Bob Breedlove

PowerShell Class

2011-12-16T20:23:00.000-08:00

I have just spent 5 complete days in an on-line Administering Windows with PowerShell class. My head didn't explode, but there was some knowledge that leaked out my ears. That's to be expected. I find PowerShell knowledge to be very helpful in my line of work -- I'm primarily a SharePoint and Records Management administrator and developer. PowerShell provides a toolbox with which I can better do my job. I will immediately put the knowledge that I gained to work in my day-to-day business.

I'm an old perl guy and find much of PowerShell reminiscent of perl. The object-oriented nature of the language takes a bit of getting used to as does the pipe, but once you get the hang of both, it's pretty easy to get the most out of the tool. I will have to convert some of the perl that I have written for Windows into PowerShell as the other members of the team will be better able to maintain and enhance the scripts if they are written in PowerShell than in perl.

I also plan to make extensive use of PowerShell's remoting capability as we have multiple systems in various farms that we have to administer. We also have the need to make sure that some of the fall-back farms have the same configuration as our primary farms. We need to be ready to fall back to our alternate location in case of any problems with the primary farm. The use of remoting will assure that the same configuration is applied to all servers in both farms. it will also allow us to determine the cause of problems across multiple WFE's as we troubleshoot the farms.

Tools I Use: WinMerge

2011-12-03T11:47:00.001-08:00

In my work life, I use several tools. I thought I'd tell you about some of them. Most of these are free and some are portable. The first one I have made use of recently is WinMerge. WinMerge is an open source differencing and merging tool for Windows. It is available in a portable version which I have on a USB PortableApps.com stick. It can compare both folder structures and individual files and also merge files to create duplicate copies. I especially like the portability as I can move it from server to server and remove it when needed without having to install it.

I use it consistently to test configuration files for the various fall-back servers we have. It allows me to check configuration files on the fall back servers with the current production servers to assure that all changes have been applied to both servers. I recently used it in a migration which involved transferring several gigabytes of files from one system to another. We made the initial move by copying the complete library to the new system, then, after several days, had to copy any changes which were made during production operation. The initial copy took 4 hours and we would have had to spend that much time to copy the entire library again had we not had a tool like WinMerge. I set the compare to use date and file size and with a couple of minutes had the list of files to be copied/deleted. I told WinMerge to do the job after checking the files and within 5 minutes had migrated the files.

Get it and keep it in a ZIP file or on a USB drive for use with multiple servers. You won't regret it.

A perspective on "tweaks"

2011-12-02T09:11:00.001-08:00

Here's an interesting perspective on all those little design tweaks that seem to some at the end of a project. As a programmer, these often drive me crazy. I suppose that I know the logic behind some of them, but have wondered at the logic of the "2 pixel move" for a page element. Perhaps designers should come up with techniques which would minimize the impact on a project and we programmers should be more tollerant of these clean up elements.

I know what to do . . . but should I?

2011-12-01T21:03:00.001-08:00

One of the more perplexing problems that I face as a SharePoint administrator is not technical. It's the problem raised when someone approaches me with a question which has both a technical aspect and a governance aspect. I know how to solve their issue -- sometimes more than one way to do it -- but the question is should I? Sure, I can move their documents, grant them access, delete their material, create . . . I stumble over the governance questions related to these requests.

The point is that, as administrators, we need guidance and direction from the business units as to whether we should solve their issue. One of the most perplexing arises when some one says that can't reach a particular URL or see a particular document. I check their rights and sure enough, they can't. Now the issue is should they be able to? I find that the ansers these types of questions are not often readily apparent without a strong governance policy and involvement of the owners of the information.

Often, technology is implemented as the solution to a problem. People feel, that if they can only implement the software, then everything will be solved. But, the implementation of the software is often just the start of what is needed to solve a particular problem. Administration and governance and on-going maintenance and attention are needed both technically, and from a business aspect to assure that the system continues to function effectively for the business.

And not just best practices are needed. The business needs to do the hard work of defining a governance policy and, often, directing the users through policies and procedures aimed directly as the specific entity. On interesting application of this is records retention and legal discovery. The creator of a document may have no knowledge of or interest in this aspect of the document lifecycle. They simply need to produce an artifact for a specific purpose like a meeting presentation, publication, etc. The storage, retention, and disposition of the document beyond this single purpose is beyond their level of expertise and interest. It's up to the records managers to guide the creator in those aspects of the document's lifecycle.

The technology that I administer can implement the policies and procedures and assure that the document is retained for the specific period and then disposed of at the end of its life. But, it can't define those policies. It can make sure that the storage location is secure and backed up properlly, but it can't define who should have access to the document. It can help legal discovery find the documents, but I can't define the correct terms or search methodologies used to classify and index the document infromation.

And technology definitely can't deal with the vagaries of business organization, employee lifecycle and reorganization. As a company evolves, their policies, procedures, and organization evolve to fit the changing business environment and model. Business administrators must assure that the policies and procedures which he software enforces and updated and the software adjusted to accommodate the new environment. It's a never-ending obligation of the human beings to drive the technology to reflect their changing environment.

LiveToad Testing - Foundation Tabs

2011-11-26T20:23:00.001-08:00

Over at LiveToad, I'm looking at Foundation and the tabs feature, specifically tonight. I must say, it's pretty easy to make a tabbed display and the nice tabs make some pretty good looking tabs just out of the box. I put together some information with 4 tabs in about 20 minutes, including fumbling with BlueGriffon on my part. It worked the first time and is pretty good looking on the page.

The tabs are created from a DD element while the content is in a UL block. Common naming links the tabs with the content. I didn't try to be too fancy just out of the box -- text only -- but it worked as advertised.

Looking at BlueGriffon

2011-11-25T08:48:00.001-08:00

I am fascinated by editors. Yes, simple text editors. I am also interested in tools (read HTML editors) to maintain my website. I have Dreamweaver, but have been looking at other WYSIWYG editors which might be used and are free.

I am looking at a free WYSIWYG editor for the website. I still love Dreamweaver, but am looking at something I can put on other laptops and operating systems without costing an arm and a leg to license. Enter BlueGriffon. It looks good, so far, but I have said that before about other editors. We'll see how it works out. Check it out here.

One issue I have run into is the source editor and it isn't very good. When I tried to position the caret on the line, I found that it was off by about 4-5 spaces from the display. Not real usable. I am also trying the editor on various platforms and have implemented it on my netbook and home laptop. On the netbook, I have installed it on both Windows XP and Ubuntu (Windows 7 on the home laptop).

One clue about installing on Ubuntu. It appears when it first installs that the configuration directory isn't accessible to you because the permissions aren't set correctly. The configuration directory also isn't obvious. It was hidden (i.e. a period in front of the name) and was called

.disruptive innovations sarl

I changed the ownership of the directory with

sudo chown : .disruptive*

(Note the use of the splat "*" as I didn't want to type out the name with escapes for the spaces.) Once I completed that, the program would start. Another interesting problem is getting the program in the launcher, but that's another story.

I have also added the FireFTP add-on which allows me to upload files to the site. It works pretty well. Right now, my evaluation of this editor is that it might be good for small changes, but still lacks for major work.

The other problem I have with this editor is the same one that I have with other systems except Dreamweaver -- site definition. In Dreamweaver, you can define the site and then use relative links in your work. In these other editors, I have yet to find a way to do this. When this happens, you have to create relative URL's and can't use references to the top level of the site, for example. Thus, if you have your images in the

/images

folder, and you are working on a page down in the structure you have to reference the top with constructions like

../../../images

to get the relative link and have the images or CSS show up.

More to come.

SharePoint 2010 Review Job Definitions Error

2011-11-23T08:57:00.001-08:00

Symptom: In central administration, the "Monitoring > Timer Jobs > Review job definitions" page would not display. The error was that there was an invalid GUID.

Of course, the programmer chose to not tell me which GUID was invalid. After poking around a bit and using the PowerShell Get-SPTimerJob cmdlet, I determined that there were two jobs without DisplayName fields.

I reasoned that these jobs were causing the page build to fail because there was nothing to hang the entry on -- DisplayName is used as the Title field on the page display. The Name field for these jobs matched the ID.

I deleted them using the following PowerShell commands. First, I listed the Name and ID of the three jobs:

get-sptimerjob | where {$_.name -eq $_.id} | select name, id, displayname, isdisabled

This command displayed the ID's of the job.
2e1692f0-7f01-4a99-8fb0-99403018561e 2e1692f0-7f01-4a99-8fb0-99403018561e False
b5afe147-1dbe-40b4-b452-0df11c2c647c b5afe147-1dbe-40b4-b452-0df11c2c647c False
e343e08e-645b-4d31-b56a-bd18696cbc92 e343e08e-645b-4d31-b56a-bd18696cbc92 False

Then I used the ID in the following sequence. The Delete() removed the job.

$job = get-sptimerjob -identity 'e343e08e-645b-4d31-b56a-bd18696cbc92'
$job.Delete()

I could have applied the delete in the first lookup, but wanted to be extra careful as I was going to delete something and I might not get it back.

Once I deleted the fields, the page displayed.

Testing Foundation CSS Framework

2011-11-19T08:29:00.001-08:00

I'm testing Foundation CSS framework over at LiveToad. It's a foundation based on rows and columns. I have reorganized the page and and working on the basics just to see how it will work for other projects. So far, so good. the initial conversion from my own home-grown style was easy. I did have to remove an element or two and haven't tried to fix any of the sample styles that they supplied with their kit. That will come later. I'll add notes and impressions to this blog as I work through the process. Like lots of things in my life, this is a fill in project which I will be doing in my spare time -- like I have a lot of that -- so things make take some time to develop. Stay tuned.

IE and Firefox, but not Chrome

2011-11-13T10:49:00.001-08:00

I'm a BIG Microsoft OneNote fan. I also use SkyDrive, where I store notebooks. To open them in OneNote, I can use IE and Firefox to open the files, but not Chrome. Makes sense to me because of the competition between companies.

Microsoft OneNote and Remote Learning

2011-10-23T11:13:00.000-07:00

I have just spent the week in a Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administration class which was delivered remotely. I sat at home and took the course, labs and all. It worked quite well and my brain if full. One if the things that I did was to use Microsoft OneNote (the one program Microsoft got right) to take notes. I used it to capture slides and add my notes to a notebook. At the end of the class, I converted the notebook to PDF and posted it on our SharePoint 2010 support site on the corporate intranet.

I used a dual monitor set up so I could keep the presentation up and still take notes on OneNote. I put the screen capture look into the quick access toolbar so that I could quickly capture the slide information and relied on the auto-save feature to keep me from having to worry about saving my notes. I added a page for each lesson and it came out great. Now, with very little effort, I have notes which I can share with team mates from the class.

The Ingenuity of Fools

2011-10-20T07:20:00.000-07:00

Foolproof systems do not take into account the ingenuity of fools. [source]

This axiom holds true in designing computer systems. It manifests itself in the requirements phase of the project. Admittedly, your users are [probably] not fools. But, there are certain statements that raise the hackles on the back of my neck. You know the ones--they're generally "numeric" in nature . . .

We never have more than . . .

We always have at least one . . .

Whenever, I hear something like "we never have more than 5 entries", you can be sure that the first time you get a call about your newly installed production system, it will be "hey, why can't I put 6 entries . . .".

So I have a couple of design axioms that I live by.

Never set an upper limit.

Plan for there to be no entries.

Stick to these and you will eliminate a number of issues when you system goes into production.

So why isn't is caught in testing? It's usually because they don't test for it, because if "never happens".

Completed move of Project Server 2007

2011-10-15T16:08:00.000-07:00

I recently completed a move of Project Server 2007 VMWare server and database to the test environment. It was an interesting ordeal. After one mis-fire, it came together. The interesting thing was moving both the server -- by copying the VM and renaming the server -- AND the database. We used an alias on the server to keep the database name the same for the move.

There are two gotcha's:

Replace the passwords on all the service accounts on the services. The operating system seems to be aware that you have copied the server and renamed it.
Check the site collection administrators. I had some problems with the PWA application because of this.

We have checked things out and are now ready to perform the upgrade to PS 2010 followed by SP1 and the June, 2011, Cumulative Updates. More on this as it progresses. BTW, I have taken a backup of the VM and database in case the upgrade is FUBAR. Hope for the best, plan for the worst.

E-mail Conversations

2011-10-02T11:09:00.000-07:00

When do you stop?
How do you contribute?
What do you do to make better?
How do you file?

One of the things that I dread the most is "design by e-mail". Recently, I received this e-mail which was the last of 30+ responses:

Please handle the issue.

This simple e-mail was a problem. The problem -- what was the issue and what was I expected to do?

Problem solutions via e-mail conversations can be problematic (no pun intended). In an ongoing conversation with many participants, after a while, it can be difficult to determine what the problem is, let alone what has been done and what you are expected to do about it. You can spend more time thrashing through the e-mails trying to determine what the original problem was and, what, if anything was done to resolve it. You have a difficult time to determine what was

tried and rejected
considered and eliminated
tried and partially succeeded
rejected out of hand
considered and not tried

Well, you get the idea. And this assumes that there weren't side e-mails -- e.g. e-mails between a subset of the original participants.

E-mails are particularly bad documents for design for many of the reasons above. Some of the responses may be curt, some are detailed, but irrelevant, others are pertinent, but poorly worded, and on-and-on. It can be difficult to determine who the decision makers are/were and what the actual decision is/was.

With today's penchant for texting and short messages, and the likelihood that e-mails will cross in flight, often the responses are ambiguous. You get a "go for it" and, unless you spend time analyzing the e-mail chain and the timestamps, you are uncertain just what should be gone for.

So what can you do? People aren't going to stop the practice. You're still going to get that 50 e-mail chain with directions to do something. What can people do to make that "something" more obvious?

Summarize before you comment

If you are going to propose a solution, summarize the issue in YOUR e-mail and then write your comment. This way, in a single response, you have stated the problem as you see it and made your comment. This is especially important if you are responding to a particular part of the chain and commenting only on a portion of a complex issue or design.

I like the colors proposed by John for the . . .

is much stronger than

I like it.

Rearrange the To: and Cc: headers

If you are responding to an individual's comment or directing an individual, rearrange the e-mail header to make that obvious. It's important to let people in the conversation know to whom you are responding or who you are directing. It can be very confusing to have 10 names on the To: line and not know who is the recipient of the direction. I might ignore your direction to me just because I see someone else's name on the To: line.

If you don't want to take the time to do that, at least start your response with the name of the individual(s) to which it is directed.

John, can you do . . .

rather than

Can you do . . .

Summarize before you direct

If you are going to add an implementer to the conversation or direct someone to implement the solution who has been part of the conversation, first tell them what you want done. Don't just include the e-mail chain. Summarize the solution in YOUR response. This serves two purposes.

First, it tells the participants what you perceive the problem and solution to be. Unless you're the manager of the entire team, someone at your decision level may not agree with your assessment of the situation. I like summarizing both the issue and the proposed solution in a single e-mail response because it eliminates any ambiguity in the situation.

Also, if it isn't patently obvious that you are the person with the authority to make that direction, somehow state that you are taking charge and directing the solution. This is especially important if you are going to propose a solution which requires involvement of other resources not under your direct control.

Make things as concise and clear as possible

An e-mail chain is NOT a conversation. The participants have not necessarily been in the chain and, if they have, may not have paid all that much attention as the exchange went on. The bottom line is to make each discrete response and concise and clear as possible. By doing this, you will save time (and money) and achieve the end that you intended with as little hassle as possible.

SharePoint RAP Over

2011-09-24T07:38:00.000-07:00

The RAP is over and we are waiting for the final report. There were a number of findings, including some glitches from the 2007 upgrade to 2010. Now the real work begins -- fixing and tuning. Our first effort will be to expand the memory on our VM's to at least the minimum recommendation. Along with this, we will want to turn off some services which we are not currently using. I ran the recommended:

stsadm -o enumallwebs . . .

command and it blew up. Yep, failed. I need to get the time to look at the results in more detail to find out where and why, but that's not encouraging. Still more of my experiences to come . . .

SharePoint RAP

2011-09-17T07:24:00.000-07:00

Next week, we'll have Microsoft in to conduct a RAP on our intranet SharePoint site. We upgraded this from 2007 to 2010 and feel that things may not have gone as well as could be. Hopefully, we will learn from this effort. More after the 3 days.

Good Ideas Evolve

2011-09-11T08:47:00.001-07:00

Good ideas take time to evolve. Little bits of insight amass over time to become a great idea. I heard this in an interesting TED talk and find it applicable to me, at least. I find this in my professional and personal life. It often takes any number of conversations, considerations, ponderings, wanderings . . . to make that good idea snap into place. It's that idea that you get out of nowhere in the shower or while cutting the grass or doing any number of mundane things. The idea really doesn't just magically appear, but seems to be a result of the distillation of all those other events coming together in your mind to result in the idea.

When do we have that "ah ha" moment when the good idea finally gels? How does all that evolution occur within our minds without our not necessarily knowing it?

The start of an idea can be a word or phrase, something you hear in passing. The key for me is to get it recorded in a place where it can grow. It's sort of like gardening. You take a clipping and plant it in a small pot in your green house were you can nurture it. The key is to recognize a potentially good idea and capture it so you CAN nurture it.

What good ideas have you had and how do you keep them growing?

Ubuntu, Calibre, Blackberry w/MobiPocket - a good experience

2011-07-03T18:37:00.000-07:00

I have just had a good experience on my Aspire One netbook and eBooks. I don't generally buy ebooks just because they are as expensive or more so than the equivalent paper book. But, I have just tried an ebook system with Ubuntu, Calibre and MobiPocket on my Blackberry. It was quite good. I downloaded free ebook in epub format, converted it with Calibre, attached the Blackberry and set it to look like a USB drive. Clibre then detected it and sent the converted book to the device. Everything worked well and I'm able to read the book on the phone. Pretty neat if you ask me.

HTTP 400 and Project Server 2010

2011-06-19T11:27:00.000-07:00

I'm in the middle of a mystery involving the HTTP 400 error, a Sun Reverse Proxy, Certificates, and Project Server 2010. Sound complex? It is. It has lots of moving parts and lots of possibilities. I have been through three intense days of analysis and have come to only a single conclusion. Something is causing HTTP 400 errors to be reported and, once they occur, the session doesn't seem to reset until you close your browser and start over. Next week, I will be attacking network traffic between the reverse proxy and the SharePoint server (IIS) to see if I can arrive at a solution. It is especially frustrating because the error reporting is giving me no clues. I have looked a the logs on all servers and just can't figure out what the problem might be. More later . . .

Real World API

2011-05-29T08:20:00.000-07:00

I was reading an article about design when I came across this statement

“ ...The top user request is often ‘export to excel’.... Excel empowers the user to do ‘out of the box’ actions. It is the API to the real world.

how true. We spend our time designing all sorts of export interfaces with complex XML, etc. when all the end user wants is a comma delimited file (CSV) that they can import into Excel. We have even had to provide utilities which take the XML we produce and convert it for those users who don't have the resources to design on themselves.

Sometimes the simple solutions are the best.

Interesting Answer about Programming Skills

2011-05-21T08:12:00.000-07:00

I was puttering around Twitter and found a question:

What is the best programming to focus on?

I clicked to the web page found the usual responses -- the Java guys recommending Java, the .NET guys recommending C#, some recommending C++ (used by Google). But one struck my fancy. It was a recommendation for COBOL:

Actually, if you want a secure job for life, learn COBOL. Most of the banking applications still use COBOL, and are likely to continue doing so.

Very interesting response. Here is a language thought dead by many of the young programmers today (if they even know what it is), but still in use in real-life business situations.

Dislike MousePad on Netbook

2011-05-17T07:13:00.000-07:00

Have I ever mentioned that I REALLY dislike using the mousepad which comes on most notebooks and my netbook specifically? I find it very counter intuitive and I am constantly doing things which I don't intend to do. There is a new product -- a "mouse ring" which I am seriously considering for use when I have to place the netbook on my lap and work with the built-in mousepad. Really frustrating here at the Tech-Ed conference where I have to work on my lap. Otherwise, the netbook is working well, especially the 8 hour battery life with the 9 cell battery.

Tech-Ed

2011-05-15T07:46:00.000-07:00

I'm on the way to Tech-Ed in Atlanta. Just went through on-line check in. Gotta love it. Now if they could just get on-line travel working so I wouldn't have to spend 4.5 hours in a center seat of the bus, I would be happy. I hope to learn a lot about SharePoint at the conference.

The Right to be Forgotten

2011-05-01T09:53:00.000-07:00

On the Internet, nothing ever dies. Some groups feel that you should have the right to have your information erased completely -- to be "Forgotten". But it isn't all that easy, especially in a country like the U.S. where the over-abundance of lawyers and the legal system they have created through their next evolutionary step, the politicians, has resulted in the "land of perpetual employment for litigators".

This environment of continuous litigation results in businesses being expected to keep information for ever-longer periods of time. And the continuous stream of lawsuits mean that information needs to be retained for extended periods of time.

Not just information, however, but the servers, workstations, and software systems required to retrieve the data. Data is useless if you can't retrieve it in some format that human beings can use to pry money from others through lawsuits.

I have worked at places where entire computer systems must be retained just in case data needs to be retrieved from systems which have long been replaced by more advanced systems on newer and more efficient equipment. This can be especially problematic when organizations change operating environments -- say from Sun to Linux or Linux to Microsoft. Even changes of things like databases can mean extra expense to be able to retrieve the information from the old database. And then there's the human element. Knowledge of the older system can vanish as experienced engineers leave the company or retire.

So what do you do? Well, you need to abide by the laws of the jurisdictions under which you operate. If you do any work on the Internet, this can be a daunting tangle of legal. As much as possible, you need to maintain or convert your data into formats which can be easily read by common tools. This can mean using standard encryption methods for storing sensitive data and avoiding proprietary coding for required data.

Documenting processes and methods for systems is important if you feel that a vital human resource will not be available when you have to retrieve the data. I can guarantee that if the knowledge is not recorded and saved that resource will be unavailable when you need to retrieve the information and you will spend vast amounts of time and energy working to duplicate the work which might have taken mere hours or days to record in the first place.

The bottom line is the data won't go away any time soon, and, at some point before it does, you may have to retrieve it in a meaningful manner for some lawyer. The best bet is to plan for this in your processes and document the techniques to accomplish it. Not pleasant, but, much better than the alternative when the subpoena is served and you have a deadline to do it anyway.

!@#$% - Say What!?

2011-04-16T09:08:00.000-07:00

Ever wonder what to call all those symbols you run into as programmers? Check out this article.

My favorite is SPLAT ("*" yeah, I know it's asterisk, but splat is so much more descriptive). Also, the octothorpe ("#" it's the pound sign) is not really all that rare. It was the official name for AT&T in the day and may still be used. Pound sign is easier to say. One I didn't know was "strudel" for the at sign ("@"). But, hey, you learn something new every day!

FAST Search, an exploration

2011-03-13T12:51:00.000-07:00

We are standing up a SharePoint 2010 site with FAST search. I have quite a bit of experience with the Google Search Appliance (GSA), but little with FAST. One of the aspects that I will have to get into is the fine tuning of search to achieve goodness. Goodness for search appears to be defined as:

I want to see the content I intended no matter what I put into the search query.

The urgency to achieve this desired result varies directly with the status of the person performing the search. That is the urgency to achieve the desired result is greatest for executives and important external participants.

OK, I am being a bit cynical with the statements above, but I mean it to point out that, not only do we need to understand and classify the content that we are displaying, we need to understand the thinking of the audiences are are targeting -- and some audiences are more important than others. The balance of these factors mean added complexity and continuing efforts to achieve the desired results.

FAST appears to have the complexity to be able to achieve at least part of the goal. That is, we have the tools in the toolbox that are needed to be able to tune the search engine to display the results. We just need the knowledge and, in the case of a very dynamic website, the continuing examination and fine tuning to continue to achieve the desired results.

One interesting aspect of tuning FAST is that it appears much of the tuning is done through PowerShell. This can be disconcerting for the business user who may have to rely on IT resources to actually achieve the desired result and continue to correct for changes in the content and thinking of the participants.

The fine tuning appears to involve many aspects of search including crawling, indexing, and query tuning. Some of the features that are desired require that no only is the search tuned, but the web parts are fine tuned on the results pages to achieve a user experience which displays the results in a manner that is friendly and meaningful.

As we work through out FAST experience, I will record my thoughts and findings here. I hope that FAST experts will join in some conversation to improve the results of our efforts. More later . . .

Trusting the Cloud

2011-02-27T08:13:00.000-08:00

Today, the Cloud is the next best thing in computing . . . at least to those hoping to make scads of money from the concept. I'm a bit leery of putting my information in the cloud. How about you?

What type of data do you trust to the cloud? Me, not much. I definitely can think of some advantages to having data in the cloud -- availability on multiple platforms and locations being the primary one. But I just haven't gotten over the thought of what the service is doing with my data. What type of mining and mapping and analyzing are they performing on my data?

Modern Browsers?

2011-02-21T08:19:00.000-08:00

Take a look at this article by Faruk Ates. He discusses modern browsers in a quite rational way. Here is his definition:

A modern browser is any browser that: successfully renders a site that you just built using web standards, testing only in your browser of choice along the way, with all the essentials functioning well; without you having written any browser-specific hacks, forks or workarounds; and shows great performance as you navigate it.

I like it. Dealing with browsers is one of the major hassles in web development. This can be especially true if you are forced to support ancient, non-standard browsers like IE6 (the punch-card of browsers).

I especially agree with his statement "successfully renders a site . . . using web standards". As long as you are developing to approved web standards, the site you just created and tested using Chrome should render accurately in the production version of Safari or Firefox or Opera or IE. The key is developing to web standards. If you go beyond this to the cutting edge, all bets are off.

Take a look at his well thought out article. If you develop for the web, you'll enjoy it.

humans.txt - credits for people?

2011-01-23T08:38:00.000-08:00

Take a look at humanstxt.org. I got this is a tweet and was intrigued. It is described as

An initiative to know the creators of the website.

A TXT file that contains the information about the different people who have contributed to the web building.

Sort of like movie credits for websites. It's an interesting concept, but, how useful? How many of us stay behind to see who the "key grip" was. For that matter, how many of us know what a "key grip" does and does it matter for the movie? Except for a small group of insiders or enthusiasts, does anyone really care.

Now, knowing who is backing (i.e. financing) a web site can be an interesting thing to know. That, more than who designed it, will tell us about the motivations of the site and the likely biases in the site. Maybe what we need is a "money.txt" file in which all those backers of a site are listed? Now that would be interesting AND useful.

SharePoint Lists Tip

2011-01-14T06:26:00.001-08:00

I found when you change the name of a field, SharePoint does not change the "internal name" which you use to retrieve the field through SOAP. Example, "Title" became "roomnumber" on the list, but remained "Title" ("ows_Title") to the SOAP retrieval. You can imagine that I spent some debugging time on that one!

Buried in JQuery -- Moving old pages and repurposing

2010-12-24T08:48:00.000-08:00

For the last few days, I have been converting an old perl-based set of web pages in the a JavaScript-based set of web pages. It's sort of an interesting project in that, the perl used algorithms to create links that would display files for users.

Sounds simple, but, of course, it wasn't. First a bit about the project. These are VERY old files which are maintained for historic reasons online. They are static and the file names are created in such a way to be able to be algorithmically derived. For example "type_date.ext". So far, so good.

When this set of pages was live, the perl needed to read the folders to create the pulldowns for available files. It would start with the base day and work it's way to the current day using routines from the excellent Date::Manip module. Luckily, that isn't needed now, so JavaScript becomes a good alternative. Oh, by the way, we're moving these files from one server to another, thus the reason for rewriting.

Rather than writing programs to gather the dates from the file system, I started with the finished web pages generated by the existing perl programs. That is, I displayed the page in my browser and saved it. This gave me a base page with all the select fields already populated with the original files. If you use this technique, be sure to check for relative links which are now displayed as static links (the full link including the domain). You will want to edit these back to relative links. Usually a simple matter as you can find-and-replace with your favorite text editor.

It was then a reasonably simple matter to create the JavaScript to format the pages and display them. I found, that, for the most part, I was able to translate the perl subs into JavaScript (JQuery) functions. Straight across.

One interesting problem was unwinding some code that was in the perl to accommodate the original real-time operation of the pages. For example, depending on the hour of the day, the files might not be present. Since these are now static pages, in essence, this code is not necessary and might even cause some problems. After working through that with a couple of cases, I was able to complete the project successfully.

First One-Million Only

2010-12-18T07:46:00.000-08:00

Over on The American Person, I saw an ad from Google:

. . . first million businesses only

Gives you some idea of the scope that some of these large web businesses operate in.

Content for Web Applications

2010-12-12T09:41:00.000-08:00

A web application is a website that contains pages with partly or entirely undetermined content. The final content of these pages is determined only when a visitor requests a page from the web server. Because the final content of the page varies from request to request based on the visitor’s actions, this kind of page is called a dynamic page. (source)

Here's an interesting article about writing content for applications. Not the content that goes around the application, but the content for the application itself. You know, buttons, labels, help desk, directions.

Magic and Mirrors . . .

2010-11-14T18:07:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting here on my couch typing this blog on a computer that is about the size of a medium text book. It's not connected to anything. When I'm done the post will be put on the web immediately and can be read by people all over the globe. All this has been developed during my lifetime. It's magic!

Yeah, I understand the technologies behind it all -- at least in theory -- but whenever I take the time to think about something which has become commonplace, I am amazed. Now instant is too slow. E-mail, how last year, physical mail, how last century. Ya got to love it.

Ubuntu - Part 2

2010-11-14T08:31:00.000-08:00

I have had some time -- not a lot to check out Ubuntu on my netbook. I use the computer like one might use a notebook, primarily at work in meetings and other places where I can't take my work laptop. My primary program needs to be something like Microsoft OneNote where I can create documents, take notes and generally organize my thoughts. Here are some of my general impressions . . .

Not significantly faster than Windows XP which came on the netbook.
It does load a bit faster, but, once in operation, the overall experience is not faster. This may be due to the type of programs I run.
My favorite program -- OneNote -- isn't available.
I did find BasketNotes, but it just isn't quite the same as OneNote. This goes to a point I have made many times over the years. Buy an operating system to run applications that you need, not because it's fancy or looks good. People use programs, not operating systems.
Like the update and program availability from Ubuntu.
I have had several updates downloaded to the system and it seems quite efficient. I haven't downloaded many programs, but the few I have added went well.

The bottom line at this point seems to be that Ubuntu would work, but, because many of the programs I use and require for work and other interaction run on Windows, I'm unlikely to change completely to Linux on the netbook. BTW: I am not typing this on the netbook, but on my computer at home.

Ubuntu on my Netbook

2010-10-20T07:25:00.000-07:00

I recently installed Ubuntu on my Netbook along site Windows XP. You'll remember I said in my list post here that my ideal netbook would have Microsoft OneNote. Obviously, Ubuntu would not meet that ideal, but I though before I went whole hog on that thought that I would need to evalute something else, just to be sure that it's really the right decision. I have found "Baskets" to replace OneNote. It's definitely not in the same class, but does provide interesting note taking capability.

I haven't spent much time with the operating system and I'm still learning its ins-and-outs, but it seems reasonable. I'm not sure it's much faster than XP on the Acer netbook, but it is acceptable. I use the FireFox browser and the netbook version of Ubuntu. I'm right now going through the update process which seems pretty painless. I'll let you know more as I work with the operating system and the applications on it.

My Dream Netbook/Tablet

2010-10-17T07:58:00.000-07:00

Most tablet computers seem to emphasize showing content. My ideal Netbook/Slate involves creating content. Here are the essentials:

WiFi -- Don't need 3/4G and I don't want to pay a phone company for a data plan
Web Browser
Microsoft OneNote or equivalent -- I want to duplicate the outstanding ability to capture and create contsnt
Keyboard -- I'm creating and don't like a handwriting interface, although I might use one in a meeting, for example.
Under $400 -- preferably under $300

Sounds pretty impossible, doesn't it. But they are pretty simple requirements. Here is some reasoning.

The ability to play MP3, show movies, etc. would be nice, but not necessary. So, given that, lets go down through the basic requirements. First, WiFi access. I don't travel and don't find myself in many places where WiFi isn't available when I want to create data. Plus the $1,200/year cost of a data plan from a phone company just doesn't seem necessary.

A web browser is needed to display source information. Pretty much a must have today to access the data and opinions of others. It's also the mechanism by which I'm putting information on the web like this blog entry.

Microsoft OneNote or equivalent. This is a major tool to create content. It's the one application that Microsoft got right.

I need a keyboard because my handwriting is so bad. If I had a tablet, I suppose that I would like to be able to enter information some other way, like a touch screen, but the keyboard has long been my preferred method of data entry.

And the kicker, the price. I don't have all the money in the world for a toy. I'd like the maximum price point to be $300-$400. Otherwise, I'll stick with my current Acer netbook and leave it at that.

All those thousands of apps? I don't need them and probably wouldn't use them. So, they might be nice, but I don't think you would find me spending my money on many of them. I just don't see the use. I know I'm a bit on the minority side with this discussion, but, it's what would get me to buy one of these things.

Interesting Google Chrome Behavior

2010-09-25T07:42:00.000-07:00

This is a bit of a stream of consciousness blog while I'm working through an interesting issue with Chrome . . .

Over in Bob's Third Place I mentioned that I'm trying Google Chrome out as my default browser. But I have run into a bit of a interesting issue. My day job has Outlook Web Access 2010 (OWA) implemented for access to e-mail from home. I have been successful with IE (duh!) and Firefox, but when I try to access it from Chrome, I get the fact that the site is "not available". I can switch to Firefox, for example, immediately and the site IS available and function as advertised. The only reason for this is that the site uses our companies certificate to provide SSL access. I have loaded the root cert and intermediate cert, but still seem unable to access the site via Chrome. This may not be the case as the error message is "Error 7 (net::ERR_TIMED_OUT): The operation timed out", but it's interesting that this occurs only here. I tried another secure page on our site with the same certificate and got the same problem. I suspect it's timing out trying to authenticate the root certificates even though I have them in my certificate store on the browser.

Well, I found the issue and I don't think it's with Chrome, but rather the OWA or certificate authority. By turning off the check for certificate revocation, everything was blazingly fast. A quick note to the OWA support staff is in order.

JavaScript Debugging

2010-09-05T08:37:00.000-07:00

Here's a quick tip for debugging JavaScript . . . JavaScript is flat. Thus, an error somewhere higher on the page will cause JavaScript to fail further down the page. If you have looked at that JavaScript you just added and can't figure out why it isn't working, start from the top. Look for some of the less obvious causes:

Check permissions on external files
If your users don't have permission, they can't read in the file, references will fail
Check anything that might have been affected by find/replace on your page, you may have messed up something else.
Check for closed tags
Check for more global misspellings.

Anything above the JavaScript you just added might affect it.

FireFox 4 beta - some thoughts

2010-08-28T08:46:00.001-07:00

Generally things are working well with the new Firefox beta on the Acer netbook. I use Outlook Web Access (OWA) 2010 for work. This version works on Firefox and seems to respond well. I did experience some hang ups while using it on the beta version, but this might have been due to the fact that I was on WiFi which might not have been all that reliable. Refreshing the page seemed to get things going. More later . . .

Progressive Enhancement

2010-08-28T08:11:00.000-07:00

If you design, implement or automate websites you should take a look at this article on progressive enhancement. It's the concept of building your site up from core content through these steps:

Content
Format (basic then advanced)
Scripting

By following these concepts, you build a site which makes sense on browsers which support the latest CSS3 and JavaScript and those which are less capable. It's open to readers, those with visual impairments and even text browsers (do people really use these things!).

Take a look.

Libraries without Books

2010-08-24T18:28:00.001-07:00

As society changes, libraries are changing with it. They are going more and more to electronic media as resources. It may be that the buildings will get smaller and the virtual resources larger as libraries evolve. The buildings may just become spaces where people go to utilize the resources. The library may also be extended over the internet to become a resource for people across the planet. (I can't imagine the legal hassles that will arise as people check out books virtually, but that's another blog.)

So what will future libraries look like? I envision smaller buildings, perhaps on the lines of a series of meeting places or coffee shop sized rooms where people can meet and work. It might even look something like the local Starbucks with people in the same area, but on their laptops or the machines which are supplied by the library.

I wonder what eBooks will do to the shape of libraries? Maybe you will be able to check out books and reference materials to your laptop, netbook or tablet or use them only in the confines of the libraries Wi-Fi system. I can imagine that libraries will also be a place where people will meet to research and collaborate on projects. They might provide the facilities to facilitate collaboration like projectors, smart boards, networked printers and other devices yet to be thought of to bring projects into existence.

Looking at FireFox 4.0 Beta 4

2010-08-24T13:27:00.001-07:00

I just installed the beta version of FireFox on my Acer netbook and it seems significantly faster than the IE8 which I use regularly on this machine. I haven't done much with it so far, but I'm going to keep trying it with the various web components that I use and see how things work out. Let you know what I find as things go along.

Documentum to SharePoint

2010-08-18T18:42:00.000-07:00

I need to move folders, versions, etc. from Documentum to SharePoint and retain much of the meta-data. There are tools, but most seem to be in the $30-50K range which seems a little excessive for this task. Any ideas out there for a tool or technique which will do it?

I'm considering using the SharePoint copy service combined with some code to extract the information from Documentum (I already have this code which could be modified). Seems that I could put something together with some ease given the answers to some questions:

Can the copy service create versions?
Can all the meta data information for versions be created/modified?

The technique doesn't have to be all that fast and might use a share as a landing place for the files and information. The Documentum system is 5.2.5 and runs on Unix servers. That's about it.

Linking through Search

2010-08-07T07:55:00.000-07:00

A colleague of mine made and interesting statement about the sprawl which results from SharePoint site proliferation. He said that sites should be allowed to become whatever is right for the business while being tied together by search. This got me to thinking about the concept and the types of things which would be needed from a corporate perspective with this philosophy.

Corporate Document Control

In environments where there are audit and security requirements -- like ours -- you would need some policies and procedures to control and track controlled information (I'll refer to them here as documents just to keep the blog shorter). Access to this information would have to be controlled and, often tracked, for compliance reporting.

Classification

In order to find something, it would have to be tagged in some way with a consistent set of terms so that I could find it. This taxonomy, in my experience, it the place where many organizations fail. It takes a good deal of continuing maintenance to assure that it is consistently enforced, updated, and applied.

Another aspect of classification is knowing what is actually real at the time of the search. Let's say you're looking for the "jury duty" policy (something I'm currently involved in). You enter the term into your handy search bar and get back several documents. You really need to be able to know which is the one governing the corporation at the moment vs. the one which was presented to the committee as a white paper, but rejected.

Your search needs to give you some locational elements to know where this document is in order to know its relevance to your current need. This can be difficult for a search engine. Take a look at this site as an example. It contains 25,000+ documents. Sure, you can find a document based on your term -- often hundreds of them. But, what is the reference you are searching for? Where are these documents located so you can get some context for them? We implemented the concept of Abstract files to allow you to find that information. It's maintained by our publishing system and allows the user to go to the page(s) on which the document is located to understand more of the context in which it was produced.

Document Life Cycles

People tend to be pretty good at putting things on sites. They are less than good about getting old and irrelevant things OFF the site. Thus, you can end up with a mass of old, outdated information on your site. Using search an reveal this information and, being presented out of context, it can lead to confusion, misunderstanding and frustration. It can be worse to get too much information than too little. This isn't really a problem for your search, but for your governance policies, procedures and life-cycle automation to help keep the sites clean. Just finding old and irrelevant information can be a major undertaking without some policies and tagging procedures and the involvement of the owners of the sites.

Administration and Maintenance -- the Human Factor

One problem of proliferation of sites is the human factor. The scenario is that some super user on your team establishes a site, maintains it, makes it elaborate and hard to maintain and then gets transferred to another department. Their replacement (if there is one and this wasn't a downsizing), is not so interested in the site and things languish. This can occur because job functions change, personal inclinations, or just the press of other duties (their real job). The site becomes outdated and irrelevant, even blatantly wrong and there is no one to clean it up, so it's documents contaminate search results.

With inevitable reorganizations comes the interesting phenomenon of information which is completely unowned or ends up being owned by multiple organizations. Now, when the system administrators ping a group about their site which isn't used, that group doesn't even exist and the new groups won't take responsibility for the information on the site. It might still be valuable corporate information, but there is no one to actually maintain it -- an interesting situation for the system administrators and compliance staff.

Conclusion

I think my point is that the concept is good -- sites should be useful for the organizations which use them. In fact, they HAVE to be or they won't be used. But, there has to be come corporate framework and human administration and maintenance to keep them relevant and useful at a corporate level also.

The Value of FREE

2010-07-27T08:55:00.000-07:00

That's FREE as in free beer. I am trying the free WiFi at Starbucks, but is it really free. I guess it is if I were coming here to drink coffee and happened to use the WiFi. But, I actually came here because of the WiFi and paid for it by purchasing a tall (i.e. small) coffee. The tall coffee makes me think about the science of naming things, but that's another blog. So the WiFi here cost me $1.50. Not a bad deal, but not free. If I went to the library -- which isn't open, by the way -- the WiFi would be free. But, then, I pay for that with my taxes, so . . .

Anyway, I got to thinking about free as in free, open source software, and I got to wondering if not charging for something devalued it. That is, given two pieces of software, one free and one costing something, does the one which actually costs something have more value than the one which is free. To me, the free version, if it is of the same quailty, is preferred, but, I'm not sure that this applies to everyone. Why do people buy name brands. Why do managers feel that "supported" software (e.g. paid) is preferable to one which is community supported, even if you never use the support and the community responds in a more timely manner than the support personnel?

In some aspects, I think that people value things when they have to spend something (e.g. dollars rather than participation or effort). They think that the product or service must be better because it is more costly. I'm not convinced.

Amazon - More Virtual than Real

2010-07-20T06:31:00.000-07:00

Amazon announced that it now sells more electronic books than actual books. I'm not sure whether this is a good thing or not. On the one hand, conservationists may be happy that fewer trees will be cut down for paper. On the other hand, the entire book publishing world -- including companies that make products that go into books, warehouse personnel, delivery personnel, book store employees -- might look on this with some trepedation. Their industry could be affected by this development.

Of course, Amazon sells things for their book reader, so, like Apple, if you buy into their electronic books, you buy into their system of distributon. If you go with Barnes & Noble, you're buying into their system, etc. Just like Apple and their iTunes ecosystem, you are committing yourself, not only to a device, but to all the distribution and other infrastructure that goes with it. And what if that book you desperately want to read isn't published for the name your device here? Do you go out and by the other device and all that it implies to read that one book?

We'll see. . .

A Dog's Life?

2010-07-18T12:37:00.000-07:00

Working like a dog? I'm not sure were the expression came from, but, from the looks of this, a dog's looks pretty good to me. Asite, perhsps from the fact they wear fur coats in this 100 degree weather, as long as they're inside like our mutt, life is good.

Ubuntu on a USB Stick - Initial Impressions

2010-07-18T11:56:00.000-07:00

Installation was painless and I'm now running Ubuntu 10.0.4 Netbook on my Acer Aspire One from a 2GB USB stick. I'm typing this on Firefox. Things worked well from the start. The system detected my WiFi and made the connection. Haven't tried much else, but I'm working to find things out. One thing I see is that The time is wrong. Probably didn't set up things correctly Looks like it's GMT.

Ubuntu on a Netbook

2010-07-18T10:11:00.001-07:00

Looking at Ubuntu Linux on a netbook. Loading the operating system onto a USB drive just for fun. Not sure anything will come of it, but it's something different. More as I work with it . . . or maybe nothing at all.

More Battery . . .

2010-07-16T21:56:00.000-07:00

The battery on the Acer Netbook has made the little computer very useful to me as a note pad. I am able to use it throughout the day in meetings, for general notes and for other times when I'm not at my desktop computer at work. At home, I'm able to use it throughout the house to take notes. Given this experience, I'd say that battery life will be one of the chief elements if I replace this machine.

Why would I mention replacement. Well, it is a bit underpowered for some uses. But the portability and the fact that OneNote runs pretty well on it once loaded, make it OK for now. We'll see what happens later.

New Battery Thoughts

2010-07-10T12:10:00.000-07:00

I have spent a couple of days with my new 9-cell Acer battery with 8+ hours of life . . . and I like it! It makes the Acer a much more effective tool. I have used it at my real job and have experimented with it a bit here at home. The fact that I don't have to plug it in every 1.5-2 hours alleviates much of the stress of using the netbook. I make good use of the snooze button to make sure that the system isn't wasting my batter life just sitting there. I have found the estimate of life to be pretty accurate, given this. I'll be very happy if the thing lasts 5+ hours -- enough for a couple of long meetings and notes. I'm basically using the Wi-Fi to access websites and OneNotes to take notes and make documentation. I'll keep you informed as I work with this little machine. (Sure wish it was a bit more powerful, but for ~$300 it's pretty effective.

Netbooks and Batteries

2010-07-05T17:53:00.001-07:00

With all the hoopla about the Apple iPad, I feel sort of like a dinosaur writing about a netbook, but I have one and like it. I use the netbook like a notebook -- not the computer, but the real notebook. I take notes, compose things, use e-mail, etc. My primary programs are:

Microsoft OneNote
Browser
Essential PIM Pro -- e-mail, task, calendar

You may be wondering why I don't prefer a cool device like the iPad. First, if someone gave me one, I probably would use and like it. But I just can't afford the price. Second, despite cool apps, it doesn't run the primary program I want to use -- OneNote. More on this in another blog. Third, I don't write well. I can type must more quickly and accurately than I can handle a pen on any device. Most of the work I do involves words, which means typing in my case.

I have used my Acer for some time both personally and at work. One of the problems I have faced is that of poor battery life with the 3 cell battery that came with it -- less than 2 hours with my pattern of use. I have just ordered a 9 cell battery which should triple the battery life at least. I look forward to being able to sit through a series of meetings or design sessions without having to plug in the computer.

The 9 cell batter is quite a bit bigger than the standard battery, but it appears to be designed well and work with the little computer. Even with the larger battery, it looks like the little Acer will be smaller than any alternative that I can afford. More later as I work with the new battery life.

CAML Dual Tags

2010-07-05T08:53:00.000-07:00

In working with CAML in SharePoint, I had to add dual tags around the query. It looks like this:

<query>

   <Query>

      . . .

   </Query>

<query>

Had to do this in order to get the web service call to recognize the query. It looks like the query is escaped (like I did when I created this blog) unless you do this.

Why Windows?

2010-07-01T06:48:00.000-07:00

Why Not!?

I don't want to deal with an operating system. I don't want to THINK about an operating system. I want to choose application that perform the tasks that I need to do and run them. The operating system is secondary to that consideration. It's just the platform that allows me to run the applications I need to do the work I do. Windows on the desktop is that operating system at the moment.

'Nuff said . . .

Trust in the Cloud

2010-06-27T11:51:00.000-07:00

I have just started using Miscosoft's Skydrive because they have implemented the OneNote application on the web. This got me to wondering what information people trust to the cloud. I tend to be a bit paranoid about information on the web. I don't use FaceBook or its ilk for example because I just don't wnat people to know all the much about me. I also don't think I would put anything on the cloud that was vital to my business, plans, ideas, etc.

Blogs like this are good for putting ideas out to the public to see reaction. But, I'm egotistical enough to think that anyone actually reads them. It's more of a way to put ideas out there for my own consideration. But, for things I intend to, perhaps, make some money from or otherwise benefit from, I don't think I trust either the people who might read them or necessarily the folks on whose systems I place it.

I'm an old timer who grew up in the time before personal computers or the Internet. Perhaps my reluctance comes from that. I know that there are generations after me to whom trusting all sorts of information to the web is no big deal.

We'll see how I end up using this resource. Right now, it is just a place to start ideas which I will later take to my system to develop into something real.

USB Tools

2010-06-13T11:05:00.000-07:00

I carry a number of tools on a USB stick to make sure that, whatever computer I am using, I have some common tools with me. All of the tools I have on the drive are free. Here's a look at a couple of them.

PortableApps is a system which allows me to have common menu and easy upgrade and access to the tools I use, there are a number of these available. I suspect that most are good. I just happened on this one first, liked the way it works and continue to use it.

TiddyWiki is a single page JavaScript-driven personal web page that I use in connection with a USB drive to be more personally productive. I put links to things there and carry it on my USB drive to make sure it goes everywhere with me. The tool allows me to quickly add a link to a category, write a brief note, whatever, and have it at my finger tips for future reference. I am constantly changing the links on the page to match what I'm doing at the time.

Notepad++ is a portable text editor. I'm sort of a text editor freak and am always looking for a good text editor. This one provides all the editing capability I need in a portable package.

EssentialPIM Pro is an e-mail, calendar, task, note organizer application. I bought a version of this as it forms the base of a lot that I do. There is freeware version which could be very adequate for most use.

More on the other tools I use later . . .

Looking for an Editor

2010-05-30T10:51:00.000-07:00

What I'd really like is something portable which would provide WYSIWYG HTML editing with the ability to go back to the code. It should be able to do HTML, ASP, JavaScript and should be easy to use when I want to just put something out while allowing me to get into the code when I want to. It should be as close to free as possible and, ideally, would work from a USB stick so I could transfer it between machines.

Oh yeah, it should also treat a "site" as a "site". By that, I mean, be able to set the "home" folder of the site and have relative links which would allow me to specify things like style sheets as the links should appear on the site rather than relative to the current folder.

OK, what I really want is Dreamweaver without the cost of Dreamweaver.

Control Freak

2010-05-16T08:08:00.001-07:00

"The 21st century is a very bad time to be a control freak. Why? Cause you can't control information. It's just too easy for anyone to put just about anything where almost anyone can read it. Things which would have required thousands of dollars and vast infrastructures before are now done on computers costing under $1,000 from your living room."

I saw this a while ago and thought of this application even in placed where control freaks are needed -- say at a company. If you are handling controlled information -- secure, proprietary, confidential -- today's environment makes it very difficult to control. You can control access to the information at its source, but once someone with access copies that information, it's very difficult to control where they place it. Even within the corporate firewall, confidential and sensitive information has the ability to, VERY EASILY, be just about anywhere. Once that happens you have the secured (original) piece of information and the "rogue" information who-knows-where.

Social networks, blogs, wikis and programs like SharePoint make it very easy for someone to take a document, snippet from a table, etc. and move it somewhere else. So how do you control that? There are tools which secure the individual document, but what about someone who copies information out of it for a valid reason, with all the right access, places it into another document, wiki, or blog which is not secured? Very little way that technology can deal with that. Oh sure, you can use enterprise search that can index all your content, everywhere and then design algorithms which will scan for certain keywords, but it will probably take human beings to actually determine if each individual case is a valid use of the information and secured correctly.

I think that policy, process, and education are the keys to this type of control. You need to train all employees and contractors, follow processes which minimize the need to copy sensitive information and monitor your personnel to assure that they are following the processes. If they aren't take appropriate action to correct the problem or remove the individual.

JavaScript: URL's to Clickable Links

2010-05-03T12:26:00.000-07:00

HTML is text. I find myself parsing text lots in HTML. It's one of the reasons I'm a fan of perl -- perl does text. Now I have found myself in a position to need to use JavaScript to make actual links out of plain text. Turns out it's pretty simple with a few caveats to follow. Here's the basic code:

var t = 'url http://bobbreedlove.com/livetoad';
var l = t.match(/http\S+/i);
if (l !== null) {
t = t.replace(l, ''+l+'');
}

"t": any text (note caveats below)
"t.match" uses the RegExp to pick off something that looks like a URL. Note that the "\S" is any non-whitespace character. This function returns the strings which were found to match the pattern. Note that this code assumes that there is only one matching string (e.g. one URL).
The "if" statement checks to make sure that there was something in the string. If not, the original string is left alone.
"t.replace" replaces the matched string "l".with the HTML following the comman in the call to format a clickable link in the original string "t". Note that this particular link uses a "_blank" target to open a new window. Just about anything can be added. One thought would be to apply a unique ID to the link and be able to style it, but, hey, that's another blog.

Caveats:

The Regular Expression assumes that there are no whitespace characters in the URL (e.g. no spaces). It also assumes that the URL is followed by a whitespace character (or the end of the string). If you are using the URL in a sentence and end it with a period, for example, this code would pick up the period.

It's actually pretty simple code. You can see it actually working in the "140 Character Thoughts" block on the Live Toad page on my site. This block retrieves Tweets from Twitter and makes the URL's clickable. Note also that it opens a new window, just to keep people on the site.

Working with text can make your site more dynamic. This technique can be used to construct URL's that actually work as links from plain text. Maybe I'll expand it next to pick up multiple URL's in the text string.

Enjoy!

Playing w/JQuery, CSS, and Stuff

2010-04-30T19:36:00.000-07:00

I'm playing with JQuery, CSS, and other stuff on the website. You can see the results on the Live Toad Page. Some of the things may seem pretty simple, but actually doing something helps me to learn. I'm trying out all sorts of things to see how they work. I really appreciate things that help me with concrete examples which are more real world than the typical Hello World examples. I found a very interesting site that lets one see what's going on. Check out JSFiddle. It will let you play with different frameworks and see how things work.

I hope to put some concrete tutorials from my messing about also, but, as I have little time, this may take a while. In the meantime, I hope to have the code on Live Toad commented well enough that you can see what's happening and how I found to do things. Of course, I'll also keep things noted here, on Live Toad and on the rest of the site.

Enjoy!

Website Glitz Requires Graphic Artist

2010-04-25T09:40:00.000-07:00

The company I work for is getting into glitz on their Internet and Intranet website. One thing I have noticed as a programming is that glitz requires graphic artists. I can implement the JavaScript pretty simply through the use of frameworks like JQuery, but the really glitzy effects require graphic artists to create the graphics which the JavaScript manipulates. For years, now, I have been trying to convince the management of some things regarding glitz:

It requires a graphics staff to maintain the graphics required to achieve the slick effects
It requires additional staff to maintain the pages in most cases as the elements are more static by definition even though they move/fade/flip/slide/... on the page and appear more dynamic
Pages and sections of the site require more planning and continuing maintenance efforts because of the graphic elements

It seems that many feel that technology will be able to accomplish the glitz they wish, but I'm working hard to show the amount of effort required to start and maintain the glitz.

A Website, A Blog, Both?

2010-04-04T12:01:00.000-07:00

I have been wondering if a website is needed any more. I have one. I have maintained it for years, but find, now, that I spend more time with the blog than the website. I'm not sure that I really need to keep the site as blogs implement more features. It's not like I'm trying to sell anything, so I don't really think that I need the site for that. It does give me someplace to do some piddling. (By the way, I have written about that -- piddling that is, also, here! But, that's another blog.)

I like being able to work online to enter some blogs like this one. Others I develop offline and upload. It depends on the complexity of the blog itself. I think I'm slowly getting away from the website and putting more effort into the blog. We'll see . . .

Exploring JPoint

2010-04-02T13:00:00.000-07:00

I have started exploring JPoint for use with SharePoint. Like many open source projects, one of the real problems is getting any good, complete examples. On many of these projects, they are either too simple -- "hello world" only goes so far -- or vastly too complex. I guess it's the way I learn. What I really need is a reasonably complex, but straightforward, and complete example from which to work.

In this case, I am trying to simply get a list and display some information from it. I ran into a problem and have had to dig my way through a really complex -- good, but complex -- web page on which the programmer actually implemented JPoint. I have made some progress, but I can't show it here as I'm not certain I have made enough progress. When I have it complete I plan to post it so all can see and get that learning example that many of us need.

As to JPoint itself, I think it's going to do the job. I hope to be able to add to its capabilities in the future, but for now will try to contribute by adding code to this blog. Look for it.

JQuery w/SharePoint

2010-03-26T18:58:00.000-07:00

Today I built a Web Part in JQuery. Well, actually, I used a Content Editor Web Part (CEWP), threw some JQuery with AJAX into it, added some graphics and had a web part. It accessed a SharePoint list and modified its display, downloaded and formatted some RSS, and contained some links. Pretty simple stuff which added glitz to our intranet. Felt pretty accomplished in CSS and JQuery when I got dome.

I look forward to exploring JPoint as one of my responsibilities is sprucing up the UI on our SharePoint intranet site. I'm also starting to explore Silverlight as another glitzer-upper (if that's a word). I'm looking for things which are easy, but give the site appeal. It's not my main job, but we need to make the site easier and nicer to use for our employees and contractors.

It will NEVER happen.

2010-03-26T13:56:00.000-07:00

Whenever a business unit tells you this in a design session

BEWARE!

It's the first thing that WILL happen.

It's one of the reasons that I try to design without things which cause restrictions such as number of elements.

OneNote - Microsoft got it right

2010-03-24T18:26:00.000-07:00

I know it's not fashionable to credit Microsoft with anything, but they really got it right with OneNote. I just completed another webcast session with note taking and screen capture using OneNote. At the end of the webcast, I was able to download the PDF of the slides which I printed to one note. I was able to capture parts of the webcast and add notes instantly. I did this at work where I have two screens, so I could keep the webcast up on one screen and OneNote on the other. It worked like a charm.

Browser Frustration . . .

2010-03-21T12:54:00.001-07:00

I'm working on GLITZ for my personal information and company requirements. What's GLITZ? It's all the fancy stuff User Interface (UI) stuff that makes websites and web applications interesting. If you look at LiveToad, you'll see that I have a JQuery menu that displays well in EVERY browser EXCEPT Windows Internet Explorer (IE). It's VERY frustrating. Just display the page in FireFox, Chrome, Safari and things work as expected. Fire up IE 8 (the standard for our company, by the way, is IE SIX!) and things go to heck. Why can't Microsoft be like everyone else in the known universe? Their latest SharePoint 2010 is loaded with JavaScript and they're using JQuery. AARGH!

Driving from the Business

2010-03-14T13:06:00.001-07:00

Have you ever noticed how many projects originate with the technology?

Have you also noticed how many that originate with the technology, fail?

Many people feel that problems can be solved by throwing a piece of technology at it -- often a new piece of technology. In my experience, this is exactly the wrong approach.

Business problems are solved by business solutions. The technology applied to the business solution is merely the tool to implement the solution. We often, don't take time to produce the business solution before attempting to implement some technology to solve the problem. It seems difficult for people to admit that what they are doing or not doing is the actual cause of the problem. "If I could just get a system . . . " seems to be the mantra for this approach. By going directly to technology, it's like people are saying that its technology's fault and not my fault that things aren't going well.

Throwing technology at a business problem is like coming to a home construction site with only saws. As long as you're cutting lumber, everything goes OK. But, when you have to connect two boards together, things stop working -- no hammer.

The key to developing a viable business solution is to define the business requirements to solve the business problem. And by business requirements, I don't mean naming the technology you want to purchase. The business unit should be able to define the business process and identify the business requirements without consideration of technology.

A business requirement is not "sub-second response on a page". A business requirement is "be able to process the transaction while the customer is on the phone" or "allow the customer to enter all personal information securely and receive confirmation that is has successfully completed during their session".

The answer to a successful technology project is often to ignore the specific technology and concentrate on the business problem. By understanding the requirements in business terms, you will be able to select the correct technology to support them.

Processing the Queue

2010-02-20T08:17:00.001-08:00

In my last post, I told how I organize things coming into the queue from the chaos in which I exist at work. Now, it's time to look at processing the queue. Remember the basics:

A task comes in, usually in the form of an e-mail, but maybe as a phone conversation, at a meeting, or through a direct assignment from my supervisor
I create a task. I drag-and-drop the e-mail onto the task queue to create a task, categorize the task and optionally, prioritize it or create a task directly from some other source material.
I optionally flag the e-mail so it's easier to find and file it in an Outlook folder. If the task came from some other source, I make notes so I can remember what it's about. I will also make notes as I work the task, especially if I have to interrupt or postpone the task to another time.
The key here is to keep my in box relatively clean so that new e-mails coming in are easier to process.
Now, it's time to actually DO something. Here, I'm working from a number of sources, but, I boil most of it down into tasks so I can work from the task queue in Outlook. My system is pretty simple. I place the tasks on the appropriate date and keep the list organized first by date, then by priority, then alphabetical. That last sort really isn't necessary, but it can help to group related tasks as I tend to name them pretty much the same thing for related tasks.
The priority system is very simple. It's simply the high, medium, low priority flag which can be set in Outlook. High-priority are for those things that I really want to work on. Most tasks are just average. I only use low priority for things that I want to separate out of the average queue to make them stand out.
I assign most tasks a date. This lets me take a look at my "day" (more on that later). But, I have a set of standard tasks that have no date. These sort into the "none" date and allow me to have some templates for Journal entries or forming other tasks. I can highlight one and use the ctrl-J keyboard shortcut to create an instant journal entry. One interesting thing which happens with these tasks is that the date and time on the journal is set to the current time, so it's easy to load-and-go with the journal entry.
A look at the tasks for the day, only gives me a look at the scheduled tasks that I know about. Since I deal with 30+ identity management provisioning tasks which result in about 200 provisioning actions each day, some of my day isn't driven by the task queue. This is where the general tasks come in. I know that I will have provisioning tasks, so I start up a provisioning journal action and then work from another queue to actually perform the tasks as they become available. The priorities set for me by management is:
Production support (mainly issues and problem management)
Identity management provisioning
Everything else with some projects getting priority as directed by management
I check for those production issues and then, periodically throughout the day, check the provisioning task queue for ones I can work. In between this, I work on the other tasks (projects, enhancements, research, etc.) The task queue really helps there. And then there are the interruptions . . .
My job is interrupt driven. Because my team supports production systems, we have interruptions as people actually use those systems. Interruptions can come through e-mail as issue tickets or on the phone from our help desk (1st level support). When one of these arrives, I bring up the journal and start recording.
One problem I face is keeping track of what I was doing. I need to remember at what point I was interrupted and get back to it as quickly as possible once the interruption is dealt with. In the case of an e-mail, this can be relatively simple. I can usually do a quick scan of the e-mail (remember that clean in box), categorize it and, if it's more important than what I am doing currently, get to a point in my current task where I can logically break and deal with the incoming interruption.
Phone calls are more difficult to deal with. If I'm really slammed with something, I can ignore the phone and let it go to voice mail. In this case, however, I'm taking the chance that they will attempt to reach my cell or come directly to my cube to get attention.
If I need to deal with the call, I try to get to a point where that can happen or make a note on that journal entry which will help me get back to what I was doing as efficiently as possible. When a call comes in, I start another Journal entry with the timer going and start taking notes. I find, if I spend some time with the individual, and take good notes, I can usually take the time to get my original task to a logical stopping point before I proceed to handle the incoming interruption.
I find that the key for me is to keep things organized constantly, keep the in box and other queues as clean as possible and record what I am doing to minimize the impact of interruptions. More details on my techniques in a later post.

Existing in Chaos

2010-02-07T12:22:00.001-08:00

I exist in chaos at work. I'm really not multitasking, but am more interrupt-driven. I support a number of corporate applications and processes including:

Web Publishing
SharePoint
Identity Management (including certificates)
EDMS
Mercury Quality Center
Employee Life Cycle processing
and other miscellaneous corporate applications, some developed in house and others purchased and out-sourced.
As I'm sure you can imaging, keeping somewhat organized is vital to my sanity. I spend a good deal of time making sure something doesn't slip through the cracks. I'm going to spend a couple of blogs discussing my methods. In addition to maintaining these tools, I also have project work. I'll put that off until later and concentrate on the production aspects of my job.
INPUT
Most of my tasks come through e-mail. I live in Outlook. I make extensive use of
Folders: to organize incoming e-mails.
Tasks: I drag e-mails to the task list to create tasks and organize tasks by time
Journal: I record my work in the journal so I can produce status reports and justify requests for additional overtime, budget, etc.
One of the most important aspects of input to me is keeping my inbox clear. The first thing I do when I get into work is a "morning review". I go through my in box and clean it out. I create tasks by dragging an e-mail to the task list and assigning the task a category, date, and priority. I "flag" important e-mails and move them to the appropriate folder. I use the flagged view to see all the current tasks in a single place and to reply to e-mails.
One of the things I have found is that, if I respond to an e-mail from a folder, I let the system store the reply in that folder. This keeps my responses organized by category and make finding out what I have done easier.
The morning review includes checking the task list and reviewing some standard systems to make sure that they are functioning correctly. Once I have completed this review (usually 15-30 minutes), my in box is reasonably clear and I am ready to tackle the tasks for the day.
I work from the task list. Since tasks are organized by date and priority, I know what to work on first. As new e-mails arrive, I check them to make sure that they aren't urgent (you know, from the boss) and, keep them organized as the day progresses through the same process. I keep track of things on the task and the journal. As I start to work on a task, I highlight it and use the ctrl-j keyboard shortcut to create a journal entry. I start the timer and get to work. Because some things can be done in the background, I sometimes have two or more journal entries open at the same time. I use the journals to jot notes which I may need later. If a phone call interrupts me, I use the ctrl-shift-j keyboard shortcut to start a journal entry for that event and keep track of what is happening. I find that this method works well for me as I can track what I have done and keep notes in a single place. If the phone call turns into a task, I can use the ctrl-k keyboard shortcut to create a task for later work. It all hangs together in my world.

Still Searching . . .

2010-01-27T06:43:00.000-08:00

. . . actually, still working on search. This will probably be a major part of my life now that I have started it. It appears that the effort to convince executives that it is a policy and procedure effort rather than a technical effort to achieve search goodness is a major effort.

We have the situation on our website that we are not attempting to sell things or necessarily push visitors to any particular destination, but to allow visitors to find the information they are looking for. This is often a particular document (not a web page). Thus, goodness would be

When I put in "X" I expect to see "Y".

Where "X" is sometimes only vaguely related to "Y" and "Y" is something very specific. The problem in using technology to solve this issue is that, "X" can vary for different audiences and can be only peripherally related to the "Y" for which they are searching.

Another thing complicating our site is that the primary purpose of most documents which are posted to the site is not to be posted to the site. Thus the documents are designed for presentation at a meeting, say, and not for retrieval from the website.

I believe that search has to start at document creation. It is only the subject matter experts (SMEs) who can really define how a document should be classified. The producers of documents need to understand that retrieval from the Internet is part of their job and that they are the only ones who can really classify documents. If the source documents are correctly tagged, the resulting PDF documents will be correct.

The battle continues . . .

Frangible Systems

2010-01-24T08:46:00.001-08:00

frangible: capable of being broken; easily broken

[source] Systems design can be fragile. When I ran across this Word of the Day from Dictionary.com, I was reminded of this. Frangible systems are difficult to maintain and don't react well to the constant change which is inevitable in many systems. One element that I have been thinking about recently is design that makes systems fragile or easily broken. One design element that I think contributes to the fragility of a system is its complexity.

Systems by their nature can be complex. They require complex interactions, complex computations, complex manipulations. But we add to this native complexity by adding system complexity in an attempt to make them stable. From my experience this system complexity can actually add to the fragility of a system.

I work in a 24/7 environment where vital things are occurring every 5 minutes around the clock. The systems require constant up time. But they can tend to be fragile, I think, because of the very design to achieve this. We cluster everything and have hot fallback systems. It works most of the time, but appears to contribute to the frangible nature of our systems some of the time.

The point here is to make systems as simple as possible to add to their stability. Don't over engineer your systems in an attempt to make them bulletproof. Continually examine each element of your design and ask the question:

Can I make it simpler?

Reduce code, reduce systems, reduce complexity to the point where it achieves the goal in the simplest possible manner.

An speaking of the goal, look at the assumptions where also. Does this system really have to be up 24/7 without interruption? Can the system suffer some downtime, say for preventative maintenance? Is an outage because of a problem of some length acceptable if it only occurs once each year?

My mantra is simple, simple, simple. Make a system as simple as possible to achieve the realistic goals set for it.

Search Goodness

2010-01-17T18:58:00.001-08:00

There's a new bane of my existence -- search. Yep . . . to "Google" . . . to find stuff based on random phrases that may or may not have anything to do with the thing I'm trying to find . . . to expect a document to appear at the top of the list even though I put in a word which appears nowhere in the document . . . to have the correct reference appear on one search engine, but not on yours . . . to have diverse audiences who look for the same thing using completely different references . . .

OK, by now you get the idea. From what I am reading on the Internet, I'm not the only one with this millstone hung around their necks. Let me tell you a little about what I have found. First, our site is essentially 25,000+ documents (PDF, Word, etc.) organized into about 1,000 web pages. We have a very diverse audience and are constantly involved in a number of high-priority projects spanning a great deal of search real estate. These documents change at the rate of as much as 50 per day every business day.

It's an interesting problem for a search engine. Here are some of the challenges we face:

The need to index documents shortly after they are published to the site (e.g. within an hour, not a day or week.
The documents posted are not created specifically for the Internet so the authors don't see tagging them for search as part of their job.
We have a remarkably small staff publishing documents to the site for the volume they handle and, by the way, they also do other things during their work day.
Documents come from a number of internal and external sources for publishing.
Documents are often referred to by different titles than their official titles, especially for things like regulatory filings.
Budgets are constrained (aren't everyone's!).

Sound like I'm grousing? Well, maybe just a little. Mostly, I'm trying to work things out in my head. The situation is one, I'm sure is faced by search professionals everywhere. It's typified by statements like: "Can't find anything on your site.", "Your search is unusable", "I couldn't find the document on your site; went to Google/Bing/. . . and it popped right up". It's also typified by management which thinks that any problem can be solved by technology. I'm not sure that's true.

So my first issue is trying to determine what people want to see -- "search goodness". The question is:

Given a search phrase, what do you expect to see?

Seems simple, doesn't it? It's not. Sure, if you sell products, have a promotion, concentrate on an event, it can be much more simple. But, if you're like us and exist in "random chaos" it's much more complex. The proliferation of search engines might give some clue to the complexity of the subject.

So what can be done about it? I'm starting by trying to ask "experts". By this I mean subject matter experts, but also those executives who pay the bills. When you put in "X", what do you expect to see? And, I'm hoping for a more definitive answer than, "the thing I'm looking for at the moment". It could be a daunting task. After all, there are whole businesses out there dedicated to getting your site ranked higher in the commercial search engines. It can't be all the simple.

My initial thoughts are that process will be the key to our eventual success. We need to get documents tagged correctly to assure that they can be retrieved. This will start with the creation of the document and carry through to the creation of the final published version -- in our case usually PDF -- and the placement on the page (which needs to be tagged correctly, also). Another part of this thought is that implementing process will be difficult. One of the major reasons is that content on our site is not produced specifically for the site and thus, authors don't view tagging it for search retrieval is not viewed as part of their job.

More later as the quest continues . . .

Prototyping . . .

2010-01-09T14:45:00.001-08:00

. . . because user's CAN'T tell you what they want, but they CAN tell you what they don't like!

Have you ever noticed that it's difficult for users to determine what they want in an application? Even if it's an application automating a process that they do all the time?

You spend months designing and developing an application. You show it to the user and their reaction . . . "but it needs to work like . . ." . . . "that won't work for me" . . . "why doesn't it do . . ." . . . "ok, but what about . . ." . . . Well, you get the idea. Users often don't know they want until they actually SEE something.

Enter prototyping. There needs to be a quick and inexpensive way to show the user something; to let them get their hands on something so they can work through what they do. By extension, something so they can then tell you what they don't like or can't use BEFORE you have spent a great deal of time and a lot of money.

One benefit of prototyping is that users often discover that they do more than they actually think they do while performing their day-to-day process. They remember that decision that they didn't tell you about in design or discover that they actually have more information than they initially told you or determine that the yes/no action actually has a maybe option. By prototyping and giving them something that they can manipulate they realize this early in the development cycle before you have committed to many resources to the effort.

The key to early prototypes is to keep them SIMPLE. Not simple in terms of functionality, necessarily, but simple in terms of development effort. Keep the graphic elements simple, also. This forces the user to concentrate on the important elements of the process rather than the color of the screen or the wording on a button. You want sessions with early prototypes to flush out the major logic and data requirements rather than wasting resources on irrelevant details like colors or type styles. Revise and flush out your prototype until your user is satisfied with the flow of your system. This can save hours of coding -- and recoding -- as you actually develop.

Google Chrome

2010-01-06T13:23:00.000-08:00

I have found it necessary to check out this browser, so I installed it on my Acer Netbook. So far, it's pretty nice and seems to work with most things. I'm exploring something which works under IE, but throws ad JavaScript error on other browsers (Firefox, Safari, and Chrome). Sigh . . . I sure wish that browsers would get together. This is really silly and a constant pain in the neck (or lower parts) for developers. In this case, it is something which was working previously on all browsers, but is now only working in Internet Explorer.

Duct Tape Programmer

2010-01-03T16:23:00.001-08:00

Joel Spolsky blogged on this subject some time ago. He describes as duct tape programmer as "the kind of programmer who is hard at work building the future, and making useful things so that people can do stuff. He is the guy you want on your team building go-carts, because he has two favorite tools: duct tape and WD-40. And he will wield them elegantly even as your go-cart is careening down the hill at a mile a minute. This will happen while other programmers are still at the starting line arguing over whether to use titanium or some kind of space-age composite material that Boeing is using in the 787 Dreamliner."

I consider myself this type of programmer. I love nothing better than making a tool that helps people get things done. I view things simply and want to make reliable systems which support the goals of the corporation while minimizing the overall cost of ownership.

". . . wield them elegantly even as your go-cart is careening down the hill at a mile a minute." I'm especially interested in this statement. I think that most IT departments don't (or won't) admit the speed at which the business needs to operate. They spend months developing elegant, sophisticated, complex systems while the business is using Excel and Access to actually do things. Often when these complex systems are finally implemented (something like 70% never are), they are not what the business wants or needs and are probably out of date. Here, I'm a fan of iterative programming (agile programming being a variant). Give the users a tool which will help them with their business process, is easy to maintain and upgrade and then iterate new features and functionality into it.

The key to these types of implementations is that users often don't know or can't define what they need, but they definitely can tell you what they don't like. Give them something which meets a good percentage of their needs, let them use it, listen to them, and the modify the system or give them new features which meet more of their needs.

Get out the duct tape and the WD-40 and fix things as they are used. Put the tools into their hands at the speed with which they need them and you will succeed.

Processing the Queue

2009-12-31T17:02:00.001-08:00

In my last post, I told how I organize things coming into the queue from the chaos in which I exist at work. Now, it's time to look at processing the queue. Remember the basics:

A task comes in, usually in the form of an e-mail, but maybe as a phone conversation, at a meeting, or through a direct assignment from my supervisor
I create a task. I drag-and-drop the e-mail onto the task queue to create a task, categorize the task and optionally, prioritize it or create a task directly from some other source material.

I optionally flag the e-mail so it's easier to find and file it in an Outlook folder. If the task came from some other source, I make notes so I can remember what it's about. I will also make notes as I work the task, especially if I have to interrupt or postpone the task to another time.

The key here is to keep my in box relatively clean so that new e-mails coming in are easier to process.

Now, it's time to actually DO something. Here, I'm working from a number of sources, but, I boil most of it down into tasks so I can work from the task queue in Outlook. My system is pretty simple. I place the tasks on the appropriate date and keep the list organized first by date, then by priority, then alphabetical. That last sort really isn't necessary, but it can help to group related tasks as I tend to name them pretty much the same thing for related tasks.

The priority system is very simple. It's simply the high, medium, low priority flag which can be set in Outlook. High-priority are for those things that I really want to work on. Most tasks are just average. I only use low priority for things that I want to separate out of the average queue to make them stand out.

I assign most tasks a date. This lets me take a look at my "day" (more on that later). But, I have a set of standard tasks that have no date. These sort into the "none" date and allow me to have some templates for Journal entries or forming other tasks. I can highlight one and use the ctrl-J keyboard shortcut to create an instant journal entry. One interesting thing which happens with these tasks is that the date and time on the journal is set to the current time, so it's easy to load-and-go with the journal entry.

A look at the tasks for the day, only gives me a look at the scheduled tasks that I know about. Since I deal with 30+ identity management provisioning tasks which result in about 200 provisioning actions each day, some of my day isn't driven by the task queue. This is where the general tasks come in. I know that I will have provisioning tasks, so I start up a provisioning journal action and then work from another queue to actually perform the tasks as they become available. The priorities set for me by management are:

Production support (mainly issues and problem management
Identity management provisioning
Everything else with some projects getting priority as directed by management

I check for those production issues and then, periodically throughout the day, check the provisioning task queue for ones I can work. In between this, I work on the other tasks (projects, enhancements, research, etc.) The task queue really helps there. And then there are the interruptions . . .

My job is interrupt driven. Because my team supports production systems, we have interruptions as people actually use those systems. Interruptions can come through e-mail as issue tickets or on the phone from our help desk (1st level support). When one of these arrives, I bring up the journal and start recording.

One problem I face is keeping track of what I was doing. I need to remember at what point I was interrupted and get back to it as quickly as possible once the interruption is dealt with. In the case of an e-mail, this can be relatively simple. I can usually do a quick scan of the e-mail (remember that clean in box), categorize it and, if it's more important than what I am doing currently, get to a point in my current task where I can logically break and deal with the incoming interruption.

Phone calls are more difficult to deal with. If I'm really slammed with something, I can ignore the phone and let it go to voice mail. In this case, however, I'm taking the chance that they will attempt to reach my cell or come directly to my cube to get attention.

If I need to deal with the call, I try to get to a point where that can happen or make a note on that journal entry which will help me get back to what I was doing as efficiently as possible. When a call comes in, I start another Journal entry with the timer going and start taking notes. I find, if I spend some time with the individual, and take good notes, I can usually take the time to get my original task to a logical stopping point before I proceed to handle the incoming interruption.

I find that the key for me is to keep things organized constantly, keep the in box and other queues as clean as possible and record what I am doing to minimize the impact of interruptions. More details on my techniques in a later post.

Existing in Chaos

2009-12-30T18:26:00.001-08:00

I exist in chaos at work. I'm really not multitasking, but am more interrupt-driven. I support a number of corporate applications and processes including:

Web Publishing
SharePoint
Identity Management (including certificates)
EDMS
Mercury Quality Center
Employee Life Cycle processing
and other miscellaneous corporate applications, some developed in house and others purchased and out-sourced.
As I'm sure you can imagine, keeping somewhat organized is vital to my sanity. I spend a good deal of time making sure something doesn't slip through the cracks. I'm going to spend a couple of blogs discussing my methods. In addition to maintaining these tools, I also have project work. I'll put that off until later and concentrate on the production aspects of my job.
INPUT
Most of my tasks come through e-mail. I live in Outlook. I make extensive use of
Folders: to organize incoming e-mails.
Tasks: I drag e-mails to the task list to create tasks and organize tasks by time
Journal: I record my work in the journal so I can produce status reports and justify requests for additional overtime, budget, etc.
One of the most important aspects of input to me is keeping my inbox clear. The first thing I do when I get into work is a "morning review". I go through my in box and clean it out. I create tasks by dragging an e-mail to the task list and assigning the task a category, date, and priority. I "flag" important e-mails and move them to the appropriate folder. I use the flagged view to see all the current tasks in a single place and to reply to e-mails.
One of the things I have found is that, if I respond to an e-mail from a folder, I let the system store the reply in that folder. This keeps my responses organized by category and make finding out what I have done easier.
The morning review includes checking the task list and reviewing some standard systems to make sure that they are functioning correctly. Once I have completed this review (usually 15-30 minutes), my in box is reasonably clear and I am ready to tackle the tasks for the day.
I work from the task list. Since tasks are organized by date and priority, I know what to work on first. As new e-mails arrive, I check them to make sure that they aren't urgent (you know, from the boss) and, keep them organized as the day progresses through the same process. I keep track of things on the task and the journal. As I start to work on a task, I highlight it and use the ctrl-j keyboard shortcut to create a journal entry. I start the timer and get to work. Because some things can be done in the background, I sometimes have two or more journal entries open at the same time. I use the journals to jot notes which I may need later. If a phone call interrupts me, I use the ctrl-shift-j keyboard shortcut to start a journal entry for that event and keep track of what is happening. I find that this method works well for me as I can track what I have done and keep notes in a single place. If the phone call turns into a task, I can use the ctrl-k keyboard shortcut to create a task for later work. It all hangs together in my world.

Account Provisioning

2009-12-29T07:47:00.000-08:00

I spend a good deal of my time dealing with this. It's amazing, if you have security restrictions on a site, how much change there is. In our case, we have about 30 requests in the queue at any time which result in about 200 provisioning actions each work day. The changes are mostly authorization rather than authentication. That is, existing users getting additional authorization in the system or having their authorization removed. I have developed tools which help with the provisioning and we are working on additional automation, but it is amazing the volume of changes.

Be prepared if you have secure sections on your site. Make sure that you have allocated enough time to provision these accounts in a timely manner. Be aware that things change--constantly.

Blog Test with OneNote

2009-12-27T12:52:00.001-08:00

I really like Microsoft's OneNote. It works the way that I think -- randomly. I am especially fond of the fact that you can click on the page and start typing anywhere. I'm actually writing this blog in OneNote as a test of using it for blogging. Since I have blogging software which is not one of the big ones and runs from text files, I'll have to see how this works as I export this to text. In fact, here goes . . .

. . . that was interesting. I tried saving the document in several formats, transferring it to Microsoft Word and copying it. The thing that worked best was to select the entire page, open Macromedia Dreamweaver, and past the text into the program.

It's interesting to me because I use bloxsom. It works from text files which have a simple format. The first line in the body has to be plain text. This is followed by formatted text. When I copied the entire file, and pasted it into Dreamweaver to create the HTML page, it formatted the OneNote page title as a plain text line and placed the remainder of the file into simple paragraphs.

The only problem is that it didn't copy the hyperlink from the bloxsom reference in the paragraph above. I think that could be a minor problem to overcome. One quick tip about copying the page. You can't use the Ctrl-A keyboard shortcut as this appears to copy only the block you are currently in. You have to select the entire page with the mouse if you want to pick up the page title.

Otherwise, as I work in OneNote all the time and it's so easy to start and come back to entries, I think this could prove to be an interesting way to create blogs.

(If you're viewing this on Blog Spot, then it's because I have uploaded it through Word as another test. Interesing . . .)

I Blog, Therefore I am

2009-10-18T11:01:00.000-07:00

OK, I'm back to this blog. Remeber my real bog is here. I just posted a blog about a sign of the times. I've done several of these as a result of the recession. Things I have see while out and about which I have recorded on my phone. So why am I blogging here about blogging there? Good question. I think I'm trying to deal with the wave of data that comes at me each day. I want to be able to make sense of it and get down my thoughts about things in general and things that interest me, specifically.

Yeah, Another BLog

2009-10-17T15:36:00.000-07:00

I was here and signing up was so easy . . . I just couldn't resist. Stop by the Gimoblog at http://bobbreedlove.com/cgi-bin/blosxom.pl for the real thing, but, hey, who knows . . .