Thursday, 29th of April, 2010
HP's aquisition of Palm is particularly interesting - and it's not primarily because I'm a fan of Palm. (I just switched to the iTouch 3 weeks ago anyway.) Rather, HP has been a strategic partner with SAP to provide end-to-end Business Intelligence solutions. Mobile delivery is very hot right now - this could be part of the strategy to create an end-to-end mobile BI solution...
Tuesday, 27th of April, 2010
Worked with a different group today that is using an older fixpack of XI 3.1 to connect to BEx queries (~1.3) - turns out it doesn't bring in any characteristics that are displayed as text (vs. key.) It's a good job we're at least on 2.2 in my group...
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
I noticed today that Maps on my iPod Touch was only 2 houses off when pinpointing my location at home. This led me to wonder what sort of directory existed out there that allowed an iPod to use WiFi signals alone to determine location. The answer is Skyhook Wireless - I have moved in too recently to be in the directory probably but Skyhood hires people to drive around neighbourhoods with GPS units and recording the MAC addresses of all the sources of broadcasting WiFi signals in urban areas. Cool!
Sunday, 11th of April, 2010
Picture - It's nice that the Audi Q5 has folding mirrors, but I'm not what the angle of the rotation really accomplishes here - looks like it's still sticking out to me...
Saturday, 10th of April, 2010
It's hard to believe but I have had my Palm Tungsten T2 for over 6 years now, but one little thing after another has ceased to function on it in the last few months, and today it doesn't really come on - just flickers constantly on the boot screen. For a device that I carry with me everywhere, I would say 6 years of use is quite impressive - that's about 5 years more than the average PDA and cell phone that I carry around.
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
I've been creating universes against BW data this week and I noticed that all of the date objects are not being identified as having a date datatype – they are coming over as characters. Simply switching the object data type in Designer was no good. While WebIntelligence has functions to convert characters to dates, this does not help prompts, which now get a long list of date values instead of the nice calendar selector. Obviously SQL functions are out of the question too for an OLAP universe. I unfairly pushed some developers to look again into the data types of these objects on the BW side, but then found SAP note 1370410:
Infoset date type objects (DATS type) are mapped as Character types in a
universe based on a SAP BEX Query.
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.
So it looks like we're out of luck on the date prompts until SP3. But this is only for InfoSets – I tried looking at some objects in InfoCubes and they work! (Quick cheat for non-BW people: InfoCubes are actual data sets. InfoSets are descriptions of two or more data targets, such as an InfoCube, joined together to allow for reporting against multiple data sets.)
Wednesday, 7th of April, 2010
So I have developed an Xcelsius dashboard with multiple Live Office connections to reports on a Development server, and it's time to promote the SWF, WebIntelligence, and Universe files to test. But wait, the connection in the data manager has specified the development server for the Session URL – will I need to regenerate a new SWF file for every single environment so the dashboard will point to the test, production support, and production reports/data? At first it appears so – even Life Cycle Manager appears to only remap QaaWS URLs. Live Office connections are stuck using whatever server you specified when you generated the SWF.
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
Picture - There were too many Lamborghinis in stock at the dealer this morning to sit down and take pictures of any one, but look what I found around the corner!
Picture - Rear shot
Picture - This one has a manual transmission too!
The Maserati and Bentley selection was quite impressive too but I also found the Rolls-Royce Phantom to be quite fascinating. People talk about how enormous this car is I don't think I had fully grasped the concept. When you stand next to it, the roofline sits at where you would expect an SUV to be, and of course it stretches 230 inches, longer than even a Ford Excursion. No SUV will be able to roll up next to this and dwarf it, and I think that's the point of this 21st-century luxury car. And the exterior design is hardly SUV-like - it's like someone took the Silver Spur that has defined Rolls for two decades and created a 1.1:1 scale model of it.
Picture - The interior is quite a scene too. How about the "Power Reserve" meter to the left of the speedometer that goes from 0 to "100%" - which is where the redline is. Yes, Rolls drivers can't be bothered with knowing how fast the engine is running, they just want to know that they're driving around with only 20% of the engine's "power".
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
Query as a Web Service authentication is pretty straightforward in Xcelsius - if the dashboard is uploaded into the Enterprise the credentials used to log in to Infoview are used in the dashboard. Outside of Enterprise, you get prompted credentials, or the Xcelsius developer can put in a system/generic ID. While the prompt allows you to select from the different authentication methods, (Enterprise, LDAP, Windows AD) it seems that when the credentials are embedded in the Xcelsius connection it always attempts to use Enterprise, even if the method is changed in the Web Service parameter. Fortunately there is a workaround - in the QaaWS designer change the parameter to "Consumer Defined". This adds another input value, "authenticationType" to the web service. Then, in the Xcelsius data connection the developer can enter "secWinAD" or "secLDAP" for that value to use a different authentication method.