April 18, 2008

Becoming a Single Point of Failure

For quite some time now, my main activity at work has shifted to a different project. Nevertheless I'm still working on the old project for a smaller part of my time in a quite small team.

Some time ago I've been informed that my project manager for this project will leave the company and take on new opportunities. This leaves me as the only person for this project, which has an almost-complete overview of the systems, interfaces, designs and most of the technical aspects of this project.

Of course my manager is currently busy transferring as much of his knowledge to a replacement but it's impossible to "copy" the know-how of a formerly dozens-of-people-sized team within a few weeks. Much of the knowledge we take for granted and forget to transfer to our substitutes falls into that category also with stuff we have in the back of our heads and comes back only in situations when we hit a similar problem or situation. Which means, that I'll be the last person for quite some areas which will be able to manage, overview, design, fix and maintain.

I'm now officially a Single Point of Failure, as well as some other people on the same project but other topics.

April 10, 2008

New toy finally arrived... again...

Ok, I admit that it took way longer than one week until my F31 arrived two days ago. The seller had to take it to the Fuji service one more time because apparently there was still something wrong with it and in the end they had to clean up the whole inside, removing humidity and dust. I have no clue how these managed their way into the case but it did definitely not happen while I had the cam. And then there were some issues about taking the additional costs and shipping etc. but in the end I paid additional 40Eur and the package was sent into my direction.

Until now the thing works correctly and without any flaws and I hope it stays this way for a long time...

PS.: Just one drawback, the guy which sold me the cam silently changed the contained xD memory card from H type (high speed) to M type (normal), but I'm tired of fighting and since the H-type card was never announced or described on the eBay offering, I'll let this case rest.

April 9, 2008

Microsoft opens more protocol specifications

As I just have read, Microsoft has released more specifications under its Open Protocol Specifications program. I browsed a bit through it and recognized that it now also contains specifications on protocols between Exchange and Outlook. It may very well be that I'm wrong here but if this means that now the whole communication between Outlook clients and Exchange servers is documented and freely available, I guess it will now be just a matter of time until many of our beloved mail clients will not only be able to use IMAP/POP3/SMTP as the protocols to talk to MS Exchange but use the custom/propietary protocol/API for accessing the mail servers. Also, groupware and calendar applications will be able to integrate with the excellent organisation-features (appointments, people availability, address completion, etc.) of exchange into their software.

I really hope, that my interpretation of the things I saw so far is true...

April 2, 2008

Time planning desaster

Well, I think this time I messed up my whole time planning. The last two weeks were learning-free time and I started way too late to continue learning again. Now it's the case that today evening we're having a little Russian-test and I haven't even touched a fourth of the stuff we had to do until today. Also on upcoming saturday we'll have an end-term exam in "Documentation- and Work-techniques" and all I did for it until now is printing out a course-summary of a colleague. Damit...