Alef Arendsen

Tonight I got several calls from people telling me that emails to one of my company’s domains were bouncing. I had been fiddling with some of the DNS settings and apparently (after half an hour of searching on the internet) this screwed things up.

As I learned, CNAMES override must other DNS records and a CNAME conversion is done even before an MX lookup.

At first, I had A records for both remotion.biz, www.remotion.biz and *.remotion.biz, pointing to my web server. I then removed the remotion.biz A record and changed it into a CNAME (pointing to www.remotion.biz). I left the MX records as is and thought this would work.

But, like I said, after researching online for a while, the CNAME overrides all other records. So if a mail server is looking up the MX record for remotion.biz, it first does the CNAME conversion, causing it to search for an MX record for www.remotion.biz instead of remotion.biz. And since no MX record for www.remotion.biz exists, things went sour!

Well, I quickly changed things back and after the changes had propagated everything was back to normal.

I’m happy I made this mistake on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Now it was only 3 people calling, instead of 20, which it’ll probably be on a busy weekday.

Sometimes you just have to say how good a product is you’re working with. I previously did this with Pixelmator and I feel the urge to do it again right now. This time it’s Solve360 that’s making me happy.

When we started our new business we quickly settled on the need for a CRM system. I looked at the options and finally opted for ZOHO. SalesForce proved to be too expensive and ZOHO seemed to fit my needs. We’ve been working with ZOHO for about 4 months now and I seemed to be looking at the system less and less. I think one of the key factors in a CRM system is that your staff should be happy using it, in fact they should be excited to use it. Well, with ZOHO, this definitely was not the case.

In the end, there were three other things that made me want to look at other options:

• Decent integration and data export possibilities. ZOHO does have an API and you can export data to CSV and Excel and alike, but in some areas the API is quirky and the export possibilities are sometimes limited. I’m setting up my new IT infrastructure in a very loosely coupled way, with desparate systems integrating with eachother via HTTP (REST) and ZOHO facilitates this only to a certain extent
• Rigid way of handling sales. I’m a big fan of systems that don’t force you into a particular way of working. ZOHO unfortunately does this however. There’s a very strict division between Leads and Contacts (client), while I consider everybody to be a client, not just leads. It’s very forced at optimizing the sales process and not on serving the customer in the best way possible. I want to have a system that facilitates my serving our customers, not serving some VP of Sales we might eventually hire
• Last but not least there’s project management. Our sales process itself is not just about selling products, it’s about delivering service. In essence we’re a service provider and even in the sales process, it’s not about closing the deal, it’s about giving the customer the best service experience possible. This means I need a system that does not only help me with the conventional sales tasks (creating opportunities, upping the probability of a sale, sending out quotes), but also with more service-oriented things (task management is the most important one). And even after the sales process has finished, I need a tool that helps me manage the service we’re delivering to the client. ZOHO does not do this. It does have task management, but once a sale is done, it’s hard to keep using ZOHO to deliver service to the customer)

There are a few other things that made me look for other solutions (ZOHO’s UI is sluggish, not very Web 2.0 and sometimes hard to work with), but these were not the most important reasons.

One last thing kind of itched as well. As a service provider, ideally you want your suppliers (of for example IT tools) to be just like you: delivering excellent service. This was not the case with ZOHO. On the forums, questions remained unanswered from time to time, most of the time feature requests were answered with a simple ‘we do not support this at this time’ reply. This made me feel bad about forking out money for something like that.

Ironically on the ZOHO forums, I came across a thread where people were recommending other CRM solutions, amongst others Solve360 and this made me start to look around for better.

Fast-forward to today: I’ve been working all weekend to move my data from one place to the other (from ZOHO to Solve360 that is) and it’s been fun. The API is very usable (although it could use some improvements here and there–more on that later). The system is very flexible (which makes you think about your process–something I like, as opposed to being forced into a process that somebody else thought up for me). It supports project management, opens up to our actual customers (by publishing project-related info to them and even allowing them to work on the projects with you side by side) and doesn’t stop there. Integration with an email marketing solution (Constant Contact) is available and on top of that, it’s totally Web 2.0 (in the sense that it offers a very usable, very nice single-page UI). One minor thing (tongue in cheek): it has a button that strongly resembles the Windows start button and the button with which you can manipulate the windows (close, maximixe) are on the wrong side of the windows and being an avid Mac user, I don’t like that, but well, you can’t have it all, can you .

On top of all this one thing made me decide this was the company that was going to help solve my problem: their customer service so far is excellent. The API has a 12k call limit per day. I can understand this, but I really needed to move my data from ZOHO to CRM over the weekend and I didn’t want to run into the limit. So I fired off an email to them asking about this. Within an hour I had a reply, telling me they had taken off the limit for me. This was in line with all the other interactions I had with them: quick replies, to the point and always helpful.

A few other things I like (amongst others):

• It does tagging. And yes, tags are different than multi-select fields or checkboxes. You can tag anything in the system, with self-defined tags
• It has iCal integration, synching your tasks to your iCal calendar automatically. This is great!
• It facilitates lead nurturing very well with scheduled emails and things alike
• It integrates with Google Docs and Google’s address book

So, conluding I can say: ’so far so good’.

Of course there are always negatives, but so far I haven’t been able to find a lot. One that’s itching is the XML they’re outputting when using their API. Now before I go on let me state that it’s a great API that just works, but having been a software engineer for quite some time I’m a bit perfectionistic in this area. The issue: their XML doesn’t conform to a schema. When requesting a list of contacts using the API I would have expected something along these lines:

<customers>
  <customer>
      <id>1235</id>
    <firstname>Alef</firstname>
    <lastname>Arendsen</lastname>
    <status>On Hold</status>
    ...
  </customer>
  <customer>
      <id>1236</id>
    <firstname>John</firstname>
    <lastname>Doe</lastname>
    <status>In Progress</status>
    ...
  </customer>  
</customers>

but instead I got this:

<response>
  <id31507>
    <id>1235</id>
    <name>Alef Arendsen</name>
    <parentid>52541</parentid>
    <flagged>1</flagged>    
    <custom52857>On Hold</custom52857>
  </id31507>
  <id34943>
    <id>1236</id>
    <name>John Doe</name>
    <parentid>52542</parentid>
    <flagged>1</flagged>    
    <custom52857>In Progress</custom52857>
  </id34943>
  ...
  <count>21</count>
  <status>success</status>
</response>

Ouch! First of all, with the id-element including the contact’s identifier, this XML document is never going to conform to a particular schema (well, it might, but not the way I want it too). The second thing is the custom fields. While on the one hand it seems to make sense to include the custom field’s identifier (you might want to change the name of an identifier, and then you don’t want your identifiers to change), but what I would really like is for the field to have some kind of symbolic name (that I can define myself) that will be included in the XML. API design is important, and I’ve always like how people like Juergen and Arjen (former colleagues at SpringSource) spent countless hours working on the best possible experience for a developer.

Now again, let me restate that their API is way better than what I’ve seen from other providers (SOAP, anyone), but I just *had* to find one negative point . And then again, knowing the guys at Norada, maybe they’ll even work on improving it (hint, hint).

Last thing: I’d like to upload my own background. Right now I’m stuck with a set of preselected backgrounds . But well, the backgrounds Norada in combination with their very slick UI provides are way more attractive than a dull Web 1.0 interface, so I think this’ll have to do for now .

As far as pricing goes, Norada offers plan ranging from $24 (per month) for a single-user subscription to $149 for a subscription that’ll get you 18 users. In comparison, the ZOHO edition we used (Enterprise) cost us $112 per month for 4 users (including the Mail Add-on). SalesForce would cost approximately the same per month, but only for one user(!). I need the API and this is only offered in SalesForce’s Enterprise Edition, which costs $125 per month per user.

Okay, that’s all for today, I think I’ve done enough promotion work for the Norada guys. Keep up the great work!

Bijna Kerst, dus de eindeloze hoeveelheid kerstdiners begint weer. Met een aantal vrienden die maandag op vakantie gaan vanavond de eerst. Terwijl de stoofpot staat te pruttelen typte ik het menu hieronder maar even in. Geniet ervan.

Amuse: Kalkoen met Mango-Sinaasappelsaus

• 1 mango
• 1 sjalotje
• 1 theeleper boter
• 100 gr. kalkoenfilet
• Peper / zout
• Sap van 1 sinaasappel
• Beetje rucola
• 8 amuselepels

Schil de mango en haal de pit er uit. Snijd de ene helft van het vruchtvless in reepjes en de andere helft in blokjes. Snipper het sjalotje. Bestrooi de filet met peper en zou en bak aan biede kanten aan. Temper het vuur en laat in ongeveer 6 minuten gaar worden. Fruit het sjalotje samen met de blokjes mango. Blus af met het sinaasappelsap. Laat de saus al roerend nog wat indikken op een laag vuurtje. Snijd de kalkoen in reepjes. Leg op alle amuselepels een takje rucola, enkele plakjes filet en reepjes mango en schep er wat saus over.

Soep: Pompoensoep met geitenkaas

• 2 uien
• 1 teentje knoflook
• olijfolie
• 300 gram pompoen
• 1 blikje tomatenpurree
• 1 liter kippenbouillon
• 1 limoen
• 1 el vloeibare honing
• zout
• cayennepeper
• 150 gram zachte geitenkaas
• koriander

Snipper de uien en fruit ze in de olijfolie. Snijd de pompoen in stukjes en voeg ze bij de ui. Bak het al omscheppend mee. Roer de tomatenpurree er door. Schenk vervolgens de kippenbouillon erbij. Borstel de limoen schoon en snijd hem in stukken. Breng de soep aan de kook. Voeg 2 stukken limoen toe. Voeg de honing toe. Laat de soep ca. 15 minuten zachtjes doorkoken. Haal de stukken limoen uit de soep en pureer de soep met een staafmixer of met de blender. Maak de soep pittig met zout en cayennepeper. Verbrokkel de geitenkaas. Serveer de soep met de stukjes geitenkaas en strooi de koriander erover.

Hoofdgerecht: Herfststoofpotje

• gekookte ham in dobbelsteentjes gesneden (net geen mok vol)
• 500 gr. runderlappen
• Flinke theelepel gerookte paprikapoeder
• Theelepeltje tomatenzout
• Peper naar smaak
• Eetlepel bloem
• Scheutje cognac
• Rode wijn
• Sjalotten in vieren gesneden (ongeveer een mok vol)
• 8 tenen knoflook door midden gesneden
• Blik gepelde tomaten
• Eetlepel rozemarijn
• Eetlepel tijm
• Foelie (2 stukjes)
• 3 kruidnagels
• 4 jeneverbessen
• 1 grote of 2 kleine laurierbladen
• Tamme kastanjes (een mok met een díkke kop erop)
• Krieltjes (1 mok)
• Wortelen, courgette, pastinaak in stukjes gesneden (hoeveelheid naar smaak, ik houd wel van veel groente in mijn stoofpotjes)
• Een berg verse fijngehakte peterselie

Snijdt de ham in blokjes en bak even aan in olijfolie. Snijdt intussen de runderlappen in grove brokken en kruid ze met paprikapoeder, tomatenzout en peper. Schep de ham uit de pan en braad het rundvlees (eventueel in delen) in het vet. Snijdt intussen de sjalotten in vieren en de knoflookteentjes doormidden.
Doe een eetlepel bloem bij het vlees en schep het goed om. Voeg de sjalotten en de knoflook toe en laat even meebakken. Afblussen met een scheut cognac terwijl je goed roert om klontjes van de bloem te voorkomen.
Laat even koken om de meeste alcohol te verdampen en voeg de in stukjes gesneden tomaten en het sap toe. Laat weer even flink pruttelen en doe dan de rode wijn erbij tot alles onderstaat.
Doe de foelie, jeneverbessen, kruidnagels, laurierblad, tijm en rozemarijn in een thee-ei en leg dit in de pan.
Deksel erop en ongeveer 3 uur laten sudderen.

Verwarm intussen de oven voor op 250 graden. Snijdt de pastinaak, wortel, courgette en indien nodig de krieltjes in stukken, leg dit op een plaat en besprenkel met een klein beetje olijfolie. Rooster de groente ongeveer 10 minuten. Ik sneed nu de kastanjes in met een speciaal dingetje en heb ze gepoft in een speciale pan maar je zou ze ook in de oven kunnen poffen, dan moeten ze er ongeveer 15-20 minuten in.
Pel de kastanjes terwijl ze nog warm zijn anders krijg je de schil er bijna niet meer vanaf!

Na drie uur even testen of het vlees al zacht is. Als dat zo is dan kan je de groente, de krieltjes, de kastanjes en de hamblokjes toevoegen. Deze nog ongeveer 20 minuten mee laten pruttelen en dan kan je eten.
Garneren met peterselie en serveren met aardappelpuree.

Last Saturday my Tesla Roadster was delivered! In the pouring rain, the delivery man parked his truck about 500 meters from my house, since he couldn’t get closer to my place. After having signed off on the delivery, I drove the car through town to my house and parked in my garage. No touching (or at least driving) it for the rest of the weekend, since it hadn’t been registered yet.

Last Monday I went to the registration agency to get my license for the car. This proved to be difficult. The forms they had didn’t support electric cars and the guys at the agency were perfectly fitting the image Dutch customer service has: they didn’t want to help me out at all. Yesterday after a few calls and some discussions, I tried again and this it worked. Then today I went by customs to get it cleared. This usually involves paying an additional 40% of taxes, but one of the incentives here in Holland is that you don’t have to pay that tax, so that’s cool.

Driving to and from the registration agency and customs is allowed after having obtained a one-day license number. Since the process took a whole three days, I drove around without the license yesterday and today. I haven’t been stopped by the police, so I guess that’s over now.

On to the experience of actually driving the Tesla. It’s a totally awesome car to drive! The acceleration is just too good to be true. Yes, in perfect conditions a Porsche 911 Turbo is faster (it does 0-60mph in just 3.4 seconds), but then again, this involves doing running through the shifts and all; and guess what: the Tesla doesn’t have gears, so no hassle with those. The car is most fun to drive through town or on the countryside. This is where the constant power that’s available all the way through 0 – 200 really begins to show. On the highway it’s certainly not too bad either; it’s fun to see a car in your rearview mirror closing in, just touching the pedal a little bit and already having equalled his speed.

All in all the first three days have been great. I can charge my car at the office and at home, which for now is good enough. Soon, we’ll be moving our office to Amsterdam and there I do not have a charging station closeby yet. This should hopefully be resolved quite quickly, with the Amsterdam municipality already having promised a charging station in front of our office on the Keizersgracht canal.

Yesterday, I also dropped by at our graphics designer. He’s going to prepare a bit of branding for the car. It’s almost too beautiful to put it on, but then again, we’ll have to promote the company a bit as well .

I’ll post some pictures later on.

These are some of the most recent pictures up in Gressoney la Trinité. This is where I’ll probably be heading between Christmas and New Year’s, if there’s enough snow that is.

You can see the difference between the 28th of November and the 1st of December. Let’s hope this Winter is going to be just as good as last year’s.

Today I was at a TEDx event in Amsterdam. TED is a conference held twice a year (once a year in California and once a year in Oxford) and the TEDx events are independently organized version of the main TED conferences. TED is about ‘ideas worth spreading’ and if this is the first time you’ve heard about TED, make sure to head to TED.com right after reading this blog entry and view some of the videos of the performances there.

One of the more interesting speakers today at TEDx Amsterdam (in the Tropical Institute) was Kevin Kelly. Although I’m not such a big fan of Kevin (he did found the Wired magazine, so what’s not to like about him, you might say), he did have a few good quotes to take away for us; one of them I thought was worth mentioning here, especially since I’m dealing with a lot with something slightly related these days. Kevin’s quote (paraphrased slightly):

The response to a bad should be a better idea, rather than no idea at all. So throw away the precautionary principle

In Europe, we live by the precautionary principle a lot. It states that unless undeniable proof has been given that a certain action will not result in irreversible damage to the environment, society of people, one should not pursue such action, unless the ones advocating such action can actually deliver this undeniable proof.

A good example is the discussion as of late about Carbon Capture and Storage (or CCS). CCS is a technology to capture cabron-dioxide from power plants (amongst others) and storing the carbon-dioxide under ground. This technology (in addition to pursuing other and cleaner technologies such as generating power from wind, solar and tidal sources) could help alleviate the planet from the carbon-dioxide burden. Storing carbon-dioxide under ground is always better than just emitting it into the air.

A lot of projects related to CCS are being developed right now and one of the leaders in this technology is Royal Dutch Shell. The company wants to start capturing CO2 and store it under ground in a village in the Netherlands called Barendrecht. The locals object to this idea on the premise of it not being safe enough. “I don’t want CO2 in my backyard”, is their response (small side note here: the CO2 is actually stored more than 2km under ground, not just meters below the people’s garden terrasses).

While I’m all in favor of renewable energy and I think it’s a shame the Dutch government is planning on constructing multiple new coal-fired powerplants, I think CCS is a technology we absolutely need to avoid the otherwise invetitable; climate change that will ruin the way we occupy this planet.

The precautionary principle works wonderfully in theory; if and only if you have the resources and knowledge to fully predict everything that’s going to happen in the next few hundred years and the problems you’re facing are only of minor scale. The problem we’re facing however is not of a minor scale; it’s major and if we don’t do something now, we’ll ruin our entire planet.

If we would have used the precautionary principle in the early 19th century when the steam engine ignited the industrial revolution, we would have probably never quite put it to use at such a large scale as we did. We could have never predicted or proven in any way with the resources and knowledge we had back then what industrialization would be causing. We’ve filled the air with an amount of CO2 the planet cannot cope with, or at least not without getting a serious fever.

Sometimes, if, with humanity, we face challenges that are greater than your everyday decision, then maybe, sometimes, we have let go of the precautionary principle and for once, take our chances. Note that I’m not saying we should take reckless decisions betting our entire future, rather do everything in our power to make sure nothing goes wrong and then just take our chances.

With CCS, as with many other issues related to climate change, we’ll probably never know entirely for sure how things will work out. We’ll probably never know if the carbon-dioxide we’re going to store underground is never going to come up again.

With electric vehicles, it’s somewhat the same. We know that electric cars in cleaner if we generate the power from renewable sources and the Dutch government recognizes this, by giving lots of subsidies to the sector. If however we continue to generate the power our electric cars need in a polluting manner, it’s not going to work. We also do not have the recycling capacity ready yet for all these batteries electric cars will actually produce. But sitting still and continuing our current habit of burning oil to get us from A to B is not going to be work either.

If it’s a bad idea, or if it’s not immediately clear that in all circumstances we can think of it’s going to work, we’d better come up with something better, rather than no idea at all. Because I for one know for sure that sitting still is not going to help us either.

A few weeks ago I was in San Francisco visiting my friend Lars. I still had some frequent flyer miles left after the insane amount of traveling I did the last three to four years and gratefully used these to get myself to San Francisco on a business class flight.

The first few days I went kiteboarding a bit. There’s this great place in Half Moon Bay, right in the harbor. It’s a crazy spot with people kiting right in the middle of the boats in the harbor. There’s a small launch zone there and it’s all quite tacky, but once you’re on the water it’s great; it’s butter flat to plenty of room for tricks!

The second day of kiteboarding I went to Bodega Bay up North. Normally, the people kite in the little pond on the North side of the little stretch of land, but the winds this time were coming from a Southerly direction, so I opted for going out on the ocean side. Winds ranging from 20 to 30 knots made this quite a fun experience. Lars also dropped by later that day, but then, the winds had already died down a lot. Too bad for him, but I still had a great day! Later that night we had dinner in Nick’s Cove in Tomales. Great place, definitely something I’ll have to return to some day!

The week I spent working and meeting with people. I met up with Rod Johnson (the guy I founded SpringSource with some 5 years ago) and with Warner Philips, one of the partners from Tendris, who’s currently living in Merin City.

Saturday, on Lars’ birthday, we went for a sailing trip on the Bay.

First, Vidya and me toured San Francisco to find some original herring (as described in a blog entry from a few years back) at a shop called Lehr. Then we took some champagne and the next morning, we went to Sausalito to pick up the boat.

The trip was awesome. The bay is a great place to do sailing and obviously with the scenery including Alcatraz, the SF skyline, the Bay Bridge and not to forget the Golden Gate Bridge, it was simply *great*!

We drank the champagne on the boat (since I was the skipper, I couldn’t drink too much obviously ) and tasted the herring. This was not as good as the original Dutch herring, but then again, we were at the other side of the globe, eating this Dutch delicacy, with freshly sliced onions. (more pictures on Picasa).

On the last day before I went home, we went to Sherman Island to do some kiteboarding. Normally, the thermal really blows there (ranging from 20 to 35 knots), but since it was already the middle of October, the chances of winds being above 15 knots were quite slim. After about 4 hours of waiting, almost having given up already, the wind picked up however and we had a great session of about 2 hours, just before dusk.

Ruben Lenten has been here a few times too. Once in 2006 when he even got in a fight with some locals (have a look at around 5m00).

Last week, I visited Warner Philips, one of the partners of Tendris, based out of San Francisco. Despite the excellent coffee culture (at least nowadays) in the United States, Tendris USA have their own espresso machine in their offices on 2nd Street. The machine is a Nespresso machine and after having pushed the button I had a short conversation with the office manager about the Nespresso. She absolutely hated it and on top of that was wondering how environmentally friendly the Nespresso cups were. Her reasoning was that due to all the packaging, you could better use normal (filter) coffee.

Fast forward to this morning. I was on the plane, having a conversation with a director for sustainable product design for Alcan, a large manufacturer of packaging products. He suggested that while the Nespresso cups do increase the amount of packaging, using them was still a lot better than using normal coffee when looking at the total lifecycle (either in an espresso machine, or when using to make filter coffee). Apparently to produce one Nespresso cup, one only needs 6 grams of coffee, whereas for a cup of coffee from an regular espresso machine, you need 10 to 12 grams of coffee. Quite a difference and exactly this difference is what makes up for the packaging in the Nespresso cups, according to the German guy from Alcan.

Last Java Meetup was a great success with two short presentations. Although I’m not that much into development anymore, I still like to see all my old friends, so we’re hosting another meetup next October 30th. This time, we’ll have two presentations again. We have one confirmed presentation and are still working on another one.

The one confirmed presentation is from Peter Veentjer and will be about Software Transactional Memory and a project Peter is hosting at Google Code called Multiverse.

Soon, we’ll also confirm the other one.

No registration is required and this time, the venue will be a little more quiet than the last, so we can all safely enjoy the presentations .

So, mark your calendar with the following details!

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Although today was a pretty nice day, and autumn has only just started, I am already looking forward to the winter season. Why? Well, for three reasons basically.

First of all, winter is the time of year wind speeds reach their maximum and for kiteboarding, wind is probably the only thing that matters. Ruben Lenten, our Dutch kiteboarding hero, recently posted a new vid up on the Mystic kiteboarding site. It’s called Stormsjees 3.0 and is one in the series of Stormsjees movies he’s done. Too bad Mystic doesn’t allow for it to be embedded on this blog, so instead I’ll just embed another vid, this time from Eddy Lansink, shot on the same day as the footage for Ruben’s Stormsjees movie was taken.

The second reason is skiing. I’ve been skiing a lot last winter and conditions where in one word amazing. It hasn’t snowed that much since 10 years or so. The background you’re seeing right now on my blog (if you’re not reading it through an RSS reader) is the mountain above our house in Italy, pictured last winter. For those of you with a big screen, on the right-hand side you can see a bunch of tracks made by off-piste skiers. The skiers walk up the road and pass our house after which they walk on for another 2 hours or so and then ski downhill.

I’ll be heading to Italy a few times this winter again hopefully.

The last reason I want winter to start again is because of work. The winter season is always the season I get a lot of stuff done. I hope I don’t get too much stuff done, because that would mean I can’t spend a lot of time kiteboarding or skiing .