QuoteJetty is the other project that I am working on. It is an e-procurement site for local businesses and companies. A place where your can submit your procurement needs to to a pool of local suppliers.

You may have heard of Gebiz, Singapore’s government e-procurement portal, which has saved the government millions of dollars. It gets the suppliers to participate in a fee market place by submitting their quotes and getting the best offer for their procurement needs, which is very good. But what’s missing is the procurement site for the private businesses and companies in Singapore.

Once, I wanted to print a set of bookmarks for my Toastmaster club. I had never done any commercial printing before, so I digged out my dusty outdated yellowpages; lost in the long list of suppliers, I called up some of my friends, but most of them were not sure either. I ended up calling some randomly picked printing shops; and to my suprise, there was quite a big gap in their quotes.

During that time, I wished if there is an e-procurement site in Singapore where I can just post an invitation to quote to print the bookmark. It would be nice if there is also some kind of indicators to show if the suppliers were commended by their previous customers. This will help me to decide which company I should engage, well, even if they can be slightly more expensive, but at least I know that they are good.

So, I wasted a couple of hours, I tried my luck with a printing company; and I was still not sure if I was getting the best deal, or at least a better deal.

QuoteJetty tries to solve this problem, it will be a place for Singapore’s private businesses and companies to submit their quotation requests, respond to quotations, and commend good suppliers.

QuoteJetty can help you to save some money in your procurement needs, and it can also be a place to look for new business opportunities. Well, Gebiz serves the government procurement needs, and QuoteJetty will serve the private sector, except it is going to be simpler and more user friendly.

So keep a lookout for its BETA release, the registration is FREE with a limited number of quotations per month. Register your email now to be notified for its BETA release.

Yesterday, Justin Lee, a fellow blogger who blogs about Internet Technology, Enterpreneurship and Web 2.0, bumped into BookJetty and has interviewed me on BookJetty (Hooray…BookJetty first interview).

I shared a bit on my background, how Pluit Solutions and BookJetty got started, what are the main challenges when putting up BookJetty, what’s the future plan for BookJetty, and a few other areas. Justin also wrote a short review on BookJetty, do check it out. And thanks Justin.

This week has been full with activities involving Linux, Linux and Linux. And the Dell server for BookJetty is finally up, loaded with LAMP (Linux, Apache, My SQL, and PHP), Tomcat and also the new vBulletin based BookJetty forum. Now it’s just pending the green light from the webhost, Qala.com, to move the server there.

Having lived and breathed Windows, switching to Linux was a bit daunting initially, but having played with it for a week, I started to fall in love; at least my typing speed has improved!!

Linux (also known as GNU/Linux) is the obvious choice if you are a start up or you just want to save some money to buy iPod. Linux is free, it is licensed under GNU General Public License (GPL), but what the @#$%, why Dell is charging me a couple of hundred bucks for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Well, before answering that, the Linux here means the Linux kernel, the basic libraries that form an operating system. Since it is licensed under GPL, which in layman terms, it means you can use it, modify it, repackage it with other software, do whatever you want, but you have to give your version for free too. So pretty fair, isn’t it?

And the different repackaged versions of Linux kernel are commonly known as Linux distributions, the cool jargon is Linux Distro. So you may have heard of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora Core, SUSE Linux, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, Knoppix, and others; those are the different distributions of Linux.

So each distribution is different, though all of them are using the Linux kernel for the core. As for the RHEL history, it is a bit tricky. It was started as Red Hat Linux (without the Enterprise word), but in late 2003, Red Hat Linux was merged with Fedora Linux (another distro), and born out of that is the commercial version (RHEL), and the free version is known as Fedora Core.

But wait, how could they charge the RHEL, isn’t it still under GPL license? Oh hell ya…it is, RHEL source codes are still free, you can still download it from Red Hat Inc. web site. What they are charging you is for the binaries they have compiled in a CD, for support, for software update subscription. Smart move! And it makes sense for the ENTERPRISE, there’s someone to call now if anything goes wrong.

If you are a start-up like me, that is what we call luxury, and that, is a deadly sin. But no worries, there are other free distributions available. Fedora Core is one of them, but it is not as stable as RHEL, as new libraries for RHEL are first relased in Fedora Core, which then moved to RHEL after they are more stable.

But again, worry not, thanks to another open source community, they downloaded RHEL source codes (well, they are free right?), and create a final distro which is very similar to RHEL, called CentOS (Community ENTerprise Operating System). Halleluja!!

Another disto will be SUSE Linux (I’ll leave it to you to figure out how to pronounce). It’s by Novell, similar with RHEL, it has commercial and free version available. Free version is also known as SUSE Linux OSS (what a name).

Now you know why Linux is still not gaining as much adoption as Windows, though it has been gaining a lot of mementum lately. Just to understand the distros can be stressful enough. But, don’t you feel a little smarter if you know other OS other than Windows?

And the recent popularity of Linux was partly contributed by the latest very -user-friendly distro known as Ubuntu (it means ‘humanity towards others’). It is a spin off from Debian Linux project, which simply a more user friendly version. Ubuntu as two editions, the desktop edition and server edition.

And I have to stop now, or you will never visit my blog again. At the end, I chose Ubuntu for my server. It just took me a couple clicks and minimum inputs to setup a basic running LAMP server. But of course there are other things to work on after that.

So Linux for you? And which distro? :)

I have always been very irritated with the default search in Firefox address bar. If you enter “Singapore”, it will redirect to the closest matched page without showing the search list, but most of the times I want the search list!

I did a quick search in Mozilla site, and found out that you can easily customise the default search behaviour, and here are the steps:

1. Type "about:config" in the address bar and press <Enter>
2. The config page will show up, type "keyword" in the filter input box to filter the list
3. Double click on "keyword.URL" to change its value to "http://www.google.com/search?btnG=Google+Search&q=".
4. And hooola… you have successfully hacked your Firefox address bar




In two hours time I’ll be flying home to Medan, Indonesia for my brother’s wedding. I’ve been working non-stop for weeks now, I think it’s a good time for me to take a break, though I’m bringing home two Linux books to refresh my memory to setup the Dell server that has just arrived.

I have just completed the marketing-page design for the next Jetty I have been busying with, but did not have enough time to convert it to HTML template. I will be away up to this Sunday; when I am back, I will be introducing the next Jetty and start collecting emails for those of you who are interested to be notifed for its BETA release. And hopefully the server to host BookJetty should be ready within that week too.

Man…looking forward for a good break and good food in my hometown.

A simple story that I heard on Sunday’s Sermon by Rev. Alvin Chan. A message that we have heard very often, but we often just ignore it.

It is not a verbatim quote, as usual, you will forget 80% of what you have heard from a sermon on the next day.

A young law student was talking to his mentor, and the conversation went on like this:

Why do you study law?
Because I want to get a degree.

What will you do with your degree?
I want to be a lawyer.

After that, what will you do?
I will earn a lot of money and buy a roof over my head.

After that?
I will get married and have kids.

After that?
I will see my kids grow up and get married.

After that?
I will get my first million and retire.

After that?
(paused……) I will…..die?

Exactly, we all will die one day. But, is life just about getting a roof over your head, get married, have kids and retire? Or…should it be more than that? You ponder about it.

Rev. Alvin Chan also heads the Third Place, a place to meet the spritual needs for the younger generation.

Three and a half months after going live, BookJetty is finally going to have its own dedicated server. I have just made an order for Dell PowerEdge 850, Intel Pentium Dual Core Processor 3.0 Ghz with 4GB of DDR-2 667Mhz RAM, and will be co-locating the server in Singapore.

Let’s see how the new dual core processor performs, hopefully the response time will be better and the speed will be consistent throughout the day.

I have also completed the book forum, but I am not deploying it yet; since the new server is coming, I’ll be launching it together when migrating BookJetty to the new server.