A number of years ago I read "Vehicles, Experiments in Synthetic Psychology" (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262521121/geekstercom-20) and found it to be a really great and thought provoking book. He calls them vehicles, but think little robots. The book starts off really simple and shows how with some very simple circuits you could produce something which a black box observer would think had emotions of one sort or another. The book then progresses and you end up with some amazing concepts. It's not a very long book (just 168 pages), but it took me a while to read because I'd read a page and then just think about it for a while. The book is considered an artificial intelligence book, but it was written by biologist Valentino Braitenberg and in the second half of the book he basically says so in case you thought I was just making all of this stuff up, here let me show you real world biology implementations of what I have shown so far. Just a great book.

I believe this in in order: AIX/PS2 (yeah that was floppies back in 1988), AIX/370, AIX/6000, Slackware, Red Hat, linuxfromscratch.org, Gentoo (not for long), CentOS, pfSense, Ubuntu Server (GUIs are for wimps).

I've been looking at OrangeHRM for a couple of days and have it installed in a virtual machine. However a few things have made me cautious:

- The registration page on their website to download the documentation doesn't work.
- I called their "global" technical support number to report that their registration page doesn't work and got voicemail.
- They haven't called me back 2 days later.
- The wiki site for their community version has almost no content and has been polluted with spam links that haven't been cleaned up.
- Their free online demo site which I signed up for doesn't show the basic Leave module which comes included, they only show the advanced version which is only available as a paid add-on.
- I've played with their open source version on my server and it's got some serious issues - you have to change the system date in order to be able to work with years besides the current year, and the function to roll over previous years days only pops up in specific situations and it's easy to do it wrong and get stuck.
- They don't support two employees with the same name even if they have different id numbers.

All of this just gave me a bad feeling about them.

There is no requirement to track employee hours for us, just days on leave. A spreadsheet on a shared drive worked for a while, but doesn't scale so we're looking for a distributed solution. We're primarily a Linux shop for servers (I'm sure we have some Windows servers as well) and will self host whatever solution is chosen.

I'm REALLY not a PHB/MBA type, but an experienced programmer trying to explore off the shelf options before I go an implement something from scratch which is a diversion from my normal responsibilities and a problem which I assume others have had to deal with.

Looks interesting, never heard of Gambas before. Is this application web based or does the client connect directly to MySQL?

I'm surprised I have to explain this on Slashdot, but...

While open source is also a bias of mine, I've also already looked at the source of the packages I've been considering partially for documentation. I've also got a history of taking open source packages and making some tweaks to fit the requirements a bit more. An active developer community around a project is also a critical indicator of liveliness in software and whether it continues to be viable. Note that I said that non-free packages will also be considered, open source is just a preference.

While open source is also a bias of mine, I've also already looked at the source of the packages I've been considering partially for documentation. I've also got a history of taking open source packages and making some tweaks to fit the requirements a bit more. An active developer community around a project is also a critical indicator of liveliness in software and whether it continues to be viable. Note that I said that non-free packages will also be considered, open source is just a preference.

My early thought was Drupal as well, but I'm holding off on purpose to see if an off the shelf application works before I go all custom.

I had to throw something in there for a nitpicker to catch and be satisfied.

I completely agree with the idea of breaking this up into multiple machines. Keeping everything together on the same machine is often referred to as a busybox and means that any security holes in the pieces may be used together to compromise the machine and once that machine is compromised the attacker has full control over the family jewels.

I'd keep the router, VPN, DHCP, and DNS functions on its own box. I went with a barebones Supermicro box for around $300 bought from Newegg and installed the pfSense router/firewall on it. Once you get past some learning curve it is very easy to administer through the web interface and the entire config is saved to one file and easy to keep a copy of, so if things go horribly wrong you can rebuild it easily and quickly.

I guess we're getting into semantics, but it's not a "root cause" of the disease which is what everyone here means when you say cause. Yes the symptom of high blood glucose does in itself cause other problems and because you can't cure the disease itself you end up managing the side effect of the disease to avoid the side effect of the symptom. But saying this is a cause of the disease is like a situation where a horse drawn wagon upsets an apple cart and the apples fly off and break a window. By your terms the apple cart is a cause of the accident. While the apples did cause damage, you wouldn't have that damage in the first place if the wagon which is the real cause hadn't come by.

Gosh I hope not because you've got it totally wrong. The official diagnosis for DM is a high fasting blood glucose and/or a high glucose tolerance test, but again both of these are symptoms of the disease, not the cause.

I've been thinking about the next time I do something like this and I'd take a serious look at doing it in Drupal. The Drupal website content management system you ask? Well once you get past a learning curve you realize that Drupal is a web based front end to a database which includes developer defined content types with custom fields and a CRUD front end with powerful permissions management, change tracking, query system, and presentation layer. For the offline issue there are export modules to Excel.