Location:

Type: Full-time
Experience: Mid-Senior level
Functions: Other, Information Technology
Industries: Internet, Information Technology and Services, Program Development, Marketing and Advertising

Job Description:
Comrads is looking for experienced PHP Programmers! Are you that motivated and creative PHP web developer with a passion for Internet? Do you have affinity with marketing automation and web-based applications such as DAM, MOM and MRM? Do you want a challenging job and be part of a motivated team that continues to develop and progress? Then we are pleased to get in contact with you.

We offer a dynamic job within an enthusiastic and young organization with an informal atmosphere and good, market-based benefits.

Skills:
Minimal 5 years of experience within a similar job position.

Excellent knowledge of:
PHP, MySQL, AJAX, Scripting (o.a.JavaScript), XML(-RPC), HTML, Flash and Actionscript.

Experience with:
Object-oriented programming (OOP), ITIL, RUP, Adobe Flex, Zend Studio, SVN, Adobe Acrobat, Dreamweaver, PDF-Lib, InDesign, QuarkXpress, Photoshop, Illustrator, Hosting & web server management (Apache), Operating Systems (Mac OSX, Red Hat Linux, Windows).

Company Description:
Comrads is a independant marketing application service provider and we support our clients to execute their marketing communications as effectively and efficiently as possible by means of marketing automation. This enables our clients to realize more return on their marketing budget and are able to focus on their core activities. Therefore, Comrads implements web-based marketing applications to support the marketing and communications processes of our clients. Based on an ASP-model we develop and implement tailored brand & asset management platforms, Web-to-print modules, Document management systems, webshops, etc. Interested? Then we are pleased to get in contact with you.

Additional Information:
Local candidates only, no relocation (Amsterdam Area, Netherlands).
No third party applications.
Acquisition to this vacancy is not appreciated!

I usually just use IMAP for my e-mail within Outlook on my office computer and IMAP with Thunderbird when I'm home on my laptop with Ubuntu, but my laptop gave me some troubles at home so I took my girlfriends laptop and fired up my webmail.

Damn!, Squirellmail is so incredibly ugly and gui-unfriendly compared to Horde or any other webmail project you come across. Not only do the themes stink, but it misses out on several basic functionality like sieve filtering and per-user SpamAssassin preferences.

I had some spare time on my hands so I went looking for a Squirellmail alternative. Very quickly you will find that there aren't that many (good) webmail clients around. There is GoogleMail, Horde, Roundcube, Zimbra and a few lesser known ones. GoogleMail isn't an option since we don't like to host our e-mail elsewhere, Zimbra isn't because it is more of an collaboration suite then it is a webmail client and Horde isn't an option once you compare it to Roundcube

RoundCube is an excellent open source experience for an AJAX webmail, and what will really attract you to Roundcube is its advanced user interface with drag and drop functionnalities which make it very easy to organize your email. RoundCube Webmail is written in PHP and requires a MySQL database. The user interface is fully skinnable using XHTML and CSS 2. Roundcube also offers extensions in the form of plugins. This enables you to use SpamAssassin options per-user, Sievefiltering per-user, etc.

Roundcube was definitely the webmail program the fitted our needs most. We quickly installed it next to our Squirellmail installation. The installation was super-easy and super-fast. Then installed the ManageSieve and SpamAssassin plugins and I thought we were good to go.

Then a colleague mentioned that he couldn't set a auto-reply from within RoundCube. He was planning to take a few days off and wanted to set an out-of-the-office notification. I quickly looked in the RoundCube repository for a auto-reply function but it is only available for a specific Windows mailserver. On the forums of RoundCube the programmers state that there will be no such official plugin or feature made available since they think it is not something the webmail program should manage.

I disagree.

I think users should be able to set their auto-reply message from within their webmail and not having to go trough Usermin or Webmin to do so.

Since SquirellMail DID have the auto-reply functionality available and SquirellMail also runs on PHP and MySQL I decided to just take that plugin and port it to RoundCube. I wrapped the whole thing in a RoundCube plugin format and voila, it works brilliantly.

The plugin writes a file to the users homedir where the SendMail server picks it up and fires the 'Vacation' plugin that sends an auto-reply.

Anyone who wants the plugin can download it here.

Update - If you can't use FTP to put the forward files you may try using the squirrelmail_vacation_proxy program. Not that I do not support this program nor the use of it.

You may download it here.

Update - There is now a SourceForge project concerning this plugin. You can download the files there and contribute to it as well.

Support and questions can also be put in the projects forum.

You could say that DOCSIS and EuroDOCSIS technology is to cable what DSL is (tries to be) to a traditional telephony network. The latest version of EuroDOCSIS -version 3.0- is a breakthrough technology for European cable operators and consumers. It already allow data speeds of 160 Mbps downstream and 120 Mbps.

Most remarkable about EuroDOCSIS 3.0 is that it bundles minimum 4 frequency channels of the cable network together whereas previous versions of EuroDOCSIS used only one frequency channel. This makes EuroDOCSIS 3.0 at least 4 times faster than the previous EuroDOCSIS version. As EuroDOCSIS 3.0 has no limit in how many channels it can bundle, the speed for data communications via cable will progressively increase to a multitude of 160Mbps/120Mbps.

The consumer subscriptions available have reached an astonishing 120 Mbps (6 times faster then ADSL!).

In the Netherlands the major ISP UPC is now offering the following subscriptions:

This image represents the stand-alone prices for Internet subscriptions. If you subscripe to a total package that includes television and phone you will get an additional discount on these prices.

Ziggo (another large ISP , cable provider) is now also implementing EuroDocsis 3 on a large scale and promises that they will have it available by the end July this year.

While the ADSL providers are operating at their maximum speeds and selling the 20 mbps lines for almost their costprice, the cable providers offer a better deal then the ADSL providers ever could.

UPC and Ziggo will soon launch a massive scale advertising campaign to really finish off the (A)DSL providers.

I can't wait for EuroDocsis 4 (Lab speeds at 1Gbps).

Update: 26-06-2009 - UPC launches their new commercial to give ADSL providers the final blow.

Then Windows 7 Build 7068 can out and with that I hoped to get rid of that single problem. I burned the DVD and started the upgrade procedure which stopped after just 3 minutes. Not that a success.

After an hour of trying to rescue what was left of my data (didn't make a back-up of course) I did a clean install which went really well. Not only did the installation finish in about 35 min (instead of upgrading from vista that took around 3 hours), but the resolution problem was gone as well.

I played with Build 7068 for a few weeks and I must say that some of the new features are quite impressive. There are many little enhancements that make your life just a little bit easier, like arranging windows side by side with a keyboard shortcut. I hadn't even thought of Ubuntu was it not that I wanted to show it to a friend of mine.

That was when I found out that Windows 7 completely got rid of GRUB. No booting to Ubuntu anymore. I remembered the MediaDirect button that is on my Dell laptop. It takes you to a sort of bootmenu that lets you boot a minimalistic mediacenter that is on a hidden Dell partition. I pressed the button, the MediaDirect screen came up and then everything froze.

No MediaDirect, no GRUB, and when I tried to get back into Windows 7 it said that all my partitions were gone. Thanks Microsoft.

Of course I know that this is still a beta and that some problems are to be expected and unavoidable, but this is not acceptable. This build is the last build before the Release Candidate and should not screw up your entire partition table.

In that same week Ubuntu 9.04 came out. Every time I install Ubuntu I'm suprised how easy and quick the installation is. All my drivers are automatically installed (except the closed-source Nvidia, but that is easy to fetch) and it's immediatly ready to work with.

I'm certainly not a Windows or Microsoft basher because I think most of their software is really great, but this was the last time I install a Windows Beta on my laptop (that I use every day).

p.s. Ubuntu rules

At last I took the step to start blogging. You might call it a early new year resolution.

I registered peterruiter.com last week after looking trough numerous hostingspecs at GoDaddy. Unlimited bandwidth and unlimited disk space, YaY!

I'll mock up a few articles about my search for hosting and a little comparison between the different providers.

So far I'm pretty satisfied with what I'm getting at GoDaddy so far.

Also,

I'll try to keep most of the posts in English, but occasionally you might see a lost post in Dutch since that is my native language.