs I’ve never heard of, none of which are endorsed by Apple.

So, anyway, I’ve settled on SeaShore, which is based on GIMP. I didn’t like GIMP because it runs in X11 and doesn’t interpret key commands “properly”. By properly, I mean the same way Cocoa apps behave. You have to click on a window before you can click on any buttons in X11 i.e. if you are looking at the image and want to change tools, you must click the tool twice. One click selects the tool window, and one selects the tool. Then you have to click twice in the image to start using the tool. Annoying. Oh, and all of the commands are mapped to control button, not the command button. Also annoying.

SeaShore is a very cut down version of the gimp, but it’s small, Mac friendly, and allows me to paste and resize my screenshot easily

I also stumbled across this blog entry from 2006 that discusses some of the free editing tools for Mac, all of which turned up in my search as well, but it’s easier to link there for a summary.

Recently I have started getting into VOIP servers, specifically, Asterisk based VOIP servers. I use a Macbook pro as my everyday work computer (clamshell mode while at the office).

Problem 1) The Macbook Pro has line level inputs not mic level inputs. So when I bought a medium-range Logitech Clearchat headset, it didn’t work.

Attempted solution 1: I have an external Toshiba Dynadock which has a sound card in it, and connects up via USB. The mac detects the sound card. The Sound preferences control panel sees the mic and responds to it. No other application responds to the mic. I’ve absolutely no idea why. The only problem I could find on Google that remotely resembled this was when people are trying to get sound into a sound recording application, and the recording input is set at the wrong sampling rate. I tried modifying this to no joy. I can even hear the mic if I put the input on “passthrough” mode with Rogue Amoeba’s LineIn application, but I simply can’t get it to work in an application. The most simple test I have is using Audacity and recording off that input. Sigh.

Attempted solution 2: I un-clamshelled my mac to use the internal mic. So I have the internal mic and internal speakers and I’m talking and I can hear them, and they can hear me, but they are hearing an echo of themselves. Why? Because the internal mic in a Macbook Pro is in the speaker grill, next to the speaker. So the other person talks, it comes out my speakers, and the mic picks up on some of it and routes it back to the person.

Why put a mic next to the speaker? Lots of people say “oh I used it to record my voice and it was ok”. Yes, but you’re not outputting through the speakers at the same time. Even the normal Macbook has the mic next to the camera. It makes SENSE to put it next to the camera, because when people do video calling, they are looking at (and therefore speaking to) the camera.

As much as I like Mac OS X, I don’t think I’ll buy another mac. I might buy a Vaio instead. Windows 7 is quite nice, and even if it does “go slow” after a year and require a reinstall, I have discovered that a lot of what I do is server-based anyway, meaning that as long as I have a core set of applications on whatever PC I am using, I don’t have to back up / reinstall much.