BPI inside

Tag: Corporate

  • Building demo centers

    For some weeks now, a few of my collegues are working on an "All-in-one Demo Center". This is a special installation of all our solutions combined on one system, to be able to show anybody instantly any of our different products if he is interested and to have a complete reference system running inhouse, which you can put almost everywhere.

    Its currently placed on a notebook which is taken to customers as well be present on the <a href="http://www.cebit.de/”CeBit somewhere around Cisco’s corner.

    The operating system is an installation of Suse Enterprise Linux 9(?), the database backend is running Oracle and the webinterface runs on top of Apache.

    To distribute this solution on other machines, ISOs are created with Mondo Linux, which then can be inserted in almost any other computer, booted and puts the ISOs data on the computers harddisk. Existing data is lost with that solution.

    I was granted to try to make anoter All-In-One center, which boots completely from CD on any computer but without harming the existing data on the disk. Running completely in a ramdisk without even touching the disks in any way.

    I’m basing my installation on a stripped down distribution of Knoppix, which already runs completely from CD. It uses a compressed image as data-source, so it can hold some GB of data on a single CD.

    Initially this seemed to work quite well, the database files (>2GB) compressed down to about 100 MB and the oracle binaries also shrinked a bit. But soon I ran into problems because oracle could not start up in a complete read-only mode. It needed write-access to its database files, lockfiles and so on which was impossible to do on CD.

    So I decided to temporarily mount existing drives and put the needed writable files as well as a swapfile (oracle needs plenty of RAM) there only during the time of demonstration and remove it completely on shutdown again. Seemed cool idea, worked theoretically and found gread acceptance. Practically I had the next problem: the notebooks of our marketing people, where this should run on, have only NTFS partitions and Linux currently has only reasonable readonly-support for NTFS. Luckily I found the Captive project, which grants RW-access to NTFS by including the original WinXP driver into linux.

    My work is to integrate all the pieces and give it a foolproof interface so that even the least experienced marketing person can use it to demonstrate our solutions anywhere.

    Currently, I’m almost finished with preparing the environment for oracle. This means auto-detection of all partitions, their free space and file-system, let the user choose the destination, copy the datafiles, correctly split up and soft-link together again read-only and read-write files and finally start up oracle in such a patched together combination 😉

    Somewhere by next week I should be finished with oracle and also have integrated the administration interface. That means, if no other problems appear.

  • Raising my responsibility level

    NULL

  • Attendance

    NULL

  • Evening action (3)

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  • Evening action (2)

    The release change is over, everything worked almost immediately, going home.

    Have to get up at 06:00 to take my car (again) to the garage, so that they can fix my mirror, which they forgot last time.

  • Evening action

    NULL

  • Educating new coders

    Yesterday our team got a new member. Its current task will be to slowly grow into our systems, libraries and structures and (midterm) help us with the development of our solution.

    It will be mostly my function to help him with that and show him every niche and the dark corners of our software.

    This is the first non-trivial teaching exercise I have got and I’m willing to give my new collegue as much insight and knowledge as I can.

    I showed him to the overall structure and flow yesterday and either he is cleverer than me when I were introduced to that or I’m a better teacher than the person who introduced me to the whole system two years ago. In fact, that doesn’t matter. What matters is, that he understands the whole stuff 🙂

  • Town Hall Meeting

    Okay, this time I’ll post the summary of the Town Hall Meeting, which I’ve promised. I’ve talked with my co-workers and the staff association also sent out a summary with some comments. In general I asked questions about the current and future situation of our product, how product-development will be handled and what developers can expect.

    Well, I can’t really complain much about the situation of our team in the last weeks, our department leader did his best to protect us from the almost-random and changing moods of our company leaders which always wanted to pull out the best people from existing teams and stuff them into new projects. Everyone can guess, that such a behaviour does no good to existing teams and projects and the chances that these will fail, not finish within timeline or become unprofitable are rising with every removed developer.

    It seems, that all such stuff comes to a stop now and we’ll focus again on existing and or proved products and knowledge and we won’t accept every (really every!) project, which crosses our path, even if we don’t have any experience in that areas (what aparently has been done in the past).

    At the Town Hall Meeting there was a clear committment towards our product development, which will be enforced in the future. We’ll get (a bit) more marketing and sales, our target market is enlarged from the top-only to the whole enterprise-market and we have a bit more freedom in development, so that we can implement features which (we hope) will be asked for in the future.

    Of course there were other questions at the meeting and most of them have been answered in a way, so that I can look very optimistic into our future, but I want to concentrate on those, which more or less affect me, our team or product. Some questions were also answered in a "business"-manner, so that you wouldn’t have less information if there wouldn’t have been an answer at all, but on nearly all questions it was said that more talks and discussions will happen to improve the situation.

    If you would ask me now to tell you my motivation on a scale of 10, I’d give it an 8-9. Quite high 🙂 Somewhere in the (past) bad day’s I think I were down somewhere to 3-4, I’m now happy that I kept hopefull.

  • Taskzilla refreshed

    The new TaskZilla design looks great, my helping hand got familiar with the bugzilla templates quite fast 🙂

    I feel the pressure from the top, merging everything into a project-based approach, more and more. And I still feel uncomfortable with that. I don’t like it, I want to work on a product, get feedback from the customers and enhance it. I know, that the potential of the product is much more, than currently, but there is no time to work on something like that. Everything has to happen during a (paid) project, crap.

    Well, relocations are happening here, people are moving out of their rooms, to other blocks etc. and other people are moving in. Seems, that the people staffed for a project are "collected" to the same places. But this approach is not good for the people, who are staffed for several different projects. You can talk directly to the people of the project at your place, but it’s harder to talk to people of the other projects, because phoning them is not always successful and mail-responses take some time. TaskZilla smoothens this a bit, but… well, its not a nice solution. And much time is lost with moving, reconfiguring network access and so on. Luckily I’m not affected, but I feel some sort of isolated a bit, since few are left around me who work on the same project (and none, who works on the same product).

    Last Saturday, there was a big "Personality Test" on TV. I took a look at it, to "find out more about me". Well, I’m a Rational/Inventor (german, detail). Expected something like this, but didn’t think that it fits that good. Only few things are wrong, ie. I don’t think, that I’m charismatic 😉 But that lies in the eye of the viewer.

    Want to take a test yourself? Here (german).

  • Taskzilla progress

    Wohoo… The TaskZilla train is rushing in, usage increases, migrations are running and task numbers are rising 🙂 Now got a helping hand for the design of the stuff. I’m not really a good designer, I’m much better in implementing an already created design. But being creative (in arts stuff) myself is not my thing.

    Seems, that I will have to introduce an separate "New Task"-page for PM’s to better meet their requirements and to split the PM-stuff apart from the initial developers-page.

    Offtopic: My girlfriends C++ – teacher is a moron. Or is it common to build the double-include-prevention like this:

    #ifdef include1_define_h
#include "include1.h"
#endif

    additionally inside the headerfile itself there is another check, where it belongs to. brrrr Imagine the code-block in one of our source-files where 20+ includes occur. And now the teachers reason for such idiotic stuff: "Because the application runs faster if it has not to open the include-files twice"…. Gosh, C++ is not VB, go back to your QBasic editor, if you don’t know the difference between interpreted and compiled languages! Save your and (more importantly) your students time.