Tonight, starting at 8:15 PM CET (what time is that for me?) until approximately 9:15 PM, we’ll deploy some important updates to our servers. Within this time frame, mite won’t be available for about 10 minutes. We ask for your understanding.

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Update: Maintenance took us a little longer than expected, but went just fine. mite was unavailable for four minutes only. Thanks for having kept your fingers crossed!

Julia in Tech talk

At the tab »Reports => Time entries« and optionally on shared reports, you can export time entries to Excel, and at »Reports => Projects«, projects. We remodeled these export features. Until now, mite generated Excel-specific XML. Now, mite generates XSLX.

Techie lingo aside, this update should ensure one thing: a stable, smooth export of your data. In current versions of Excel as well as, hopefully, in future ones.

Please tell us if the new export format does not work smoothly for you, and specify the exact version you’re running. We tested the new export on Windows on Excel 2016 and 2013, on Mac OS on Excel 2016, 2013, 2011, Numbers 3.6, OpenOffice 4, and LibreOffice 5, as well as on Excel Online.

Julia in Tech talk

Developers, hear hear: we overhauled the documentation of our open data interface, the mite.api.

Besides the known XML format, all requests are now finally depicted in JSON, too. Furthermore, we described common mistakes, HTTP status codes, and some previously undocumented features such as sorting time entries, filter shortcuts, and HTTP caching.

Cheers to a more helpful documentation, and happy coding! Please be so kind and get in touch if you stumble upon any inconsistencies.

Julia in Tech talk

Since 14:05 CEST, mite is not available due to a problem in our primary data center. We’re terribly sorry, please, excuse us! We’ll do everything to get mite up and running again as soon as possible. Please visit Twitter to get the newest information on this issue, we’ll update continuously.

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Update: Since 14:51 CEST, mite is available and at your service again. Of course, your data was safe anytime. You can always rely on that.

The interruption occured because of a network/DNS problem in our main data center. We’ll discuss it in-detail with our hoster soon, and try to come up with improvements. Again: we are so sorry for this downtime!

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Update: The network problems were caused by a line fault in the greater Berlin area which resulted in large parts of the Internet at the internet exchange node BCIX not being reachable. Thus, our hoster has diverted traffic to another node. Since then, mite has been available and stable again.

Julia in Tech talk

Between 8:16 and 8:39 CEST this Friday morning, mite was unavailable for all users. We are so sorry for this interruption!

A kernel error in our main database server caused the downtime. All monitoring systems warned us right away. Two minutes later, we were investigating. Three minutes later, our hoster was hands on, and restarted the server in question. This fixed the root of the problem, but mite needed some more minutes to get back on track completely. Tracking timers were not interrupted. And of course, no data was damaged – it was not in danger at any time.

Again: we are very sorry. Nevertheless, we’d like to take this interruption as an opportunity to thank our hoster SysEleven. Since July 2012, a few hiccups for less than five minutes aside, mite was running steadily and reliably. This was the first big downtime in almost three years. That’s a great service level. Thanks for your support, SysEleven.

Julia in Tech talk

Since last night, mite is running on a new version of its underlying application framework. Starting at 1am (CEST), we took mite offline for about 15 minutes to deploy the update and perform some database migrations.

If you cannot notice anything working differently, we put our thumbs up. Yes, the update speeds up mite a little bit and will help us maintaining it, but it did not change anything on a feature level. Nevertheless, if you happen to stumble upon a bug, please tell us so we can fix it right away. Send us a detailed e-mail which includes information on your browser version. Thanks!

Julia in Tech talk

The Heartbleed bug is a vulnerability in OpenSSL that was disclosed on Monday night, April 7th (CEST). OpenSSL is a very popular cryptographic software library. Approximately two thirds of all servers use it to encypt Internet traffic. The Heartbleed weakness could have been exploited by attackers to eavesdrop on communications, steal data, and compromise secret keys of SSL certificates.

Here at mite, we used and are using OpenSSL, too. Today, we want to tell you in detail how we reacted to Heartbleed, when, and which actions we took to secure your data. This information comes a little late. We are sorry about that. On the technical side, we were so much faster! You could rely on us, and you can rely on us in the future, too.

• We learned about Heartbleed on Tuesday morning, 9:20am.
• As soon as a security patch was available for our systems, we started to install them. At 12:02am, all of our servers were successfully patched.
• As a measure of precaution, we requested a new SSL certificate with new keys. We rebooted all servers. Since 12:24am, they use the new certificate. As the certificate was re-issued by DigiCert Inc, you won’t see this new validation date, don’t let this fool you.
• We changed all of our passwords on all systems.
• Tonight, we will invalidate all cookies. You will have to log-in again.

Better safe than sorry, so please change your passwords for mite, too. Click on your user name in the upper right-hand side to do that.

OpenSSL is widespread, and Heartbleed thus affected lots of services. Please think about changing your password for other services, too, especially webmail services. You can check whether or not a service is patched thanks to services such as this one. If so, check if the certificate is a new one, or ask if it was re-issued. Then, change your password.

Thanks for your attention. Now back to work!

Julia in Tech talk

Here at mite, we’re migrating to the new European payment standard SEPA, too. Although this affects you only a little bit, we have to and want to let you know about all upcoming adjustments that will become effective on February 1st, 2014.

If you pay user fees per direct debit from a German bank account, we will start SEPA direct debiting your bank account as of February 1st. Your account number and the bank code will become IBAN and BIC. We already converted your bank information for you. Nevertheless, please have a look at the tab »Account => Payment« and double-check. You can find your IBAN and BIC on your bank statement.

For now, paying user fees for mite via direct debit continues to be available for German bank accounts only. As soon as our payment partners will implement direct debit for other SEPA countries, we’ll consider this enhancement too, yes of course.

Due to SEPA, we also updated our Terms of Service. We only adjusted §6 Payment/Invoice. The term »direct debit« now reads »SEPA direct debit«. And we added a single phrase: »The pre-notification period of a SEPA direct debit is shortened to 1 day.«.

Our updated ToS will become effective on February 1st, 2014. Please find them right here. If you do not object within six weeks in textual form (e.g. via e-mail), you accept our updated ToS. Should you object, we’re entitled to terminate and end our contract on February 1st, 2014.

Thanks for your attention. Now back to more important things!

Julia in Inside out, Tech talk

mite will end official support of the Internet Explorer 7 on September 12th. We won’t optimize and fix for this browser version anymore.

If you’re still using IE7, please update soon—on version 8 at least, or, better, on the current version 10. A free update is available directly from Microsoft. Or, switch to a current version of Mozilla’s Firefox browser, or Google’s Chrome.

Internet Explorer 7 was released in October 2006. Seven years ago, aka 42 cat or Internet years. In the meantime, browsers improved big time. They got faster and more secure. We have to work around the constraints of IE7 during every single update. Sometimes, we even developed special slimmed-down versions of a feature. We’d like to put this time to a better use, so all users benefit. Better browsers are available, and, luckily, ~99,3% of all mite.users do run them. Dear 0,3%: Please update now. Other sites will be grateful for that, too, and will show their gratitude with a smoother behavior. Thanks!

Julia in Tech talk

Tonight, our servers will need some maintenance. mite won’t be available twice for ~five minutes each. The first unavailability will start at ~3:30am CEST, the second one will occur between 5:30 and 7:30am CEST (what time is that for me?).

Tonight’s maintenance originates from a production error in our IBM database servers. The error, which also lead to July’s hiccups, will be fixed by a firmware update, which unfortunately cannot be installed during normal operation. We ask for your understanding.

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Update: Maintenance went as planned. mite was unavailable a total of 5 minutes.

Julia in Tech talk