I'm sure most of you have seen the video clip of France's Zinedine Zidane headbutting Italy's Marco Materazzi by now. This movie compiles some of the more interesting animation clips created to make light of what happened. Add that to the crazy saxaphone music in the background and you get a damn funny clip.

When implementing an RSS feed on this site, we ran into an intersting problem. The feeds worked perfectly on my development machine and on our development server. However, once the site was placed on the live server, the feeds no longer worked.

After searching and trying to debug the issue for quite some time, I noticed I was running Ruby 1.8.2 locally and the server had Ruby 1.8.4. Pulling up IRB on the server, I discovered that 1.8.4 has an RSS library. The RSS namespace I was using on this site (www.plexusweb.com/rss/news) was conflicting with the one built into Ruby. I changed the namespace to be Feeds and all was well with the world again. (www.plexusweb.com/feeds/news)

So just a note of warning. Watch for namespace conflicts!

My friend and co-worker Adam Parrott is going under the laser today in Gainesville, GA. After waffling for more than 6 years he decided to make the jump and get LASIK.

Adam has the kind of eyes that benefit the most from LASIK... the kind that are basically worthless without heavy correction from glasses or contacts. The same kind of eyes I had when I had LASIK done in 1999.

As of right now, Adam's quality of life should have gotten a major boost. Amazing that such a dramatic change can happen in a matter of minutes.

P.S. You can see an actual LASIK procedure on the Affinity Health web site.

About two months ago we started using an online project management software called Basecamp. I�d considered using it for about a year but I found it very difficult to commit to spending money on a monthly basis for online software, considering we have the capability to develop our own software internally. I've always preached to my clients - don't design your busines around software, design software around your business. I have ignored my own advice.

Nevertheless, I caved. I am pleasantly surprised mostly. The folks at 37signals have done a great job with Basecamp, for the most part. There are a few weaknesses, which I very quickly pointed out to them - but I have to remember I am breaking my own rule - i am learning to design my business around a software.

So if I decided to commit the very little free time we have to building our own "basecamp" what would i do differently. The folks at 37signals have already heard this from me..but nothing wrong with saying it again.

Optional Deadlines for To Do Items
To be a succussful business, you should have lots of residual work from your existing clients. That work usually involves regular functionality updates, content updates (for those clients who opt out of CMS functions), graphical changes, etc. Most of these small, but numerous changes are entered into Basecamp as �To Do� items as they are not large enough to warrant �milestones�. But if I have 15 or 20 tasks to complete for 4-5 different clients and assign to 3-4 employees I just have to enter them all and noone is ever reminded they are due or overdue for that matter. We are logged into basecamp at 4-5 times a day but a reminder of to do items would be nice. Being able to enter deadlines would create a trigger by which to send email reminders.

E-mail Notifications for Completed To do items
I have 50-60 to do items entered in our system at all times spread over multiple clients. I would like to report back to clients when items have been completed. However, because the work is spread over 8 employees, I have no idea what has been completed because i'm never notified. It would be nice to have some notification to the system administrator when tasks have been completed - this would make it possible for me to report back to clients in a timely manner instead of when I remember to check to see what is done.

Better reports and Exports
I love the reporting capability on Basecamp. it is very easy to use, does some cool ajax stuff, and is overall a great product. One of the major weaknesses is the omission of the "To Do List". The "To Do Item" is exported but not the name of the list it is from. Most people wonder why its important. In my case we use the "To Do List" to identify the billing group and the "To Do Item" as the actual task. For example we have templates for our to do list. An example would be "Content Implementation" Under that list we have three default items � Cut and Paste Content, Refine Presentation, Add Meta Tags, and Add Title Tags. For billing purposes in Quickbooks the "Item" on an invoice is directly relational to the "To Do List" in Basecamp. The Description field in quickbooks is directly relational to the "To Do Item". Displaying and exporting the "To Do List" would make it much easier to enter items into quickbooks quickly, and the next natural progression would be quickbooks exports. Perhaps that is already on the slate...

Tighter Integration of Milestones and To Do�s
You can associate To Do Lists with Milestones and in those cases, when all to do items are completed the Milestone should be marked as completed. We will often times have milestones that have been done for days that just stay on the main list because we forgot to check it off even though all items associated with it had been done.

Progress Billing Capability
We have up to 40 projects going on concurrently at any point in time. Some of these projects are fixed bid where the time is billed in set intervals, some are hourly work and the time is billed monthly, and some are fixed bid but they are large enough to warrant progress billing on a bi-weekly basis. I have found it difficult to keep up with what I have billed or not billed because there is no way to mark items as billed. It would be nice to easily mark items as billed so I can pull reports of just time that I have not billed for previously. This would save a good amount of time!

Having said all of this, I would not hesitate to recommend this software to pretty much any type of professional service company. It is an excellent employee motivator, time tracking, efficiency tracking, and profitability tracking tool.

It's more secure

Firefox benefits from being Open Source, basically meaning that any qualified programmer can pick at it for vulnerabilities before it's released. This way most of the dangerous holes have been sniffed out before it ever a final ever gets downloaded to your drive.

Even the U.S. Government recommends you use something else.

It's extensible

Firefox has hundreds of handy utilities called extensions for you to choose from. They give the innovative community of Firefox users a framework to develop fun and useful extensions that enhance your browsing experience.

Some of my favorites...

• Web Developer Toolbar - A must for any Web Development professional
• ForecasFox - Updated weather integrated into your browser
• Sage - View and manage your RSS subscriptions directly in Firefox.
• Google Sync - Keep Firefox synced up across multiple machines. Works on all platforms (another reason to use Firefox).
• Google Toolbar - The power of many Google tools one click away in Firefox

Tabbed browsing

The feature that fundamentally changed my browsing habits and experience. I was so tired of sorting through all of those IE windows. Firefox to the rescue. View multiple sites in one browser window minimizing that desktop clutter.

If that isn't enough you can learn more at Mozilla.com