Well, I have been a Republican since I immigrated to the United States in 1991. It was a simple choice for me really, I just did not believe that people that don't work hard should enjoy the same benefits in life as those that work their butt off.  There has to be a difference between these two categories.  I could never force someone to work extra hours or study very hard to become somebody but I reject the notion that they deserve to be at the same level of standard of life of those that do.

That said, this is the first time I am contemplating voting for a Democratic President, Barak Obama.  I like this guy!

President of the United States of America for me is not really a Job, it is a title.  I expect the President to be surrounded by a lot of very smart people that are expert on the subject matter at hand to advise him.  My expectation is also that the President be smart enough to listen to them and make the correct choice based on their feedback.

For me, the President of the USA has to have "PRESENCE", when he or she speaks, people listen!  it is a gift, not everyone has.  I expect when my President travels abroad, citizens of other countries receive him in awe, respect and admiration.

You have to be able to tell that you are listening to the most powerful man in the world from the most significant country in the world.

Barak Obama gives me that feeling.  Very elegant speaker and a convincing one for sure.

MCCain stands for all that I believe in, I am with him on Iraq (I think I am qualified on this as I spent more than half my life in the middle east and I know how things work there).  I am also with him on the latest economy issues like bailing out consumers on the mortgage crisis.  Why? Why should the US Government bail citizens out that made bad choices in getting ridiculous mortgage deals that they can not afford, why should I be paying for that?  And what about my mortgage and my good choices, I get nothing for that?

So it was hard this year to find an easy answer of how to vote, until I decided to do what I am good at and use numbers:

Capital Gains Tax:

• MCCain -> 15% (no Change)
• Obama -> 28%
• Clinton -> 24%

How does this affect you? If you sell your home and make a profit, you will pay 28% of your gain on taxes. If you are heading toward retirement and would like to down-size your home or move into  a retirement community, 28% of the money you make from your home will go to taxes. This proposal will adversely affect the elderly who are counting on the income from their homes as part of their retirement income.

Dividend Tax:

• MCCain -> 15% (no change)
• Obama -> 39.6%
• Clinton -> 39.6%

How will this affect you? If you have any money invested in stock market, IRA, mutual funds, college funds, life insurance, retirement accounts, or anything that pays or reinvests dividends, you will now be paying nearly 40% of the money earned on taxes if Obama or Clinton become president. The experts predict that "Higher tax rates on dividends and capital gains would crash the stock market yet do absolutely nothing to cut the deficit."

Income Tax:

• MCCain -> No Change
• Obama -> Reversion of pre-Bush tax cuts (Very Significant)
• Clinton -> Reversion of pre-Bush tax cuts (Very significant)

Inheritance Tax:

• MCCain -> 0%
• Obama -> Keep the inheritance tax
• Clinton -> Keep the inheritance tax

How does this affect you? Many families have lost businesses, farms and ranches, and homes that have been in their families for generations because they could not afford the inheritance tax. Those willing their assets to loved ones will not only lose them to these taxes.

New Taxes being proposed by both Clinton and Obama:

• New government taxes proposed on homes that are more than 2400 square feet
• New gasoline taxes (as if gas weren't high enough already)
• New taxes on natural resources consumption (heating gas, water, electricity)
• New taxes on retirement accounts
• and last but not least....
  New taxes to pay for socialized medicine so we can receive the same level of medical care as other third-world countries!!!

So although I like Obama as a person very much, I am afraid I can't afford him!  Go MCCain!

I usually try my luck here on my blogs first when I need help in finding a service that is needed for my company.  So here it goes

I am looking for a phone system for our new offices in Santa Cruz that is not based on regular phones but VOIP.  I looked at Vonage but it was not geared towards business, as you can't have a phone attendant to request pushing a specific extension to reach a department.  I also looked at Packet8, it was a good solution but very expensive as you will have to have a full line for each employee that needs a phone on their desk to make calls, it came out to about $350 per month + $1400 startup fee for 9 phones in the office with a fax line.

They suggested having only 3 phones in the office, one for sales, one in the conference room and one for management, the rest of the team can use the phone in the conference room which sounded lame to me to ask employees to go to the conference room to make a call or use their cell phone. That costs about $185 per month.

Anyone heard of a different company that can make this work for us?

Thanks for your suggestion in advance

This week, I have been at two corporations in San Antonio, Texas and Birmingham, Alabama teaching TestComplete 6.0, a SOLID automation testing tool that is gaining extreme momentum and acceptance in the industry.

I completed the training tonight for the Alabama company, they were truly terrific, very nice people and I enjoyed their company for the last few days, while teaching TestComplete 6.0.  It was emotional for me personally as they use Delphi as their main development tool.  Seeing Delphi running on their machine, and how successful their product is, I felt proud!  It has been almost 3 years since I wrote any code in Delphi for any customer but I have to say, every time I see Delphi code or get together with Delphi developers, it always bring a sweet spot to my heart.

I head home in few hours after a long week in airports and teaching every day.

Next week, I head to beautiful SYDNEY, Australia to teach there as well for 1 week, I will try to blog more and keep this blog alive and interesting. 

Cheers!

Falafel is partnering with Microsoft to offer this free half day seminar at the beautiful Saint Claire hotel in downtown San Jose, CA to celebrate the release of Visual Studio 2008, LINQ, WPF, WCF, WF and other exciting technologies.

I just got back yesterday from a week long training sessions at Xerox in Rochester, NY.  I enjoyed my week there.  The weather was great, unexpectedly, and the city was calm with plenty of wonderful people everywhere I went.

TestComplete 6 behaved nicely after its release 3 weeks ago and proved to be a great addition to any quality assurance team worldwide.

Thank you Xerox! and thank you Rochester for a great week!

Our friends at AutomatedQA just released TestComplete 6.0 on Wednesday September 26th 2007.  Congratulations to the whole team!

I was in Irvine during that time teaching a TestComplete 5.0 class for 3 days.

TestComplete 6 adds significant new features to the award winning testing tool, from testing 64 bit applications, to testing popular 3rd party controls in Winforms and ASP.NET applications, plus improved Web Testing environment.

Kudos and Cheers to the AQ team!

You would think that finding a good web based Help desk for a company is not that big of a deal.  You Google on "Support Help Desk Web Application" and you get enough results that could take up the entire week in research for finding the one that really works.

Well, I made the mistake of choosing a good product from a bad company few months ago.  I researched for nearly a month seven different companies and their products to satisfy our needs at Falafel Software in having a simple ticket based support system on the web that also has a simple knowledgebase system that can help our customers and users find and request help quickly and easily.  Not too much to ask, right?

First of all, I installed all seven products and played with each one for at least 2 to 4 hours.  For some reason the Help Desk industry fell in love with PHP and MySQL long time ago that it is difficult to find a Help Desk out there that is not based on these technologies.  I have nothing against PHP or MySQL, if the product works, great!, I am ready to install and go for it.

I installed PHP 5.2 and MySQL 5, very easy to do especially if you know you way around config files and command line screens.

The truth of the matter is that for $500 I was able to purchase the FULL SupportSuite from Kayako (www.kayako.com) that looked, felt and behaved as the winner between all the products that I researched.  The company is based in India and the product is pretty mature in its third revision.  I implemented the support system for Falafel and released it on the site.  It looked good, worked well and I needed less than 8 hours of work to customize it and configure for the entire staff to go live which is less than I expected.

The problems started to occur when we started using the product.  It was very apparent to the team here that this product is not ready for prime time and that the team in India has never heard of the term "Quality Assurance" based on the reported bugs and forum messages that you could see for yourself at their company's site.

The final experience was 3 weeks ago when Kayako released a new "Stable" update called 3.11 where they broke the product and caused our support system to stop working on the Live Site.  We opened a support ticket with their team as "Critical" and it took a week of ridiculous answers on their system to finally admit that the update has a major problem. Then a second week to come up with a solution, which fixed the original problem and killed the system notification subsystem and corrupted the database. That of course, includes about 25 discussion threads with their team that could not get them to understand the urgency of the matter.  They concluded that the issue was based on my configuration, which was awkward especially after seeing how many people on the forums were having the same problem.

Anyway, the essence of this post is not really to bash any company, that is not my intent, it is however my intent to share with you the fact that it is not enough to look for a good product when you need one, it is also important to spend some time on that company's web site, forums, discussion groups to see how they treat their customers and how they release products and revisions.

For us, we decided that this product is not at par with what we need to support our customers best.

So I ask you, do you know of a product that would allow submission of Support tickets online and also allow for a Knowledgebase based on categories and finally it must have a good notification system for staff and customers.

Thanks for any input

I am very excited to be asked to speak at this year's DevReach conference in Sofia, Bulgaria on October 1st and 2nd. I am presenting two sessions this year, the first is "LINO on LINQ" and the second one is "Silverlight, Flash on Steroids".

I am traveling with my colleague, John Waters (Falafel CTO), who will be speaking there as well on "Creating a billion dollar ERP system using Telerik technology".

Spending some time with the Telerik team in Bulgaria and some of the speakers I got to know through speaking at conference worldwide like (Steve Forte, Richard Campbell, Chad Hower and Brian Noyes) will be a treat!

Consulting companies, like Falafel Software, during their start up years do everything they can to get as many accounts as possible and fill the pipeline with work for all their developers and architects.  It is a matter of stability and security to know that the pipe is full and work is available and secure for at least 6 months into the future. To ask for more than 6 months of security I always thought is crazy especially in our beloved Software industry in the USA and especially in the Silicon Valley.  We, at Falafel, on the other hand have been very fortunate for the last 5 years.  The company has grown substantially every year while we’re having fun and enjoying the latest and greatest of technologies.
Once a small company reaches a level of maturity and decent number of accounts, I find a lot of them prefer to only handle bigger companies for business.  So you start with the Mom & Pop shops, then you get a couple of SMBs, transition to medium size, and all of a sudden find yourself contracting to Fortune 500 then Fortune 100 with some luck, personality, connections, hard work and quality people.
I remember the days when people used to call and say “Hi Lino, I am Mr. Foo and looking for someone to help me with a bug in my Delphi code, can you help? How much do you charge? How long will t take you to fix it?
I usually replied “I need to know the nature of the problem first”.  Then they said “Sure I will send you everything, I just wanted to know how much and how long it will take to fix it before I send you anything”
I know it might sound funny but it is the truth about consulting with individuals or very small companies. Budget and resources do not come easy and everyone has to watch their pennies.You end up fixing code, cleaning up code, recommending better architecture and all of a sudden the customer is sweating.  “Why did you fix line # 14, I only asked you to look in the first 10 lines of code only?”

Anyway, you get the picture. Life goes on and you find yourself bidding on multi-million dollar projects for fortune 500 companies where you control the project as long as you deliver on milestones and everyone is happy. You end up making a lot of money and the customer is a huge reference for other major projects to other fortune 500 companies.
Soon after getting the company completely saturated with major projects and employees are working on multi projects at the same time because we can’t find enough quality people to hire in time, you get the call from another Mr. Foo, “Hi Lino, can you look into my ASP.NET code and tell me why it is not working?” How much do you charge? How long will it take you to make the code work? :)

My blog here is about a very dangerous and subtle change in any small company that can cause serious consequences:
To Small Business or not to Small Business?
Some senior and very respected members of my team would vote NO on taking this kind of projects and I would totally respect their call on that as we are faced with several dilemmas, first, we have no resources to place on that kind of projects, second, it is not worth the headache, for $1000 probably, this customer will take most of your time for several days by asking for status every 2 hours and questioning why did issue 2 take 1 hour more than issue 1 and stuff like that where it will cost the company more time to reply to these issues than the revenue generated.

Ok, if you read this blog till here you probably already know what my recommendation is about the subject, well, you are wrong! :)

Most of my multi-million dollar deals all started years ago with 2 to 5 hours of consulting authorized via a very small PO.  I did my job right, the customer was happy and thenext project was on its way from same customer. 6 months later we have 2 people full time working with the customer.  5 years later, we have 7 people working full time at customer site that went from start up to a half a billion dollar company.
I remember sitting in the cafeteria in Frankfurt, Germany after a session I gave at the Borland conference in late 90s when a gentleman approached me asking if he can “pick my brain” about a COM+ issue he was having. I accepted of course and ended up having a 2 hour chit-chat and coding fest.  We got the problem solved, he bought me a drink and was very happy. I was happy to help as well.Later that week   I was hired by his company (one of the biggest financial companies in Europe) to help with the architecture of their new .NET based systems.

What I am trying to say, don’t forget how you got to where you are today!
One of the main reasons I have so many of these great accounts today is because when these accounts were small, none of the major consulting firms (big names) would even bother taking the time.
So I say “YES” if you are Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, EarthBound Farms, Accenture, etc… welcome to Falafel Software (All these are customers already :) ) but if you are Mr. Foo and need help making your company the next Microsoft or the next Hewlett Packard, I say “YES” as well, we would love to help you out. Just, please don’t ask me “how much and how long?” before I see your problem :)

Cheers
Lino