Dexrex Thanksgiving

Over the past few months, our country has been faced with some of the worst financial circumstances in the last century. There will be some difficult times ahead, but it is most important to remember what we have to look forward to and be thankful for. We are looking towards change, which at times can be scary but it can also be refreshing. Dexrex is lucky to have many things to be thankful for as we are embracing new ventures and opportunities, but what about the team? I asked the guys what they think of during Thanksgiving…

Our marketing and graphics guy, Dan Lucey, spends his Thanksgiving in the comfort of his own home. His favorite foods are his Mom’s homemade pumpkin pie and stuffing. Dan is looking forward to seeing his high school friends at his 5 year high school reunion during the Thanksgiving break. Derek, Rick, and Barrett will also be joining Dan at this reunion where they will impress all their old classmates by discussing IM compliance and message archiving!

Aaron, our engineer and systems analyst, will be heading south for the Thanksgiving break--no, not to Florida but to Connecticut. Aaron plans on “eating a lot”, especially stuffing and pecan pie.

Cam, a software engineer, is “thankful for fish”. Cam is a Thanksgiving modernist, opting for fish rather than the big bird. Cam also enjoys some of the traditional aspects of Thanksgiving – Cranberry sauce. He plans on spending Thanksgiving at his Aunt’s house and eating it all day long.

Nick, another of our software engineers, enjoys his Thanksgiving by eating (duh). He loves Thanksgiving because it’s the same food every year but he only gets a chance to have once a year. His favorite food is gravy which he enjoys to pour over his entire plate.

Daniel Grubbs, our Senior Software Engineer, spends his Thanksgiving in the great outdoors. It’s his tradition to attend Mount Toby’s Friends Meeting where about 100 people join together to play music and celebrate the holiday. Little known fact: Daniel is a great baker. He plans on making his famous apple pie. What makes it famous you may ask? Secret ingredients. They may be obtained if you sign up for Dexrex… ;)

Cristos’ favorite food during the holiday season is his Mom’s Greek wild rice stuffing. I am happy to announce that Cristos celebrates a tradition that I agree with: the women do all the cooking; the men do all the dishes. Isn’t cooking the fun part? For those of you who don’t know our lead information architect, Cristos is a great cook so I’m sure he appreciates going home to enjoy the change of having someone else feed him.

Rick, our CTO and founder, is thankful for the opportunity to explore ideas in collaboration without reservation. He will be filling up on his family’s bread recipe that he claims they, “incorrectly call ‘pepperoni bread’”. Unlike some of our sleepy employees, Rick has the dedication to wake up at 3am to cook with his Dad. Yet, like a true man, his early rise allows him to claim to be “too tired to clean”.

We’ve had a two week hiatus from Barrett while he was on military leave and we are so happy to have our COO back with us! Barrett spends his thanksgiving watching football with his family. His favorite food is stuffing (seems to be a favorite among our Dexrex team). Barrett loves to go home and see all his friends. A Barrett Bilotta tradition is spending time with family and friends by making a fire in the fire pit near his driveway.

Derek, our CEO and founder, has a non-traditional tradition the day after thanksgiving. He and his cousins all get together for a paintball match. The match happens the day after so Derek has enough time to digest his favorite food - scalloped potatoes. He is also looking forward to seeing old high school friends.

This will be my first Thanksgiving in two years and I am overly excited (before I was in Spain and those Spaniards don’t know how to make turkey…). Each year my Grandma makes 9 different types of pies; my favorite is her chocolate cream. It’s my entire family’s favorite and its tradition to all fight over a piece (thankfully my Grandma has started to make two pies). I am thankful for my family and the wonderful friends that I have. One tradition is the night before Thanksgiving, my town heads to Kitty’s (a local restaurant) to enjoy a drink and see one another.

Dexrex hopes that you all have a wonderful thanksgiving by enjoying your own traditions. Thank you to all our supporters – The consumers, the partners, the bloggers, the investors, and of course, our friends and family. Eat the turkey, have some pie, and fall into a nice tryptophan-induced nap.
Happy Thanksgiving!

Server Upgrade

The past 7 days I have been buried in server configurations. Not my favorite thing in the world... Except when it’s on new servers! We’re moving the Dexrex server stack to a totally new and awesomer hardware platform. This means less lag time, better reliability, and we will be able to keep up with increasing demand.

There will be about a 2 hour block of system-wide downtime sometime between now and Sunday, so be sure to watch our Twitter feed or the blog here for the announcement on when exactly it will be. The downtime is to safely and securely transfer all the data and other esoteric technical details to the new platform without losing any messages.

During this downtime, Extensions may report that it can't connect to the server, but you won't lose any messages - they will be archived locally.

There will be cake served at the retirement party for the old servers. Friends welcome.

SMS Port 0 -- learning to share

A number of our users have noticed that there is a conflict when more than one SMS-monitoring application is running on their BlackBerry at the same time. After discussing it with our partners at RIM, it looks like the problem is tied to the way that all applications listen for SMS messages. Whichever application happens to start listening first (when the phone boots) will block all other applications from doing the same thing.
We've assembled a list of all the conflicting programs that our users have reported, and we're reaching out to their development teams to figure out a solution. Here are the ones we've encountered so far:

• 3jam
• Dexrex
• BlackBerry Alerts
• Cellphone Superhero
• AlertMatrix
• PeekaWho
• txtForward
• Zhiing
• text2im

If you've encountered an "SMS Port already in use" error, please send us a debug log or drop a note to contact@dexrex.com.
~ Cristos
PS: We've put together a group of like-minded developers at http://groups.google.com/group/BBID. Feel free to swing by there for more details!

EDIT: We've removed Vlingo from the list after communicating with them recently. It looks like their app may not be contributing to the conflicts, after all.

New Homepage!

As some of you may have already noticed, Dexrex.com has a new homepage! The navigation is pretty much the same, but hopefully signing in is a little simpler/easier to understand. We do plan to make additional changes (flashy stuff and a few tweaks here and there) but we think this new page is a big step in the right direction. We even have a newsfeed!

Also, be sure to check out the new survey on your member home page (bottom right corner). User feedback is the best resource we have for making our service better, so vote early, and vote often:)

Cheers, and enjoy!

Annual Training

It seems like yesterday when I last left for my US Army National Guard Annual Training, however, the time has come again. I will be traveling out to Camp Dodge Iowa for training on Saturday and returning back to Dexrex on Monday the 24th of November. Usually annual training falls in the summer months but it’s a little different this year. My unit, the 744th Forward Support Company has the opportunity to train on fixing some of the Army’s newest equipment, a chance that a National Guard Unit wouldn’t normally get.

The Army in an effort to get all its units on the same page has created Camp Dodge Iowa as a National Guard Training Reservation where different National Guard units cycle through all year for two week intervals for this intense training opportunity. The Army then sends all its engines and transmissions and other complex end items that need to be rebuilt to Camp Dodge. These get rebuilt by the various National Guard units and the new rebuilt items are then shipped throughout the world to places where they are needed.

Being an officer, my job will be to properly manage and take good care of the troops while they are working turning wrenches for the next two weeks. I will need to properly schedule my soldiers’ tasks and man hour allocation, make sure that all safety guidelines are being met, give written feedback to each soldier on how they are performing, and make sure that everyone is taking away something from this training session. I know it has definitely helped me learn to be better at my job here at Dexrex.

I find it interesting that when most people think of the Army they picture the standard infantry solider walking down city streets in formation or kicking down doors, that is the main purpose of the Army, but for every one combat troop there are about nine troops that are supporting him. I am in the Ordinance Corp. The Ordinance Corp specializes in logistics, ammunition, supply and maintenance on all equipment and vehicles. It’s a lot of hard work, but I guess I have gotten pretty used to that. So over the next two weeks I will be busy training, I will miss everyone at Dexrex and I already am looking forward to returning and getting back into the swing of things.