Small Business Services

Many of you have probably heard of SETI@Home or Folding@Home, two projects aimed at using the wasted CPU cycles on millions of machines to fulfill their massive data processing and computational needs. SETI@Home searches radio telescope data for signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life, and Folding@Home does protein folding for medical research. Both projects give out software to interested people on the internet. These clients monitor the activity on the computer, and do their project work when the computer's owner is not using the machine. Using the donated downtime on thousands or millions of desktops, these projects are able to achieve computational feats they could otherwise never dream to accomplish.

What if I told you that you could do the same type of thing with your business? Well, you can with a freely available clustering solution called "Condor."

The first piece of software I posted to the Software section is a new PERL library I wrote to make working with PERL's IThreads easier.

PERL IThreads make the management of interpreter threads easy to manage, but it's very general. The MultiThread.pm library builds on this generic threading framework to make common concurrency paradigms a little easier. While there are several concurrency models, MultiThread currently implements two: the Worker Pool, and the Pipeline.

You may have noticed that I've added a new "Software" section to the site. This section will be where I link some of my original contributions to the Open Source community. Several of these are already up on Google Code, others will probably be distributed through other means.

As with all software, these are all works in progress, with varying degrees of completeness and utility. Some are simple proofs of concepts, others are software that I use every day to run my business. I'll be adding these over the next few days as I create write-ups for them. Each write-up will specify the degree of completeness for the package, as well as technical specs like the languages and databases used.

If you're wondering why I would distribute unfinished software, it's because I hope that what I've done can be used as a starting point or reference for others.Maybe someone can take an idea from what I've done and use it in their own software. Maybe the code can be instructional to people unfamiliar with the technologies I used. Who knows? Maybe someone even looks at one of these and decides to pay me to add a feature they want, or they contribute back to me the work that they may have put into it.

That's the beauty of FOSS. Even incomplete or immature software has value.

So help yourselves, enjoy, feel free to make suggestions or send me your code changes. Let me know if you're interested in the continued development of any pieces of code you find here that may not be under active development. If I don't know where the interest lies, I can't put my work where it count the most.

I guess it was only a matter of time before it happened: my site was plastered with about four hundred spam messages for various male-enhancement pharmaceuticals. If anyone saw that before I did, I assure you, I'm no drug pusher.

As annoying as it was, it did cause me to take a look at what spam-fighting options are available for Drupal, the software that runs this site. My goal was to keep anonymous posting available, yet make it more difficult for spambots to flood the comment pages. As it turns out, there is a freely-available system called CAPTCHA, which internet-savvy types like yourselves have undoubtedly seen before. CAPTCHA helps to ensure that the user is human by asking some questions that are difficult for computers to understand and answer, but easy for humans to do so.

Most business owners would agree that a solid technology program is essential to the sustained growth of any business. Not only does a well-tuned IT operation allow for faster, more accurate accounting and inventory management, it can also help you to find where your business is lacking or missing out on opportunities.

Unfortunately, maintaining an experienced IT staff can be prohibitively expensive, so most SMBs simply go without. Spadea Small Business Services solves this issue with a program called "As You Need IT", so now you can take advantage of seasoned IT staff without the cost of maintaining them full time.

I ended my previous entry giving you assurances that there is no conflict of interest in the Open Source economy, and noted that there are many reasons that people contribute to free software. In this article, I will show you how these many reasons actually help to eliminate the possibility of conflicts of interest causing substandard software in the Open Source world -- at least for the purpose of monetary gain.

I was on the train from New York late one night, tapping away at some code on my laptop, when the woman next to me noticed that my interface had a feature she was looking for: White text on a black background. You are probably now thinking "Wow. Some feature.", but it was apparently very important to this person's husband, who suffers from severe eyestrain. Black text surrounded by a sea of white hurts his eyes, but he wasn't sure how to change that. I told her I was sure it could be done in Windows through the Display control panel, but that I hadn't used Windows in a while and couldn't tell her exactly. When she asked what I used if I didn't use Windows, we started talking about Linux and the economics of Free Software.

Many businesses are looking to Linux as a strategic platform because it's vendor agnostic, low cost, is targeted by tens of thousands of software packages, and has a huge set of enthusiastic users who understand the Linux ecosystem. That last point is key. If you are seeing strategic roles for Linux in your organization, but are staying clear simply because of a lack of in-house expertise, it might be better to hire in someone, either part time or contractually to start, to provide that initial knowledge base.

I've recently been working with a product called OS Commerce. I was approached to put together an e-commerce solution for a local store, and found this product to be extremely capable.

Like all of the products I talk about on this site, OS Commerce is freely available. It runs on a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL and PHP) software stack, and is pretty easy to install for the average technical person with knowledge of Linux and MySQL. Once the software is running, anyone can manage it. It's 100% point and click, and new products can be set up or removed with minimal effort.

Most businesses today have a site on the Internet. Depending on the type of business you run, it can be anything from a simple page containing directions to your store and your hours to a complex e-commerce site with credit card authentication and inventory tracking. Regardless of what you use your site for, you need it to look good. This article will introduce you to some Open Source tools that can make that happen with minimal effort.