I am proud to announce that we have finally finished our office renovation of the development headquarter in Ebstorf, Germany. Nearly everything is in place again so that we are 100% operational again and can now concentrate on our projects again without being disturbed by the painters or a loud saw etc.
Have a look:
Due to a problem in Microsoft’s Media Center Gallery database, mceWeather disappeared from the Media Center’s “Gallery” menu in some european countries.
Now it’s back and you can start it again easily from your Media Center “Gallery” menu even without installing:
If you like this plugin, try to convince Microsoft to add it to the Media Center Gallery in the USA. We never were able to convince them (like back in 2006 when Chris Lanier tried as well)…
At noon yesterday (Friday), we suddenly had a power outage in the whole office. The fuse always jumped out when we turned on more then 3 PCs or servers. As the painters are still working on painting the rooms, we first suspected them to have done something wrong. But they didn’t. After 2 hours searching for the problem, the electrician arrived and started searching for the problem. All employees went home as there was no work without any power.
At that point you really get hit hard by reality again and that you can’t do anything in our job without internet and power.
After another 2 hours, the electrician found the problem: a new lamp that was just attached the day before in the corridor had some cabling issues that only came out now as the lamp was switched on the whole day and got warm. If we would have not had this lamp on for so long, this problem might have never occurred!
So the guy who attached this lamp will get fired immediately! I will check twice when attaching the next lamp so such a thing could not happen again.
Yes, redecorating the offices can be a fun thing… 
The office improvement goes pretty well. Some rooms look very chaotic and dirty for some time:
We have just updated our chat bot PamBot on the servers. We have fixed the error message in Wikipedia requests (like “what is skype”) and were able to improve the conversation flow a lot. The bot is now able to react better on what you have said in your previous message. So there is a kind of “brain” which keeps the previous messages to be able to refer to those messages from you.
Additionally, we have fixed the games in PamBot: try it by typing LUCKYSLOTS, WORDPLAY or BLACKJACK.
Have fun with Pamela
We have just updated PamFax in the backend to version 2.0.14 tonight.
This update includes the following changes:
- Improved performance
- Fixed file upload for multiple files
- Added dashboard page in portal
- Improved website
- Optimized transmission reports
- Added “only send notification if an error occurs” setting to notification options
- Fixed relogin issue after sending a fax from Portal
- Group notification checked by default if more then one recipient
- Startup hint “unsent faxes” shows count of faxes, not recipients
- Improved “set password” dialog on first start
- “sent” time is only shown when fax was sent, not while it’s processed
- Improved Facebook and Salesforce.com plugin. i.e. now also show faxes from inbox
From time to time, every office needs some new paint. Now it’s time to get some fresh color into our main offices in Ebstorf, Germany. Every wall and ceiling gets new paint and then every room gets a new floor (some nice wood) as well. As we are a young and innovative company that has no time to loose, we are all still working in the offices while the painters paint around us
Some pictures of the work in progress:
In our efforts to re-brand all our websites in our new corporate design, we have now updated PamNews.com to a new and shiny design. We hope that this makes it easier to find all information you are looking for.
Want to see how the blog looked before the update? Here you are:
Any comments are welcome.
We have updated the Pamela website www.pamela.biz to a complete new look:
We made the whole site much nicer then it was before and improved the usability a lot. It’s now much easier to get the information you are looking for about Pamela and to download and then order Pamela.
The website is now also available in german. If your browser is set to german, the page will automatically open in german. But you can also switch between the languages in the bottom right corner.
Any comments are welcome.
Skype has just announced today that the Skype Extras System will not continue. This means no more third-party applications for Skype will be certified and no new extras will be added to the “Tools” -> “Extras” menu in the Skype client. All existing entries will not be removed until the certification period expires. This does not include the Skype Public API which allows third party software to connect to Skype and control some functions and do things like call recording etc. Skype says this API will be maintained in future.
But this shut-down also includes the Skype Credit payment, which will be switched off shortly. No third-party software will then be able to accept Skype Credit payments.
So how does this affect Scendix/PamConsult products? The simple answer is: not very much.
