This issue only effects new subscriptions, account upgrades or renewals.

Don't worry, we've received your payment and as soon as PayPal fixes these issues we'll process the backlog as quickly as possible. We understand and share your frustration on this issue. Sorry!

It seems awareness of how web applications can add value to your organization begins to increase in the Netherlands and that is great news for customers and vendors alike.

• When creating a new time entry, sometimes you would have to click the start timer button twice.
• Fixed some issues when you have a lot of different time lines on your time sheet.
• The title bar will now show you have an active timer, so it is easier to see if you have a timer running.
• Improved the feedback about when a time sheet is stored, or when it is being stored to the server.

I hope this increases your experience with the time sheet.

No mail has been lost and we'll do our best to get to your question as soon as we can.

Update:
It seems GMail is working again and we can finally dive into our backlog. Thanks for your patience.

The city center is one of the really highlights of Europe. Amsterdam was in the 17th century a world power in itself, and the unbelievable riches at that time resulted in a marvelous and large old city center, very well preserved and still to enjoy. A walk runs from the medieval center, pieces of the old city wall, along the famous canals, China town, the former Jewish district, not to mention a bit of the famous Red Light District.

As a matter of fact, Amsterdam is an impossible city. Around 1200 the piece of land was a swamp, everything sunk in the mud. An almost inaccessible harbor. No direct connection with the North Sea - which was not realized until the 19th century. Nevertheless Amsterdam became one of the most important cities in the world, a major science and cultural center. Since 1650 Amsterdam with 200.000 inhabitants was the third largest city in Europe, after London and Paris. How could that happen?

During the walk you learn about key aspects of the history of the city, while walking along the highlights. They do not tell 'everything'. Their guiding is "light", but highly competent! With explanations about what you really see.

Guided walks Amsterdam.
Guided tour of the Amsterdam Medieval Center.

The Dutch, who were in 12th place in 2007, scored particularly well for its good infrastructure and high research budgets.

Top of the list was the US followed by Taiwan (up from 6th) and the UK. Japan fell from 2nd to 12th place. Denmark and Sweden are also strong European countries in the index taking places 4 and 5.

• Globalization and the Internet will “liberate” R&D. Ecosystems similar to America's Silicon Valley—bringing together talent, technology, venture capital and good universities, supported by a risk-taking ethos—will remain the best incubators of IT innovation. Internet-driven collaboration will partly level the playing field, however, facilitating companies’ access to skilled IT innovators and researchers wherever they are located.
• Competitive broadband markets help cultivate strong IT sectors. Without fast, reliable and secure Internet access, technology firms cannot interact effectively with partners nor can they sell their services online. IT industries in the index top tier all derive substantial benefit from the high-quality networks developed through competition, but more telecoms liberalization is needed in less developed regions to spur infrastructure development.

So again, we see that the Internet is a essential tool for business. What can the Internet do for your business?

An investigation is currently under way into the failure of the project and should be completed at the end of this year.

The project was being carried out by in-house staff and computer services firm Logica and was canceled in June after 30 months of work.

Don't tell me nobody saw that coming.

It reminds me of a story about an IT project gone wrong for the NHS that Clarke Ching once used to illustrate what issues any software development project faces.

© Clarke Ching 2005

The National Audit Office has identified changes to specifications after the award of IT contracts as a key reason for regular delays and overspends on government projects.

That's from 2005, I wonder what different conclusions turn up this time around?

In short, the best way to down a software or web development project can be accomplished by any organization in three simple steps:

• Think of everything in advance

• Fight change vehemently

• Then lie about the consequences and blame everyone else

What other software or web development projects do you know of that have gone horribly wrong?

When it comes to internet use, the Dutch are ahead of most of the rest of Europe with eight out of ten people regularly online, according to a study by Forrester Research.

The report also shows that Dutch 16 to 34-year-olds use the internet for an average 16 hours a week. Only the Scandinavians are online as long.

The latest Comscore reports give slightly different numbers and even show a decrease of 1% of internet usage in the Netherlands. Netherlands has had the highest broadband Internet penetration in the world and remains steadily in the number one position. Internet access in Holland is completely saturated.

Other countries in Europe are moving up fast, showing more people online, more often consuming more data and services.

While online last year, the Dutch spent an average of €365 per head buying everything from secondhand comic books to houses, according to another study also out on Monday.

The total amount spent online through sites like Marktplaats.nl is estimated at €4.6bn in 2007, research group Blauw said. This figure does not include purchases made through webshops.

Even though the reports vary, on the whole you can draw one conclusion:

If you're not making it your business to have an active online presence, you're losing money to competitors who are.

The Phantom Writers have a few tips for moving your off-line business on-line.

A few years ago off line businesses would never have dreamed of bringing their businesses into the Internet arena but now marketing has changed so rapidly that businesses cannot afford to ignore the Internet.

What is the most heard excuse?

1. My business is local and the Internet is global
2. I have a wholesale business I cannot sell hard goods on the Internet
3. Websites are expensive and what do I do with one anyway?
4. Internet "surfers" are not interested in my offline goods

Here are some tips from the article to help you think about:

1. Local businesses have local customers that still use the Internet to research their purchases. If you're not showing up on the net, they'll eventually move to a competitor that is.

2. You can make use of drop shippers and fulfillment houses that can be contacted online. Drop shippers can deliver directly to your customer and give you the wholesale prices. Fulfillment houses can take care of your inventory and shipping to your customers.

3. A good professionally designed and developed website works to help you and your customer. Websites can be designed and built for a very reasonable price by using experts like us. Don't think of your website as a online brochure or an online shop only. Your customers are used to having Internet tools to interact with people and companies. A great way to use your web presence is to help increase customer service levels. Very cost effective. Also new web techniques can be used to help you better understand your customers and to forge a relationship.

4. Internet surfers are actually your own customers but in a different place. They are serious shoppers and expect the high standards they have been used to offline. Your website will provide them with all this and more.

What other tips can you share to move your offline business online effectively?

The museum’s director Director Wim Pijbes says that the contract for showing the work is the strictest he has ever signed. “The skull has to be placed in a dark room without anything else around it. Everything we have to do is in the contract. We can't even mention who the owner is...”

The skull, that of an 18th century European covered in platinum and 8,601 diamonds, was sold in 2007 to a group of investors for € 75 m, the largest sum ever paid for a work by a living artist.

The sculpture is titled "For The Love of God". The title of the piece comes from Hirst's mother who asked her son, “For the love of God, what are you going to do next?”

For Hirst all his art is about death. This piece was influenced by Mexican skulls encrusted in turquoise. “I remember thinking it would be great to do a diamond one — but just prohibitively expensive” he recalls. “Then I started to think — maybe that’s why it is a good thing to do. Death is such a heavy subject, it would be good to make something that laughed in the face of it.”

Later he was quoted saying: “What have I done? Because it’s going to need high security all its life.”

What do you think of the Diamond Skull?

He writes in a recent post about That Old Time Software that he's had it with complex software:

I also think that we’re at a stage now where software interfaces just have to be more immediately intuitive than ever before, have to tell a story with extreme compactness and on first pass. There’s still a long way to go in raising the bar for good interfaces, but it’s much higher now even than where it sat at the end of the last century. In the intervening years, there have been too many good interfaces — still not enough in general, but enough to show us that software design can accomplish much more with much less.

He goes on to signify the end of an era.

Web applications have tremendously abridged the opportunity window for all new software, whether it resides on the desktop or the network.

Much of this is not news to many readers, I’m sure. But sometimes, in the midst of change, it’s easy to overlook the fact that we’ve moved from one era to another. Maybe two years ago it would still have been passable to ship an application like that. Today, it’s puzzlingly anachronistic. In a few more years, it’ll just be completely unacceptable.

Of course I agree with Khoi's vision. It is totally unacceptable to produce and ship customer hostile web applications or software.

However I keep seeing complex feature loaded unusable web applications come to the market only to frustrate users and waste clients' valuable time and money.

What customer hostile web applications have you run into lately? Link it up!

Update: Maintenance has been completed
Please let us know at if you have any problems.

This release addresses:
- Increased internal accuracy of the application
- Increased consistency between the UI and the back end
- Decreased number of background http requests needed in the time sheet
- Various minor issues

Thanks for your patience, we hope you continue to enjoy Simple web based on-line time tracking with 14Dayz.

This is a Doeo. Doeos are sneaky, pink and square little things that have the tendency to appear suddenly in unexpected places. They disappear just as suddenly and as quickly and for no apparent reason whatsoever. Doeos are quick, nimble, cheerful and of course utterly evil.

In this action packed and spectacular game by Raitendo your objective is to gather 100 Doeos in 40 seconds over 5 splendidly designed levels until you find and capture the Doeo King (Apparently they have a King) and finally put an end to the madness.

To gather a Doeo, just touch it with the mouse pointer. This is a fun game to help you improve your hand/eye coordination and mousing skills. Important for any professional takes their on-line presence seriously. (Okay, okay, you got me; it's just an excuse to play a game on Friday :)

Mouse over the Doeo below and find the Play button to start the game.

Playing tip: You don;t have to click the Doeos, just touching them with the mouse is enough...

Anyway, cheers and thanks to Marcus Richert for this well Designed and very original game! Happy Weekend!

To help some fellow developers in the future who are wondering why is PayPal displaying the payment screen in the wrong language here is the missing documentation.

PayPal now uses country codes instead of language codes. Which is basically a false assumption by PayPal. It is often made by developers. In lots of countries two or more languages are spoken. Some countries even have two or more official languages.

PayPal uses the url parameter lc (language code)
lc =
US
GB
NL
DE
IT
FR


These are now country codes, before they used to be language codes so setting the English language would be done by putting lc=en. Now to set it to English just use lc=US for US residents or lc=GB for people from the United Kingdom. This will also pre-select the country in the pull down menu for your customer, so it's not all bad. :)
Also, it seems they now need the code to be in upper case where as before lower case seemed to work fine. Hope this helps.