Home: Archive

2008-01-01 - 2008-12-31

Working out titles is soo hard

Posted on 05/19/08 23:49:40. |

Why is that so? Although I precisely know what I want to write I always loose a couple of minutes on inventing a title. Anyway, this time it is about IT and business.

My daily tasks include reading Midgard Planet and that way I dropped into Tero Heikkinen blog entry. At first I wanted to comment it there, but Captcha in his net.nehmer.blog component didn't seem to work.

I know Tero as Midgard contributor and newly aquired developer and have met him a couple of times on Midgard Meetings. Once I even heard him singing Finish anthem which sounded quite nice... or I just had a great time there in Finland having beer and sauna :) But it is still not the main clue...

Having myself re-oriented on IT service delivery and management I have been forced to meditate a bit on those various aspects. My current job is focused on specialized inner web hosting service delivery within GSK and I can now clearly see how important the philosophy is. Taking Tero's 10 point I would say:

Making software becomes as challenging as IT service environment gets closer and closer real life.. Modenr technologies allow more and more detailed and accurate reflection livng things on IT layer. This of course implements complexity but hey! we still got few Americas to discover!
Good processes are key to success. And we got good old ITIL rule: adapt and adopt. You don't have to blinldy obey any regulations. The point is in understanding underlaying ideas and implement them they way they suit your organization.
PDCA - a Plan-Do-Check-Act philosophy ensures that IT organization will always deliver a stable service that is guarded by continous improvment process.
Quality assurance is done by thorough change/release management. While incident recovery is only a temrary remedy, documented and tested change gets rid on errors and allow future developers to get involved quickly.
Risk management covers also outside environment and continuity planning and disaster recovery. Those are essentials of good service delivery and cover all other areas.
Implement best practises from ITIL standards and you feel how good your IT is.
Incident and problems are inevitable and must be calculated in. The point is in maintaining proactive tools that help controlling them
Problems controlled by respective process are things that move service into continous development.

Of course, you can't close all essentials in 10 or 8 points. IT organization must individualy decide an extent to which it will implement processes. What is sure, is that you have to keep discipline to hit the goal. And remeber, no matter what they say - there is no perfect software.

Good luck with your exams, Tero.

Foundation Certificate in IT Service Management

Posted on 05/26/08 18:04:21. |

Yep, I just received a hard copy from EXIN along with a small pin-bagde they give to all certificates.

It happened that GSK SCS department that rules all company-wide IT areas, decided that everyone working in Poznań Technical Centre has to finally take ITIL course and Foundation Certificate exam. The training was quite nice and enlightened me in some stuff I somehow was aware of.

Deeply in my mind I knew that there must be a kind of knowledge helping deal with a broad aspects of IT service delivery. ITIL became now mine leading philosphy and I liked so much that I decided to go further and get more of ITIL trainings for Service Manager certificate. Wish me luck :)

Polish Catamaran Cup. New experience.

Posted on 05/31/08 16:28:56. |

Pls, forgive me the form. I now try to utilise my N800 to scratch that note.

Edit: Hmm.. using N800 is quite painful when you want to write a bit more than a shor mail. A hardware keyboard would be a bless.

Today we had three races in (in weak wiinds) and it was my first time on a new boat. I started racing on formula F18HT which seem to be an outstanding fast boat. Despite my many failures only two A class's and one Tornado were faster. I thing I'm gonna like it.

After a frst day of 3 races we were 4th, second day didn't bring many changes to score. All regatta won Tornado team before 2 A-class cats. The wind was tricky and changing, but still in a rage of weak winds that preferred leightweight boat like A-class. Tornado team was outstandigly fast, what is reasonable since they spend some 200 days a year on trainings. Anyway, we were very close to beat all when leaders took left side downwards and lost the wind completely while we had some on right side. Unfortunately on a leeward mark, we were claimed to touch a bouy, however we are sure we didn't. Suddenly when we were making a round, a boat that was som 30 meters ahead called and then boats behind us picked it and start calling. What is strange is that normally Sebastian was taking bouys very close \but this time. This time we passed it from distance... but that's life 3 votes against one and we decided to take a penalty without protest risk. Funny, that none of them was able to tell which part touched the bouy.

Next regatta in two weeks. We'll see :)

Sopot Catamaran Cup 2008

Posted on 06/29/08 09:58:41. |

That was a strange regatta. No wind, hurricane, no wind...

First day we launched for long distance race from Sopot to Hel and backwards. The start was promising - some 3-4 Bft, steady, north, no waves. We took a left leg but it appeard wrong very soon.

As the wind was getting weaker and weaker we noticed that we are totally loosing our good starting position but it was too late to change the leg and we had to continue that way. After some hour other boats running on right leg stopped, so we took an advantage of our hi tech Bimare catamaran and got them very soon. As we approached upwind mark near Hel a sudden gust of wind pushed Wojtek Kaliski's Exploder and however I thought we got him, he managed to run away. Same time, from behind two other boats came on the same gust, but we were still standing!!! That curious situation looked like we were in the middle of wind hole - everyone around had a bit of nice gusts but us.

Finally we got lucky and another gust pushed us around the mark and we started a leg back to Sopot. For some 20 minutes we had a nice gust and we got into a direct fight with a Piotrek Baryżewski's Tornado. Of course, Tornado is faster on stronger wind so they took us, but not so easy. We were defending our position at all costs so they need to work very hard to pass. Eventually after 5 hours of sailing we finished the race on 9th position.

On Saturday we planned to take 3 racec up&down. First race wasn't so good and qwwe finished it on 6th place. During 2nd race the weather collapsed. Black clouds came and the wind raised to 7 Bft with gusts up to 9 Bft. That was a real fight for life. Our lightweight boat (130kg) with a huge sails up to 40sqm became like a crazy horse that wouldn't go easy. Sudden gust that came from behind capsized almoast all boats, especially those on downwind course. We were desperately trying to stay up - we had some 200m to finish the race. No way... that gust was too hard and we fell as the others. When all boats fell, the Rescue started their action and RC postponed the race.

The third day was again easy and the wind was weakening from 4 to 2-3 Bft. We did a good races, so finally we closed regatta at 4th place.

Funny stuff - Wordle.

Posted on 07/06/08 01:54:45. |

I happened to see that keyword over the Internet quite a lot. Finally decided to check WTF.

Aparently some guys have written a web gadget for online tag cloud creation. It is taking your RSS feed and generates a nice picture that you can customize on their website. Here is mine Wordle:

Me goes Ragnaroek

Posted on 10/07/08 15:25:27. |

Quote: "Lodz, October 7th 2008 -- The Midgard Project has released stable release of 8.09 "Ragnaroek LTS" generation of the Midgard Content Management System. Midgard is a mature Free Software CMS package targeted for mid-to-high-end web services."

Along with new page layout which is so simple and nice that I can't help staring at my page, I've upgraded Midgard to latest (todays!) release 8.09.

To celebrate new page Release I did some changes. First, there is no stupid menu on the left. It was dumb to put a constant 6-point menu and waste space.

Next, I put 5 radom photos from my stream to the right. And not only on main page, but on all subpages and you'll never get same set anymore as number of photos will be growing :D

Most common links to page subareas and to some external resources are now put in top-most menu. Since I am a vanity man, I mostly linked my various profiles :P

Last, but not least whole page runs now MidCOM trunk code. That means I want to be as fresh in code as possible, however it may end up with some issues from developer's version. Naaah.. what I am talking about? I run perfect software, don't I?

Cumulative update

Posted on 12/01/08 13:07:44. |

Yes. OK. I am not so good in blogging, always hesitating what deserves publishing... This time I post a sort of cumulative update as few things happened within last two months.

First, I finally completed ITIL Service Manager course and on 14-16.10.2008 took exams. That was a nightmare.

They sent us a case study. Something about a transportation company that was a joint of 3 national comapnies in 3 European countries. As they grew they decided to go ITIL. Upon the background EXIN prepared two set of 5 questions covering both Service Support and Service Delivery areas of ITIL.

The exam itself consists of two parts - one day each. Each part is a 4 hrs, hand written test that you have to give requested answers and no more. If you flow too far you won't get points. If you are not precise, you lose points. Ouch.

After exams were done, I was waiting daily for a postman to deliver me any news. Evetually, last week they called and announced that I passed!!! OMG, what a relief.

Next, in the begining of November, Piotras and I we went for Midgard Gathering to Helsinki. Thanks to out valuable Finish friends we had a great time hacking Midgard, learning about PHP unit tests (that was Sebastian Bergmann), discussing future development, compiling Midgard on bloody M$ platform (he he he) and of course beer, sauna and guitar wars.

We saw new Midgard talking to Jabber via D-Bus signals and sending IM notifies about changes, we saw Vala playing nice with Midgard, we also saw amazing USB finger-drive from Jerry :) And most of all we were wonderfully hosted by Satu and Oskari Kokko (many many hugs and thanks)

One of deliverable from the Gathering was that I was appointed as Documantation Manager for the project. That means I am to make all those naughty developer to keep their code documented so that Midgard finally provides a source of knowlege, also for dummies.

Last night I have refactored midcom.admin.help component to be more automatic and scan documentation from components folders. This way, overloaded coders only have to put some text files and MidCOM itself will create docs on-line.

Hmm... When I started this post I felt I had so many things to say, but somehow I forgot...

Towards better Midgard documentation

Posted on 12/02/08 11:39:01. |

Last few days I've spent on extending midcom.admin.help plugin to make it better doc reader for end users. Let's recap what it can do now and how you, my fellow component developer, can improve your docs, and how you, my fellow user can benefit from it.

The following write-up is related to latest Ragnaroek version and lives in SVN. Refer to http://trac.midgard-project.org/ to get help on syncing your repository with Midgard SVN.

For end users, editors and site developers it is crucial to know what they can do with given components and libraries. While midcom.admin.help lived there for a quite a time, it wasn't a good tool because it wasn't too handy.

First impression is the most important, therefore index page for help needs to be inviting. Now, it is sufficient to go to Online Help from your floating menu after you were logged in. A new popup windows will open presenting you current component's index page. Current means the one you were in when you hit 'help' button.

Index page shall contain a brief description about what given component does etc. For example:

net.nehmer.blog

News items and blog entries management. Provides a variety of display styles and RSS feeds.

Developers shall put index.lang.txt file into documentation folder.

Index page shall also contain a Table of Contents. TOC is generated automagically from all files matching name.lang.txt pattern in docs folder plus two special kewyords "MgdSchema classes" and "Routes" which are added to TOC if applicable.

"MgdSchema classes" will list all schemas introduced by a component. The list includes schema names and list of properties with descriptions for each schema.

Developers shall update schema definition files with special 'description' tag for each property:

<property name="topic">
        <description value="Parent midgard_topic ID" />
</property>

Schema list should look like this:

Routes is a artificial help item that shall display all URL routes handled by component. Each route shall provide handler name, controller class name, controller method and a brief description. Any route on the list shall be a link to MidCOM API doc stored at http://www.midgard-project.org/api-docs.

Developers shall add translation strings related to routes description to component's strings database using '{handler}_info' as string identifier. For example, in net.nehmer.blog, for 'ajax-latest' handler it would be 'ajax-latest_info' that would result in:

All remaining help files can have any names as long as they match the pattern name.lang.txt but developers shall remeber to put 'help_name' translation string into at least English component's translation database. To make it easier some common titles like 'help_style' or 'help_schemas' are stored centrally in midcom.admin.help's database.

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