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Gettext for Rails 3.0.0 beta

We just posted an open-source task on the newly released nextsprocket site. The reward is $300 for a functional demo app, check the task for more details.

You can view the task here.

The art of saying no

Saying no to our customers is our biggest selling point. People don't expect it. They have never come across any salesperson that was willing to say no to customers even if it means he/she won't sell anything that day.

Whenever we say no in a sales meeting, the room usually goes silent. A shock moves across the room and people look at each other confused. Then we explain, we tell them why we said no.

In our experience, saying no and having a good explanation for it is better than saying yes. 

Bootcamp horror story

A few days ago I finally succumbed to the powers of my inner nerd. The release of StarTrek Online was too much for my LCARS loving brain to handle, so I caved. I bought the game online, booted into windows on my mac and started downloading the 8 gig installer and was ready to go...so I thought.

Project Paraguay

Next month a small delegation of our team will join the Nosotros team to create a completely new product. Together we will spend a week at their office in Paraguay, brainstorming, designing, mocking and developing.

We will keep a diary of what we are doing and post it on this site once our mystery project goes live. One thing we can say about it is that it will be open to everyone. Normally we only build stuff for companies but this will be our first consumer project. We are very excited!

New website replaces the old

Our old website has been offline for some time now and we were too busy to get it back up. We asked undogo.com to take a shot at making it look nice and we think they have succeeded quite nicely.

TNT Ruby Webservice

The Dutch postal company offers a service that will let companies send physical letters by uploading pdf files. The uploaded file is printed, folded and put into an envelope and sent to the destination.

Our product (Moves) supports this by allowing planners to send letters to their clients with no hassle at all. If you'd like to use this too, you can use our open-source plugin TNTService. You can find it on Github here.

iPhone 3.0, Tethering & MMS with KPN

Just a quick post to help people enable this. Go to http://www.iphone-notes.de/mobileconfig/ and send yourself the tethering settings.

Next go to Settings > General > Network > Cellular Data Network and enter the following settings for MMS:

APN: portalmmm.nl

MMSC: http://mp.mobiel.kpn/mmsc

MMS Proxy: 10.10.100.20:5080

Leave all of the other fields blank, exit the settings app and restart your iPhone. Have fun!

Reception 1.0 release party!

Reception is a rails frontend for transmission-daemon for people who want to automate torrent downloading.

In contrast to Clutch, Reception does not just download your torrents, it also automates the finding and filtering of them, so that you won't have to.

User visualization

Recently we hired Martin Laksman from Undogo to help us with some visuals.

We wanted cartoons that would identify our main user groups so we could use them in presentations, course material and release notes. We wanted four distinct characters: Managers, Planners, Nurses and Clients. These are the characters he came up with.

Strategy over Strategy

If there is one thing I learned from Euruko 2009, it is that more and more people are using Ruby as a strategy over strategy tool.
They are using ruby as a tool to control other tools. This varied from generating music, creating video-games to controlling complex phone switching systems. Also Ruby seems to be becoming the tool to develop your new cloud hosted application in.

The big question is why people are using Ruby to do this? They could have been doing this for years and just as easily have used any other language.