Phishman – Tech

I love using InstantFox and I’ve been missing InstantFox so much that I started looking for way to fix InstantFox or find a workaround to the address bar not working issue since Firefox version 50.

Easy workaround is to add another search option with keyword of your choice. So anything that is location that you don’t need to search (e.g. domain name), you can use that assigned URL with your keyword.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Click “Add+”.
2. Enter your desired custom “Short Name”.
3. Define desired “Shortcut”, I use “s” as my shortcut.
4. In search URL enter the following:

http://pand.li/if?loc=%q

In “Suggest URL” leave blank as it won’t load any suggestions on domains.

This will redirect/load any other URL that is not a search website.

I usually enable “Take suggested result on enter” in the “Advanced” tab. That way, if I Google something, it always redirects me to the Google search results page.

In some OSes like Ubuntu 12.04 for example I couldn’t get the InstantFox to add new or modify existing bookmark (shortcut). The only way, that I found works is to go to “Add-ons” in Firefox and edit the plugin preferences from there.

See the image on the left with my settings. Now always I type “s myadress.com” the browser will take me to the myaddress.com URL or any other that I define, starting with keyword “s”.

Here are their terms of use for the InstantFox redirects: http://pand.li/if?terms

I love InstantFox, but there’s no more support for it. 🙁

I’m thankful for this workaround, so I thought to share…

On the picture above – my memory cards and on the most left the microSD with the adapters.

Recently I started shooting in RAW format with my DSC-R1 photo camera and I started needing much more space for my photos. I started looking for new 32 GB memory card, but buying 32 GB Sony Memory Stick Pro-HG Duo is $57.99 and way too expensive than I expected.

I searched for alternatives to the Memory Stick Pro Duo and found that there are Memory Stick adapters for microSD cards, which work pretty well. I found Micro SD SDHC TF to Memory Stick MS Pro Duo for $1.32 and bought two. Arrived in less than a week and it looked and felt as expected.
The adapter states that it is SDHC and supports up to 32 GB microSD cards, but I tested 64 GB PNY UHS-1 microSD card and it worked with my Sony DSC-R1. So it does support SDXC cards.

You can find more about SD, SDHC, SDXC cards here.

I ended up pairing the this cheap adapter with 32 GB Lexar Professional 1000x microSDHC 32GB UHS-II/U3. Reads and writes feel much faster than my old card. My photo camera recognized the card as it does any Memory Stick PRO Duo. Now my photo camera enjoys fast card with huge capacity.

I performed test for accessing taken pictures in RAW format at 10 MPx on my Sony DSC-R1 with three different memory cards. Below are the results:

512 MB Sony Memory Stick PRO Duo – capacity 96 normal photos and 18 in raw format / raw access time avg. 5s.
1 GB Sony M2 Duo – capacity 189 normal photos and 36 raw format / raw access time avg. 1s.
32 GB Lexar Professional microSDHC 32GB + Memory Stick PRO Duo Adaptor – capacity 6267 normal photos and 1213 in raw format / raw access time avg. 1s<.

I don’t like benchmarking my memory cards for read and write speeds, but I bet the card is on par with what it’s stated to read and write as speeds.

So this adapter saved me $37 and is paired with much faster card than the Sony Memory Stick PRO Duo. I’m excited to do my first full photo shooting with the new memory card.

Recently my management tasks started getting out of control. Need arises for using a CRM platform in my day to day business tasks as they started becoming unmanageable. Organizing management tasks and following up with organizations and contacts became unpleasant using just simple MS Office products.

I will shortly overview the products I’ve chosen.

I need something more business oriented. That has been made for this purpose.

Here are some major requirements for the software:

• Web based
• LAMP stack technology

CRM functional requirements:

• Tasks
• Campaigns/Projects
• Accounts
• Contacts
• Opportunities
• Leads
• Marketing
• Products
• Reports
• Email/Inbox

After searching the web for any PHP based open source CRM platform, I narrowed down the list to the following products:

• Zurmo
• vTiger
• EspoCRM
• Fat Free CRM
• suiteCRM

In the table below is a visual comparison of the functional requirements for the chosen products.
The product versions are as of today 2016-12-04. I don’t have the time to go and make a screenshot of each one of them.

 

 

 

 

The color shading in the table displays my CRM preference based on the product testing I performed and the way I felt about each product. The darker the highlight the better I liked it.

suiteCRM

Initially I liked the features listed on their website, but once I stated testing suiteCRM I realized that the functionality isn’t quite there. What really was a no-go for me is the big fat interface, why would I need so big fields and confusing menu organization? Theme color contrast between the objects also were not chosen wisely.

Fat Free CRM

This CRM can cover pretty basic needs of your day to day tasks. Not what I really need. The interface is clean, but not on par with today’s website modern look and feel.

EspoCRM

This one was a tough one. I loved the rich functionality list and settings you get with Espo, but that interface tough, it’s just pushing me away!
Some of the “Create” options of the functionality menu list is sooo confusing. No explanation, just some option that you need to guess what it does.
That ugly search box on each page really bothers me.

vTiger

Feature rich interface, well organized menu and full set of options. The interface is clean and well organized.
Still I felt a bit confused by the functionalities. Also the search box at the top of each page was a no go for me.

Zurmo

Zurmo looks like it does have everything I need and the interface is lovely. Feature rich, well thought CRM with lots of geeky set of tools. The interface is not intrusive, clean and does have well organized menu.

It just wins in all features I need. The “Web Forms” is just a bonus.

 

Conclusion

It is up to you to decide what you need and like for your needs and day to day tasks.
In the table above I have created at the end short rating from 1 to 10 and the total rating of each product. Hope it helps.

 

UPDATE [2016-12-09]

Unfortunately, Zurmo is returning a bunch of errors. I tried troubleshooting the problem, but I couldn’t get it running. I spent 3-4 days reading in their support articles about this problem.

Warning: include(SecurableModule.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/user/yii/framework/YiiBase.php on line 432
Warning: include(): Failed opening ‘SecurableModule.php’ for inclusion (include_path=’.:/home/user/app/protected/extensions/phaActiveColumn:/home/user/app/protected/modules/api/tests/unit/forms:/home/user/app/protected/modules/api/tests/unit/models:/opt/lampp/lib/php’) in /home/user/yii/framework/YiiBase.php on line 432
Fatal error: Class ‘SecurableModule’ not found in /home/user/app/protected/modules/zurmo/ZurmoModule.php on line 38

I disabled the Memcache as per their advice, but it didn’t work. I tried tracking this myself in the code, but I get a bunch of ther errors. So I fix one problem and another occurs.

No product should be this complicated to install and run. I believe that if you have clean and simple, well thought code the web app should be pretty fast even without caching.
Goodbye Zurmo!

vTiger is next!