GIF is FREE

I remember when the first rumblings of this came about. It was in the early days of the internet that we know today. In those days of low bandwidth, the web was mostly just plain text. Images were starting to be imbedded into html. If you wanted a fast loading page with images you chose GIF. 28.8k was blazingly fast back then. It turned out that there was a patent on this file format. Some tech dinosaur company (UNISYS) CEO got the idea of “hey I can make money on the patent if I enforce it”.

Here is a link with the full article about the patent expiring.

This might be one of the earlier test cases where open source vs proprietary information clashed over usage on the internet. How things have changed in the past 10 years.

Mersenne Discovery

Checked the Mersenne page this morning. They found another prime earlier this month. The 44th mersenned prime. Click the link to learn more about mersenne primes
link

Here is the press release for the discovery. link

I can't belive I've been donating CPU cycles 10 years to this project. Since then 8 primes have been found. I started donating by CPU time not long after the intel FPU fiasco. See link for more . link

The prime candidates now take roughly a month to solve with my p5 3.0 GHZ machine. I would take my old P90 over 6 years. Computing power has come a long ways in that time. Yet it still doesn't seem to be enough. The flip side is that most of the donanted time could be calculated in a way shorter time span today.

One Long Week Deadlines and Security

It's amazing how fast things can get done when there is a hard deadline that has to be met. Well not a hard hard deadline yet. There have been issues migrating from one instance to another. Most of it due to connecting the QA environment with an outside source for testing. It's these kinds of issues where you learn what the network administrators take on security and how to handle it. There are two major approaches. Command an Control from a single point of entry, or each group is an island. I'm working under a command and control environment, that trusts too much once your through. The side benefit from this delay is that we've gotten a few more smaller projects in that wouldn't have gone.

 

Can't wait for the testing to begin.

 

 

Success!

Wow , I can't believe it. It only took a year. I now know what they mean by this companies time line. Nothing is ever done quickly. 2 developers and a change in layout after the first go around, this little project was an orphan from the start.

 

Lesson, projects that are deemed small and take little effort to complete are given little effort or resources so that the project can be completed. I need to remember not to take on little projects in the future. :)

OOD SDR Review

Well today, people started to learn exactly what OOD will mean for them. Being a functional support type, I'm used to not having access to everything. I've learned to work around the limitation or within the given framework.

 

OOD is going to change some of the basic mode of operation of how our IT department functions. The change has both good and bad effects.

 

First the good:

        It will break the bad habits that have developed. Developers having production access, and the ability to modify/create data in production.

 

Paying more attention to the interface process between the APPS and other systems. Currently there are a lot of places where proper checks are not performed on data coming in or going out. Too much trust built into the system. Outcome too much intervention with manual data updates.

 

Formalized change management processes.

 

The bad:

   Delayed response times. Data fixes can not be done directly, they must be tested before applying the data fix. (good in my opinion)

 

    Just in general, things will take longer to perform, changes to the system.

 

    IT will be going from anything to keep the data flowing, to a protect the data integrity.

 

(note the bad is actually good in my opinion, it's just bad that the business is used to operating a certain way, and taking short cuts.)

Happy Hour

Went to happy hour last night to celebrate yet another old co-worker leaving the company I used to work for. He had gotten into a dead end with no place for advancement in site, plus the 3% a year raise just doesn't keep up with the market. I liked most of the people I worked with while I was there. We had lots of fun together. It is just the company itself and the way it makes it's decisions. It's like watching a wreck in slow motion. It's not a wreck that anyone will die in. Just a wreck that will leaves the car drivable and a nasty ding.

 

Guess what I'm trying to say is, each company has it's own personality. If the company is established and has been around for awhile odds are it's not going to change.

Oracle On Demand

Oracle on Demand otherwise called OOD see Oracle's info if your interested. http://www.oracle.com/ondemand/ebso.html

 

We are going to migrate our ERP installation onto OOD. When? Sometime in the next few months. This will be a fun experience. I understand what going to OOD will mean in migrating bug fixes and new code into the environment. I also understand the risks that we are exposing ourselves to potential downtime. When you have 3000+ customizations to the Apps environment something will go wrong.

 

 

Oracle Apps Operating Units

It's a lot of fun trouble shooting an operating unit setup 4 years ago and never used till now. Not all of the setups for AP have been done. Paying fictional invoices hitting COGS accounts. To allocate revenue and expenses through the system in a way that's track able. Who knows what the person was thinking when they set it up 4 years ago. Probably not this kind of activity. Guess this is why there are over a terabyte worth of transactions in the database. Most of which will qualify for archival. If we can ever get the archiving process in place.

J-pop

I've been hooked on J-pop for over a year now. Random mp3 downloads to listen to new music got me started. A band that has really hooked me is The Brilliant Green. After searching Amazon I did find a CD listing. $40 USD. That was too much for me. Put it on my wish list for X-mas. I did get it for christmas. Late, sometime in March, but I did get it. I've been listening to it non stop. The song that really has me is kuroi tsubasa. I've not had the time to have it translated. It is a cool song that you can play over and over and over.

I guess a goal is to collect the rest. They are a good band. Too bad they haven't put anything out in awhile.

Finally

Oracle reports and print drivers. Solved the formatting issue. Decided to create a new driver code that the report sends to the driver file. Now I get the formatting that I need. Off it goes to the vendor to develope the layout according to the data being sent. Just 3 weeks left before final cut off for the rest of the year.

Monday

Gotta love mondays.

Espicially with maintenance weekends. The power company cut power to the building for the weekend to work on the power lines. All of the servers except one reside in a seperate building. When this "one" fails to come back up correctly everyone knows.

Long day

It was a very long day today.

Moved nearly 2 cubic yards of dirt around the yard today. About month ago we had foundation repair work done on our old house. This left a lot of dirt that the foundation repair guys left behind. When we first bought the house we bought a cubic yard of dirt (my first mass dirt moving experience). Over the years previous owners had let the yard deteriorate. Water could collect in parts of the yard and stay for days after a rain. This tends to kill grass and only weeds survive. The previous owners had also created a garden. Gardens need lots of sunshine. This one got shade for half the day (no veggies coming out of this garden). The little barrier they had made to keep out grass had also left this part of the yard lower than the rest. More than a cubic yards worth of dirt. Well today it is almost level with the rest of the yard. Just hope the renters, who ever they may be will appreciate all of the sweating I did today.

Got the forums setup for the site. You can hit the 4RCA site by clicking the link then clicking onto forums.

Progress

Added the forum link to the main web page.

Looks like the site map that was generated was good. Google didn't show any errors.

Now it's time to start working on the PHP stuff. See what I can make.

A weekend of painting and cleaning up the old house and getting it ready to rent. Looks like a busy weekend all around.

It works

With the success of getting php and postgre talking it took little effort to get phpbb up and running. Yes it is running the database on a different box. This will keep the old pIII 900mHz machine running just fine as the web server.

 

Now for some simple changes to bulletin board.

 

Now if I could only get that report working at work.

Fun Day

Fun day today

There is only so much you can do in manipulating a reports output through printer drivers. After half a day of working with and modifying the printer drivers, I’m no closer to getting the format that I want where I want. It’s time to look at the report and figure out what is not being called for formatting. Concurrent managers needed bouncing and there was not a DBA in sight. Guess it will have to wait till tomorrow.

On the bright side got PHP, Apache, and PostgreSQL working together on the home servers. Next is getting phpbb working. I hope there is a way to get the DB off of the local server. I’d rather have it on my DB server.

been playing around with the google stuff. They do offer some easy to use stuff for free. (at what price?) Found a pretty cool little site map generator. It's free as long as I place a link. Here's the link . Guess I'll find out in a few days from google if it was any good.

I get the number 1 ranking now on google and yahoo with the 4rca search. W00t!

Who knew modifying an existing report would take so long or be so difficult. This is just a reminder of the true cost of customizing something.

 

I've had to learn how oracle print drivers work and HP escape codes to get parts of the report working. I'll have to give a presentation to the developers so that they will be able to to this in the future. Not every day that the functional team can give technical lessons to the development team.

 

Another lesson that seems to be easily forgotten. Support and project resources shouldn't be the same resource, unless you do not mind projects slipping.

Oh the joy of createing processes to handle the exceptions.

It just reminds me of why, when looking at a company to work for you analyze their cash flow and their margins. Strong cash flow or strong margins can overcome a lot of things.

The last company I worked for had a strong cash flow. When you receive 95% of your cash for services within 4-5 days, you have a very strong cash flow. As long as you do not make mistakes that hinder your cash flow you can always overcome the mistakes.

This company has strong margins. As long as it can command strong margins it can overcome the host inefficiencies that impact those margins.

Web site back up. Move was successful and ATT had everything ready. Just had to repoint to a new IP address for the DNS name server lookup.

The DSL line is out in the hall. Apparently the former occupants of the house had 3 phone lines going to the house. The DSL not being the one that I'm using as an office.

Long day, tomorrow it is time to start unpacking boxes.

Tried publishing, ip hadn't propigated out fully.

Tomorrow is moving day, yes we bought a new house. That means the site will be down sometime today and up hopefully in the next day or so. That is of course that SBC …. er I mean AT&T did their job right and switches everything today.

Tonight the servers move and get re setup and hopefully DSL is up and running.

IP’s do change with the move.