For those who are following the recent Web 2.0 hype, here is a completely free Web 2.0 idea generator — just show it to a VC and you get the big bucks :)

430 downloads on the Getting the most out of ORF guide till 6:00AM. Not that I expected more, but this is far below the total number of clients the guide was sent to. And then we have not counted those who opened it multiple times or used a download manager (with multiple download threads) to download the PDF.

Configuration guides might not be the best way to get client config right, but due to complexity of configuring ORF, this appears to be the only reasonable way. Everything else that I can think of is much more limited, including wizards or downloadable configs. These cannot get the DNS, the IHL or the filtering point selection right, although these are the major reasons for lower ORF performance, by my experience.

For some reason, Fridays often bring unpleasant surprises to me. Today is Friday, but I could have hardly missed the fact.

I arrived at the office in the morning, jumped into the chair with a cup of hot coffee and started checking tech support emails. Suddenly a message box popped right up to my face, telling me that an Acrobat Reader update is available. “Oh. Right… I do not care if my Acrobat Reader is up to date, but do your update boy” – I clicked and update has started. Back to work, I started responding an email, but the installer pulled the focus back several times like if it was so terribly important for me to watch how it is doing its job.

The installation was finished a few minutes later and and yet another dialog popped up with following text:

Adobe Reader Update Manager
——————————–
Your system must be rebooted to continue this update. Click the Reboot Now button to reboot your computer. If you would like to reboot later, please click the Reboot Later button. If you click Reboot Now, after the reboot, the Adobe Reader Update Manager will continue installing the remaining updates,

Reboot Now | Reboot Later

They must be kidding, right? They pop up a totally overcomplicated dialog after a bothering process asking me to reboot my system when I did not even initiate the process? And what is that thing with rebooting my system in 2005? Come on, a very few things actually require reboot. If you replace half of the operating system components, like security patches and service packs do, it is reasonable. If you install some special network drivers, it is not so reasonable, but acceptable. Rebooting the system after updating a document reader is not reasonable, even if Internet Explorer locks the Acrobat Reader plugin.

I have been working on the new feature set of ORF recently and invented a proprietary method of compiling a feature set.

First I carefully harvested all major feature requests from our 2005 survey data (yes, your voice is heard :) and compiled a nice OpenOffice.Org Calc table. The rows consist of the following:

• relative weight (determined from the number of requests)
• estimated cost
• realistic estimated cost (optimistic cost multiplied with the very optimistic number of 1.8)
• relative price/value ratio (calculated from cost/weight)
• feature name

Now I am at the second step, which means that I am considering to throw away the rating part of my highly scientific table and trust myself that I can pick up the features needed by the users, just likely I did previously. Tables just do not seem to work, even if they are beautified and professional-looking, because they barely have any intuition.

Anyhow, estimations were useful. For example, I have learned that I will need 593 optimistic and 949 realistic days to implement the features requested, which means that we can complete all requests in 3 to 5 years.

Cool! Impossible is our business, I cannot wait to get started :)

So the Vamsoft Insider is online (after about one day of installing (and tweaking, uninstalling and installing again) php, but that is another story). But what is the reason behind this site?

There are currently a lot of things going on at Vamsoft, most of them are not strictly related to ORF. Rearranging our office, building a new colocation server, developing a marketing plan – these are all necessary to work more effectively and to support our future operations. Currently our other product – Kompakt ZOLL, only for the local market – also requires a lot of attention, and there are other product plans as well.

In my posts I will try to speak about our day-by-day problems as well as about our future plans. A little bit of personal feelings, probably a deep technical solution of a difficult problem… Hope this will be interesting enough to raise your attention – if not, at least I got a chance making myself more extrovert :)

BTW, if anyone is interested here is a Google Earth location file that shows the location of our office in Budapest: vamsoft.kmz. Google Earth is an exceptional software (is there anyone who does not know it?), I have spent hours with zooming around the globe after first installing it.

Finally, I shortened my to-do list a little, now it is not much longer than the collected works of Shakespeare, although it is definitely less amusing.

The Getting the most out of ORF guide has just been sent for proofreading to Dave to fix the Engrish stuff I carefully inserted to the script.

This is an Insider Blog, where we leak highly confidental information for what we could get fired, so I disclose the highly confidental information that the above guide is a summary of suggestions to get the highest filtering performance out of ORF with the lowest number of false positivies, i.e. to configure ORF the best possible way. I have a little doubt whether we can reach the target audience, but anyhow, I am glad that we finally managed to write this guide, we should have done this years ago.

Ah, yes. This is my first blog entry in our brand new Insider blog. Welcome :)