In this crazy world of IT acronyms and dilbert cubical terminology the art of Software Change Management and Program Deployment is one of the few terms that means exactly what it says. Unlike the most annoying leverage!
Anyway I digress, I'm in the last couple of weeks of this freelance role helping my customer to configure TURNOVER and promoting a major LMS7.1 Hotel application across 4 seperate IBM Power Systems running IBMi (or AS400's in 1990's speak). It's been a fun contract working with some great people. The downside of doing my job is that if I do it right... then everything will work... and if everything works... then I'm not needed anymore ;)
So, hopefully this weeks major implementaion will flow smoothly and I will be looking for a new contract in a couple of weeks.
In this crazy world of IT acronyms and dilbert cubical terminology the art of Software Change Management and Program Deployment is one of the few terms that means exactly what it says. Unlike the most annoying leverage!
Anyway I digress, I'm in the last couple of weeks of this freelance role helping my customer to configure TURNOVER and promoting a major LMS7.1 Hotel application across 4 seperate IBM Power Systems running IBMi (or AS400's in 1990's speak). It's been a fun contract working with some great people. The downside of doing my job is that if I do it right... then everything will work... and if everything works... then I'm not needed anymore ;)
So, hopefully this weeks major implementaion will flow smoothly and I will be looking for a new contract in a couple of weeks.
I used to walk this route daily to get to school... but backwards... School was Heron Wood (near where you started) and home was in the old Military housing, Willems Park (which used to be near Asda where you finished). Thanks for the memory jogger :)
Must try and find some old pictures of WIllems Park... it was a rather grim 60's style tower block but great fun for kids to run around and create mayhem:
Willems Park block was army married quarters on Wellington Avenue. It was built about 1964 and demolished in the 1990s, to be replaced by houses again used as married quarters. It was built on the parade grounds of the old cavalry barracks.
I used to walk this route daily to get to school... but backwards... School was Heron Wood (near where you started) and home was in the old Military housing, Willems Park (which used to be near Asda where you finished). Thanks for the memory jogger :)
Must try and find some old pictures of WIllems Park... it was a rather grim 60's style tower block but great fun for kids to run around and create mayhem:
Willems Park block was army married quarters on Wellington Avenue. It was built about 1964 and demolished in the 1990s, to be replaced by houses again used as married quarters. It was built on the parade grounds of the old cavalry barracks.
So, I was writing a little code snippet for a client after being told that all warehouse codes must be treated as 3 numeric character integers ranging from 1-999 and soon saw that the warehouse value was an alphabetic field? Huh? A little more digging around and I soon found a problem in their database design: They have a database storing warehouse codes, but in some tables they are stored as two character alphameric values, sometimes as three character alpha's and other times as 3 character numerics! :/
Now, if that doesnt set off all kinds of alarm bells in your brain, then you probably want to stop reading and go and make a nice cup of tea and watch a reality show on the Discovery channel. But, if you are a techie and just scratched you head and thought "WTF? Who designed that database then?" the simple answer is NOT ME. Obviously, it was designed by a maniac. Sadly, I'm the programmer who has to work with it and it's established in the business so us poor programmers just have to figure out how to best work with it.
Anyway, before I spend too much time moaning about lazy programmers and their crappy database design, this is how I got around it.
So, I was writing a little code snippet for a client after being told that all warehouse codes must be treated as 3 numeric character integers ranging from 1-999 and soon saw that the warehouse value was an alphabetic field? Huh? A little more digging around and I soon found a problem in their database design: They have a database storing warehouse codes, but in some tables they are stored as two character alphameric values, sometimes as three character alpha's and other times as 3 character numerics! :/
Now, if that doesnt set off all kinds of alarm bells in your brain, then you probably want to stop reading and go and make a nice cup of tea and watch a reality show on the Discovery channel. But, if you are a techie and just scratched you head and thought "WTF? Who designed that database then?" the simple answer is NOT ME. Obviously, it was designed by a maniac. Sadly, I'm the programmer who has to work with it and it's established in the business so us poor programmers just have to figure out how to best work with it.
Anyway, before I spend too much time moaning about lazy programmers and their crappy database design, this is how I got around it.
Last week was an exciting one... driving from San Francisco to Las Vegas on Friday (including the obligatory but less than amusing Boris Breakdown)... packing and loading my moving truck on Saturday/Sunday and then driving across country to my new home here at Folly Beach South Carolina.
Unpacking was fun, courtesy of three little helping hands (Nate, Fin and TIggy) and four little paws (Bailey) and now a week later I'm delighted to say that I'm mostly settled. Pictures on the wall, wireless network up and floating around the beach air, media server is serving and the coffee maker is bubbling.
Bailey the super dog is getting his regular walks around the neighbourhood and I'm feeling myself de-stress on a near hourly basis. No wonder folks who live at the beach have this perpetually smug, self amused and content look to them.... Life is Good!
Last week was an exciting one... driving from San Francisco to Las Vegas on Friday (including the obligatory but less than amusing Boris Breakdown)... packing and loading my moving truck on Saturday/Sunday and then driving across country to my new home here at Folly Beach South Carolina.
Unpacking was fun, courtesy of three little helping hands (Nate, Fin and TIggy) and four little paws (Bailey) and now a week later I'm delighted to say that I'm mostly settled. Pictures on the wall, wireless network up and floating around the beach air, media server is serving and the coffee maker is bubbling.
Bailey the super dog is getting his regular walks around the neighbourhood and I'm feeling myself de-stress on a near hourly basis. No wonder folks who live at the beach have this perpetually smug, self amused and content look to them.... Life is Good!
Wordle is an excellent website for a some serious lunchtime cyberloafing.
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.
It basically takes any string of text, parses it and creates a nice little word-cloud graphic with the most used words. It's neat stuff, and gets even neater when you feed it a website address. Give it a URL and it looks at the whole website and comes up with a graphic of words used through the site and makes it look kind of... well... just funky.
Wordle is an excellent website for a some serious lunchtime cyberloafing.
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.
It basically takes any string of text, parses it and creates a nice little word-cloud graphic with the most used words. It's neat stuff, and gets even neater when you feed it a website address. Give it a URL and it looks at the whole website and comes up with a graphic of words used through the site and makes it look kind of... well... just funky.
Anyway I digress, I'm in the last couple of weeks of this freelance role helping my customer to configure TURNOVER and promoting a major LMS7.1 Hotel application across 4 seperate IBM Power Systems running IBMi (or AS400's in 1990's speak). It's been a fun contract working with some great people. The downside of doing my job is that if I do it right... then everything will work... and if everything works... then I'm not needed anymore ;)
