When I first started IT Consulting in August 1999 I encouraged clients to keep dynamic content on websites so they can provide ongoing value to visitors. I tried to set a good example by writing daily journal entries, which I did without missing until 2002. Nowadays, "blogging" has become quite fashionable.
Picture - Showed up to the inaugural St. Louis SCCA Gymkhana this morning, and these were the other entrants. I double-checked to make sure I didn't find the St. Louis 240 club instead - looks like I might have the wrong car for this event!
This program is SCCA's attempt to reach out to the young drifting crowd. I like drifting and all - in dirt and snow. Looking at all the 360s and figure-8s on course, I knew this is going to be a new experience. Timing equipment was set up, so the goal is still to get around as fast as possible - is anything I know from autocross and rallycross going to apply? Drifting is a little like rallycross, perhaps?
Picture - Fortunately that question was not left solely up for me to answer - Bill showed up too in his autocross X Prepared car with R-compounds. Based on the way we set up in "grid" though, it seems as if we still don't know to think of the 240 guys with their welded differentials, detachable steering wheels, and enormous shift levers. One autocross XP car, one rallycross Subaru, and a bunch of 240s...
Picture - Another indication this is not like autocross - autocrossers bring one change of tires sometimes to change from street to racing tires. These people brought one and a half sets of extra tires.
Picture - Excuse me, they brought 3 pairs of tires - only the rear tires ever got changed, and they went through all of them in one event.
It was a fun day riding along with the friendly 240 guys and see them do all sorts of things most SCCA people don't know anything about: clutch-kicks, letting go of the steering wheel and letting it spin in your hand during a drift - the whole thing was a different experience. In the afternoon the course was altered to be less nauseating - instead of 5 360s in a row, we now had 2 figure-8s, just 2 360s, and a fun box element that resembled a decreasing radius turn (as in, decreasing down to a single point, lol.) I just drove it like an autocross course, but with the tight figures I was staying in 1st gear the whole time. Since there's going to be no clutch kicking the Subaru, I applied autocross techniques - slow in, fast out, find the fast straight lines to get in and out of the figure-8s. Hugging that cone as tight as a station wagon physically can was key to getting out of the 360 quickly. Speed is not as important as making the radius small. That is the trick to drifting around a 360 too - just watch Ken Block. For a while I had the fastest time of the day, 47.500. Then the driver with the "slowest" 240 (stock KA24 motor, no turbo) whipped together some 46 second runs - someone gave him advice to yank on the handbrake to hug that cone tight. Bill was doing well in the autocross-prepared car too - I could never match his fastest 47.39 time. But his car doesn't have a handbrake. Or power steering.
Thursday, 6th of May, 2010
Wednesday, 5th of May, 2010
Picture - All ready for Gran Turismo 5 now. Let's see if it makes it before the Playstation 4 comes out, lol. Picked up this very lightly used setup tonight - Playseat WRC with a Logitech G27 force feedback wheel and 6-speed H-pattern shifter (plus push down reverse!)
Picture - The G27 even comes with a clutch pedal. Now you can learn how to drive stick without leaving the house!
Monday, 3rd of May, 2010
Sunday, 2nd of May, 2010
Saturday, 1st of May, 2010
Picture - I skipped the luxurious Logitech diNovo and came across the Adesso 3200UB wireless keyboard - with a trackball! The ball is on the top right corner of the keyboard, and the two mouse buttons are on the top left, so it's really easy to use your input devices now even if you're standing up and holding the keyboard - both the buttons and the trackball are right at your thumb. Also at your left thumb is a scroll wheel - perfect for scrolling through websites, emails, or lists of things on the screen.
In this most recent iteration, additional buttons have been added for the Media Center Edition operating systems. The most useful ones don't require it though - volume up/down, mute, home, and email all still work on my regular XP machine. Most of the play controls work in Power DVD too.
To cut down on the footprint of the device, they crammed the arrow keys into the keyboard. This is common on laptops too, and to compare it to typing on a full sized laptop keyboard summarizes the experience quite well - complete with the initial hunting for the page up/down and home/end keys until you get used to where they are at. Once you learn it their positions make a lot of sense actually - they are all within thumb's reach when it's parked at the trackball, including backspace, which is great for browsing websites.
I'll admit to never having used a wireless keyboard before so I can't tell if this is normal: I appear to type too fast for the information to be delivered over RF, and letters get dropped if I get excited. As you can see in the picture, Sunny is not excited at all about the new toy, but this is one I have been eyeing for a while now, and it will be nice to not have to trip over USB extension cables when typing on the couch.
Tuesday, 27th of April, 2010
Wednesday, 14th of April, 2010
So last week I've confirmed that there is no way around BW converting all the dates from an Infoset to character when the data comes in to Business Objects, because BusObj doesn't support the Infoset dates. To rub more salt in the wound, they are being converted to dd.mm.yyyy format, which is used in most parts of the world, but not here. I started adding variables in the WebIntelligence reports for every single date to parse and reformat the dates, but then we figured out that the user profile (tcode su3) is actually being applied here. So all I had to do was change the setting in my user profile and all the dates are now mm/dd/yyyy, the way people here want to see it.
Tuesday, 13th of April, 2010
Sunday, 11th of April, 2010
Saturday, 10th of April, 2010
It also seems like the world has already moved on while I've done things the same way for 6 years. The old Palm OS had a final hurrah in the entry-level Centro device, and all PDAs now are running things that have been designed as SmartPhones from the start.
There are a lot of different mobile OSes now, but since I still want to have as wide a selection of applications that I had available for Palm, that does narrow it down a bit - I'm either looking at iPhone or Windows Mobile. Most Palm users are now iPhone users it seems, since they tend to be anti-keyboard. Having now owned both a touchscreen and slide-out keyboard phone I do prefer the keyboard for sending emails and browsing websites. If there were still a Sony Style store open (they all closed here and I had no idea!) I would just go pick up an Xperia...
Picture - So I decided to keep the phone and get an iPod Touch. It does everything my T2 does, plus all the new stuff like WiFi, an accelerometer, and the most beautiful handheld screen you can get. I've never spent only $199 on a PDA - a lot of progress has been made - it has 8 GB vs 32 MB (though the Tungsten read 2GB SD cards), and a 533Mhz CPU vs. 144 Mhz.
I have spent a decade using exclusively Palm OS and never tried to migrate the data anywhere else. It's a good thing both Palm and iTunes will import/export to Microsoft Outlook because without that bridge I would have no migration at all. I guess Outlook is finally good for something around here, but I still won't be using it for my personal email.
Friday, 9th of April, 2010
Thursday, 8th of April, 2010
Symptom
Infoset date type objects (DATS type) are mapped as Character types in a universe based on a SAP BEX Query.
Prompts related to the Date field variables are coming as List of values instead of Calendar in WebIntelligence.
Cause
This behaviour has been considered as an enhancement request and tracked under ADAPT01229917.
Resolution
This enhancement request is scheduled to be addressed in Service Pack 3 (SP3) for BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 3.1 due approximately April 2010.
Wednesday, 7th of April, 2010
Picture - But what I did was use a relative path for the LiveOffice session URL. The SWF file will just look at whatever server it is deployed on itself to connect to the LiveOffice sources. Now the SWF file can be pushed from dev to test to ps to whatever without the Xcelsius developer having to touch a thing – the way things should be. Cool! The side effect is that the SWF file will not run locally in Preview – so switching the URL to a relative path would be something you would do right before exporting the SWF to Enterprise.
Saturday, 3rd of April, 2010
Sky View Car Wash send me a coupon for a free fancy car wash tody - complete with all the colorful triple coat and RainX stuff they squirt on the car at the end. They also dressed up the tires - definitely the fanciest car wash I've ever gotten. I was also very impressed with the tire scrubber they had as part of the automatic wash - this is a whole league above Waterway, but about the same price feature for feature. When I got home I threw some wax on it too, so the car is all pampered now.
Thursday, 1st of April, 2010
Monday, 29th of March, 2010
Mon Mar 29 11:37:19.270 ThreadID<968> SAPMODULE : RowsetDataModelBase[39]::getInt(2) = 0
Why is it calling getInt on a column that is clearly a double? Scrolled up and found this:
Mon Mar 29 11:37:19.130 ThreadID<968> SAPMODULE : RowsetDataModelMetaDataBase[78]::getColumnType(2) = 4
GetColumnType pulled a 4 (integer) from the metadata instead of an 8 (double). Since this is a canned key figure (0SRVCLENKYF) I guess we'll have to open a message with SAP?
Friday, 26th of March, 2010
Thursday, 25th of March, 2010
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Business Objects\Suite 12.0\MDA\Asserts]
"Model"=dword:00000001
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Business Objects\Suite 12.0\MDA\Log]
"OverWrite"="No"
"AppendPID"="Yes"
"LogFile"="C:\MDA.log"
"LogFormat"="%T ThreadID<%i> %X : %m"
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Business Objects\Suite 12.0\MDA\Log\Modules\SAPMODULE]
"Verbosity"=dword:0000000a
"MDX Query Log"="C:\mdx_sap_query.log"
Tuesday, 23rd of March, 2010
I have seen abandoned buildings around here where people have whittled away the brick they can get to without a ladder (since used bricks are worth money) but this is really extreme!
Mmm, having a gas grill means we can make things like this all the time...
Friday, 19th of March, 2010
A concertmaster undergoes brain surgery to treat essential tremors
Youtube video - The coolest piece of art I've ever seen - a horse-drawn H2!
Wednesday, 17th of March, 2010
The Bowfire concert tonight was outstanding! Great musicians and entertainers, and it was an excellent demonstration of almost everything I find fun about playing fiddle myself. They did not have to script in dialogue to transition between pieces - it was all music, and they were clearly having fun playing together on the stage, which naturally made watching the show as an audience member equally entertaining. I learned a lot about entertainment tonight! By the way, Zigeunerweisen is definitely more enjoyable as dueling violins - it's so natural!
Monday, 15th of March, 2010
Received the SLSO's winter letter from the president today. It's fairly common for graphic designers to mirror images so they look better in the context of the overall publication, but you have to watch out with pictures of musicians! I always tend to notice those...
Maybe they've been
Sunday, 14th of March, 2010
Wednesday, 10th of March, 2010
After carefully monitoring the height clearance of the Tahoe it turns out that it actually does clear the garage door - as long as you don't make any sudden inputs to pitch the suspension as you pull into the garage. With both cars in the garage opening any of the car doors or even the door between the house and the garage is a little interesting though.
Tuesday, 9th of March, 2010
Monday, 8th of March, 2010
Picture - Mollie is also an artsy cat
Friday, 5th of March, 2010
Monday, 1st of March, 2010
Picture - One of Mollie's favourite spots to nap
Found the client's identity guidelines today too, now I can get started creating Color Themes. Deployment should be a reasonable process - it's just a little XML file under C:\Documents and Settings\<login>\Application Data\XcelsiuscustomThemes
Monday, 22nd of February, 2010
Sunday, 21st of February, 2010
Picture - Found an excellent use for old DDR RAM sitting around - Haley's G4 has four slots!
Friday, 19th of February, 2010
The good news is that they have BW Accelerator, so queries come back with all the data in under a second. While many enterprise Xcelsius dashboards now utilize LiveOffice as a temporary storage area to deliver acceptable response times, I am welcoming the opportunity to bypass it. The bad news is that they don't have the newer Netweaver platform that supports direct access to BEx queries - so I'm creating Web Service connections instead. The dashboard interacts with the BEx query through the web service, sending parameters as variables to it and returning the data on-demand to the users.
This allows each tool to do what it does best - BW performs the filtering and aggregation of the data, and the Xcelsius presentation components are bound to just a handful of cells in a very straightforward model. Selectors continue to enable users to traverse large hierarchies of enterprise information.
Both mandatory and optional variables come over automatically to the Universe as predefined filters without any trouble. The hierarchical variable works very well too since each value has a unique key in the entire BW dimension regardless of what level it is in the hierarchy. List of values are automatically created to translate business terms to the technical name behind the scenes.
Picture - There is an option in the OLAP Universe wizard that creates the TECH_NAME detail object for responding to prompts, but if you forget to select the option creating the [TECH_NAME] object manually is simple enough.
Thursday, 18th of February, 2010
Picture - Before I got the dremel out and started cutting, I went back to Micro Center because they do have the most enormous selection of power supplies I've ever seen - surely there is something that will fit. After looking around and even talking with an associate, patience paid off and I found the Hercules "Space Saving Design" power supply. Another associate, Joseph, was nice enough to open it up for me so I could do some preliminary measuring and it will definitely fit.
