ITSR21 - QuotaTracker testing

This week I have been testing the tracker application, its fairly lightweight so there are not many things to test. However I wish to avoid what happened with the scholarship project so this time I have planned the following;

Test plan

• check application starts and runs
• Check application can log in user when passed through from ease authentication
• Check application initiates scan and records correct figures
• Check application displays correctly in browser
• check application outputs correct data for user quota
• check application correctly displays drill down data
• Can I manipulate the application by hacking the url parameters

I have gone through all these tests this week and I am happy that it can successfully perform the above tasks.

The application will be peer tested next week before the go live.

Project: ITSR21 - Media Quota tracker

I have recently been working on a project for the Multi media team, they provide a service for students and staff which allows them to upload audio files the their server for download and streaming. They currently were billing the service annually according to storage capacity and there was currently no system which measured how much server space was being used.

I met with Alex Carter the section manager and we discussed his requirements, and the resulting brief was to build a system which would perform a scan of a directory structure, store the users names and the amount of media stored they have stored on the server. The media was stored in two sets of directories, one for podcasts and another for streaming.

At the same time the application will connect to the media teams database, one of the challanges presented was how we could connect to the Apple based LDAP system which the data was stored on.

As part of of the brief I was required to specify the programming language to produce the application with and suitable server software to support it.

The resulting data is stored in its own MySQL database and can be displayed through a series of password protected web pages.

This task is repeated every month and gives the reporting information required to administer billing of the storage accounts.

This is a smaller project than the dev team is used to however that makes me an ideal candidate to build it.

As always there is supporting information in the evidence folder to support.

The project has been the first time I have had end to end control over the development process. I was responsible for producing the following:

• System design specification
• Recommending free, open source CFML engine
• Prototype (if required)
• database systems
• Coldfusion application

Other factors I would encounter along the way were:

• Install and configure Apache Tomcat
• Install and configure Railo
• configure scheduled task in Railo's web administrator
• remote desktop administration to windows and mac

Things I learned about along the way were:

• data structures in Coldfusion
• scope
• modularising functions
• passing data between functions

One of the main things I've taken away from this project is organisation, when I studied Adobe's learning guide it guides you through building the art gallery application. The way that build is structured puts all the action into the forms, there are one or two configuration pages possibly outwith the browsers reach but in general what you see and what it does are in the same page.

In practice I have learned to use a framework to support the application which removes the functionality from the publicly available web pages. Further to this I have also learned how to further modularise the components providing the functionality.

I got some fantastic help which really pinpointed my weak spots as a result of me trying failing & trying succeeding. sometimes the help I get is a bit vague and sits a wee bit higher than my knowledge can reach.

As a direct result of the help being just a bit more explanatory I was able to create a pseudo Model View Controller software architecture, connect to and run queries against Apples LDAP system.

Footnote

During this project am having trouble due to the snow, I've been stuck at home this week because of the bad weather.

Where I've had difficulties in the project I have been emailing Martin Jones for help. Ive also been putting alot of extra hours into the project due to being snowed in at home all day.

VM Server - Nightside

This week I have been given the task of setting up the new server procured by our department.

This project is being led by Bill Lee our manager as he wishes to use virtual operation systems as a mean for development, developers would then be able to log into the system to whichever operating system they needed to develop for whether that be a unix or windows environment.

The task will consist of the following:

• register the new server on the network
• install a unix based operating system
• install the virtualisation software
• test the system

During my discussion with Bill this week he has stated that he wished to use Ubuntu 10 due it being supported by the unix community and the VMware virtual server 2 software.

This will be my sole task at the moment.

Computer Rep: New user PIE

Ok, first computer rep work, the task is as follows;

• re image a machine for the user
• raise a CMS call to set the user up for development services.
• arrange administrator rights for his workstation
• arrange server space
• add him to the various internal workgroups
• add drive mappings
• add any other software to his distributed desktop

I raised this call on Friday morning implement the changes needed for most of the above, naturally most of it is still undone and our new guys started this morning. I have placed a copy of the cms call into the evidence folder. Unfortunately I cant provide any evidence of it all being done.

Re imaging the machine is the part I physically do, the rest is arranging for support services to put things in place for us.

To PIE a machine all we are really doing is wiping the old system and pulling a windows image from the server which will be linked to his user account which will in turn be set up for our new guy. We make sure it all works then just await confirmation from support to say that everything is done.

End of week update

Last week was semi productive, the first half I was working on ITS042, however I had estimated this work to take a maximum of three days. My analysis took a morning, the remedial work took a day and I used the majority of an afternoon for testing. I took time to update visual source safe so all documents I had worked on were up to date and made sure that anything that could be affected by my changes were not negatively affected.

By the time day 3 of the project came round I found myself with no work and I had to keep myself busy somehow.

I arranged to demonstrate the results of the project to the project manager, that way I had a third party visually confirm completion and satisfaction. I assisted another developer with some issues she had with scripts written for the old student migration project.

I also done a PIE for a new developer who was starting this morning, I'll post about that next.

Mairi has pointed me at subjects like Polopoly (the content management system on the university's website) to read up on and try to understand, there is a working instance on the development server so I could also go mess around with it. the things there is Polopoly takes days of class training followed by days of on the job training so I don't know if I could extract anything I can use with it over the time I have, its still worth a play with though!

At the moment I don't have a workload, I have asked for one and have been since Wednesday night, however people are busy and it cant be easy finding work for me. The problem though is that with a project to work on I cant code my time against anything.

My worry is that I cant account for my time on Friday, nothing I did was a university sanctioned project and I cant just say that I used the time to study.

Secondly, I don't like having nothing to do, I am here to develop as a professional and I now have three days where I didn't do that.

Thirdly, I feel like everyone around me is contributing to the momentum of the department, I know that at the moment I'm not and I don't like that.

Project: ITS042 - IS Website external event booking

This week I have been working on the IS Website, particularly the events booking section for external users.

The university has a single sign on system, I've probably mentioned this before but the concept is sign on once and your in. The system is called EASE and external users have EASE friends accounts, in this case the unique identifier is substituted for their email address.

Towards the end of STU188 I was asked to give a quote for work to be done on this section of the site, it had been built before I came here and it had failed testing. I was lucky enough to be given it as a project to fix.

To quote the project, I had to find the fault and advise the project manager what the fault was and how long it would take to fix. I gave a time scale of three days, to account for my ability and what I thought was wrong which was an incorrect table join which returned more rows than it should hence it would just throw the system off.

During one of the down periods of infinite I worked on this to tide myself over so when the time came I was ready with a solution.

I've been working on the project yesterday and today, I still have tomorrow and I now have a working website with no errors. The code I had prepared only needed a little work to make it fit in with the rest of the software, I had developed it in SQL developer and it was going into a ColdFusion project so some commentary conflicted and I tested everything three times.

Some other issues have been that this is the first time I have had to use the development server and Secure Shell to access it, the source control system Visual Source Safe was not up to date so any code I booked out to work on was out of date and didn't match the code quoted in the error messages and I was also given the wrong code package to start work on, confusing for a new guy.

This is another good project and tested my knowledge and problem solving ability, I can say I'm pleased with it.

Appraisal

Today was my first appraisal as a developer, and it went very well. This has really been the first opportunity where I could get some peer feedback.

At the meeting was myself and Bill and we spent just over an hour, running over from an originally planned 45 minutes.

The first topic covered was what projects I had been a part of, so far these have been:

• STU186 - Student counselling data migration
• STU188 - Scholarships application system
• STU176 - Postgraduate progression management database (aka PPMD)
• RES032 - INFINITE
  

Bill had commented that there was initially a plan for my development, there were three projects lined up which I was to play a part in with a gradual easing through Coldfusion and DBMS. As these initial projects fell through the way my training was going to develop fell to the mercy of the available projects which came in the order written above. As a result the order in which I worked on the different languages and methodologies was out and I was handed larger projects then would normally be assigned, generally I would take this a bit of flattery however when I mentioned to Bill that I took the STU188 build from end to end he was genuinely surprised, which in turn surprised me.

Going forward we have agreed on an outline for my development which will centre around ColdFusion and DBMS in alternating cycles (where workflow requirements allow). Bill's opinion is that by concentrating on these two packages I should be capable of standing on my own feet by February which is encouraging indeed.

We also spoke about taking on the BOXI business objects system, we only really summarised this as CF and DBMS will take priority and it may not be wise to throw in another package to learn while still developing a skillset for these.

BOXI is essentially a MI (Management Information) tool, it allows a user to create MI reports with drag and drop functionality, so if I want a report on XYZ then I can drag them from a menu and drop them on the page and BOXI will do all the work for me. The main thing being that you dont need to know SQL to be able to produce reports, in my opinion I need to know SQL, once I have solidified skills in SQL I will feel ready to move on to BOXI development. We both agreed on this.

As I said this meeting was very productive and encouraging and I look forward to consistently hitting these objectives set for me.

INFINITE - RES032

So how is INFINITE coming along?

As a general status update on the project, it is running slightly behind schedule and in terms of developers, resources are starting to get short due to people leaving.

Procedures completed are

* Get_notification_List
* Get_next_stage
* Get_user_access_code
* Get_user_access_proposal_stage
* P_get_user_access_rights

To be done

* P_validate_proposal
* P_update_proposal
* P_sustainability_contribution

These are the modules I spoke about in the last INFINITE post, there have been some issues with the project, some of the specifications hasn't been correct. In the system design specification the description of these modules has been inconsistent with the software that has already been written into the project meaning that components and functions named in the specification don't match up the way they should.

There have also been parts left out of the design specification which have been essential for the development of some of the procedures I am writing which has meant I have needed to go back to packages already written and modify them accordingly, one or two of these have been a sizeable amount.

The specification document was also written for the pro developers here, for someone of my experience I found it tricky to make consistent progress due to asking for help with the language and where I could find the data I needed within the schema.

One of the problems I faced here was not knowing PL/SQL, although I had worked through the training disks at the start of the year I still didn't know how to practically apply techniques that I've used in other languages, there are a lot of new things here.

Again, I am aware that the guys are very busy here but I cant help asking for the help I need and I can only go to one person on this project and I do feel that I'm irritating him with it.

These are minor issues though and even as I typed them up I cant help seeing them as excuses for whatever reason, probably as a result of my frustration at a lack of pace and skills. The way I would prefer to look at these little issues is they have taught me how to deal with these situations, I am learning PL/SQL from scratch since October 15th with only a basic understanding of SQL and no experience whatsoever in programming Oracle procedures, or experience with Oracle databases for that matter.

This is another great project.

November update, UNIX, INFINITE and everything inbetween.

I've not posted since October 15th and now is probably a good time to fill in the blanks.

At the last post I was awaiting the 3rd UNIX course and just starting the INFINITE work, I'll talk about UNIX here and do a separate posting for INFINITE.

The course itself was a another self taught affair, we were guided by a member of the universities UNIX team who had several years of commercial experience.

The focus of the 3rd module was to teach shell scripting, as I've said before regarding this I remembered a good amount from the UNIX module at Napier, most of it was similar to what was being taught here. There were possibly a larger and more complicated variety of functions being taught here, however, given that there is no deviation from the way UNIX works the fundamental operating procedures do not change and the only real difference to this module and Napier's was that we went deeper into the functions.

On the other hand at Napier we operated pretty much within the confines of that course and its assessment. Of course UNIX as a subject is huge, and both these courses put together are really only a taster of something which will probably take a sizeable chunk of a career to learn.

Within this course we wrote our own shell scripts, ran them and examined the output from them. At certain points in the class we would re visit scripts or programming methods from earlier in the day and modify files to behave differently or in a more sophisticated fashion.

We were given another book to take away, there are now three of these books all with great information in them for using unix constructs.

To sum up I can say that the three classes for this course have been great and full of extremely useful information. I don't how long it will be before I can actually use what I've been taught, I will however know the fundamentals and where to go to fill in the blanks.

STU188 - Test review

The application has been in testing now since september 28th, it has been through peer test with another developer and most recently the user testing.

Many issues have been brought up, the first few halted the peer test process. I feel like the application should have been finished to a better standard however I'm only just learning what that standard is and without the issues being raised by the testing I don't think I would come across them.

This is where I have started to learn about validation, a lot of the issues raised have been how the application deals with a user going back to correct their mistakes. once the user goes backwards through the sequence of pages the application starts to lose data before it can be written to the database.

I am also learning about the difference in web browsers, some of the issues raised in testing have been down to how the page displays in different browsers.

This may sound slightly naive, I had developed the application in firefox however when it was ran in internet explorer the output was quite a bit different which in turn caused errors in the styling settings meaning that bits of the page displayed in strange places with a layout we hadn't designed.

Iv'e had to ask for more help to get round these problems, greg and petra have both help a lot with the application.

During the corrective work I have worked some late nights, I feel that with some of the issues outstanding where I have not known enough to just simply amend them I have put the time into researching and experimenting with the software in order to reach a solution. Previously when I've done this it has been in controlled and I have had a clear plan on what I was doing I why the extra time needs to be applied. On this project I still feel quite nervous about whether I am doing the job right, given the allotted budget on the project I want to make sure I am doing the correct work and still managing to keep the budget from increasing. Aside from this I feel that I don't want to fail in front of my new colleagues.

As Ive been working through my corrections I have been given server access to work in situ, however as Ive been making changes I have been doing the changes on my machine and copying the code over to the server. The problem is my development version is not an exact copy of the productions version and I believe I have brought back bugs which I have previously resolved.

UNIX

Also on the go at the moment is the UNIX training course, I am currently mid way through attending 3 training days, an introduction, intermediate and a shell scripting class.

If you are still reading this at this point then the chances are you know what UNIX is, for any non IT people its reasonable for you to see UNIX as the underpinning language of modern network and server systems, generally accepted as being superior to MS Windows, its highly versitile, robust and can be made into all sorts of wonderful things (commercially things such as Apple macs, Playstations, Android mobile os's) and its Open Source, its free.

The first class was of course introductory and covered the basic commands, the class was part lecture part self teach with a murder mystery that could only be solved by navigating around the server finding files, decrypting files, running functions and scripts and was all in all a good ice breaker to the language if you hadn't studied it before. Thankfully I could remember the UNIX module from University.

The second lesson was noticeably more advanced and showed us more functions and tools that the language offered. This class also introduced "Piping" which is the method of chaining functions together to achieve a desired output, thats the best way I can explain it without a UNIX lesson on my blog.

This was followed by another murder mystery, again using the techniques we were taught during the day and again it was noticeably harder.

The next session is the one I'm looking forward to, Shell scripting is the method of writing non compiled scripts that can be executed on a UNIX system. I'll update more once I've had the course.

Project: Infinite RES032

As yet I've not mentioned Infinite, mainly due to the work on STU188 however I have time now and want to speak about the new project.

Infinite is a workflow management system which is to be implemented between the bodies who deal with the pre and post award of research grants at the university.

The research award process is managed by Edinburgh Research and Innovation (ERI) and Finance Research Grants Section (RGS). Infinite is required to create a more efficient method of controlling the flow of information and workload between the two bodies, for example the system will only distribute tasks to users who have the appropriate authorisation for that class of task.

I am working on a component of Infinite, this component is a set of PL/SQL stored procedures which reside on the server instead of being embedded within a client based application.

Once I have completed each unit I will update as to what each unit does.

Currently my experience with PL/SQL is next to zero, I have done the training disks as spoke about in the beginning of this blog however you don't learn much without being involved in the work itself so I'm looking forward to getting into this project.

Ill update as we go.

STU188 Deployment....Nail biting stuff

Ok today is the day that my first build will go live, the build was signed off by the client yesterday and is currently going through the stages of implementation, noted in V Brown's email dated 14th October.

I have two tasks in this, one is the construction of the new live database which I have just finished, this was a case of making five databases out of the original single database and adding some new fields. The second task is a test of the Live system and making sure it works as intended now it's in the final stage of its development cycle, fingers and thumbs crossed the transition will be smooth and without any issues, however, I've said this before on this project.

On reflection, my last posting in this blog was maybe a bit over critical, I fully understand that the process of learning includes being educated by the mistakes we make and that sometimes those mistakes are a natural part of the learning process, at this stage of my development I'm not even sure I can call it a mistake if It's the first time I encounter such a thing.

It is however a definite lesson and another solid piece of knowledge to add to the foundation of my career in Software Development.

Project reflection

STU188 is now finished, a full task list is on the design specification within the evidence folder.

Looking back the project has been a good one, when I first started work on the application it had errors in the code, crashed at certain points and allowed users to go through the full application without entering any data.

This gave me the opportunity to learn how the application had been setup at first and I was able to follow the processes in such a way that I was able to find the faults which had been causing the problems while it was live. It also reinforced in myself that I was able to apply skills gained in the leadup to this placement, this was a confidence boost right at the start of the project.

I was given a timescale of around 9 days to complete the project, as these timescales were for a competant developer I was given the option to extend if required.

The tasks to complete in this time were:

• Implement EASE authentication (integration to the university single sign on system)
• Customize acknowledgement Email to include the applied for schemes
• Form Validation upgrade
• fix crashing on the Postgrad process
• Restructure the database
• remove redundant code
• create pre populating fields
• create additional mandatory fields
• add validation for the mandatory fields
• add timestamps to the databases
• amend page design (to fit consistantly with the rest of the university web space)
• amend internal links to relative format

Initial thoughts

having read through the code my intial concerns were with the EASE process and the errors causing the crashes. I had no experience with EASE and only knew of it due to the log in sequence for some of our applications.

During the build

My initial concerns were turned on their head, EASE authentication was something new and I had to ask for help with this one, Gabby one of the developers explained the procedure to me and went through the code required to run it.

The code didnt work, instead of going back and getting it fixed I decided to try this myself, with a little help from the lead developer for STU188 I was able to write a ColdFusion Component which ran the EASE authentication, this file is application .cfc and can be found in uni/evidence/september/STU188/STU188_1.1/pg/application.cfc.

One of the trickier parts of the build was the form validation, my method of implementation was to validate at the end of each section (usually 3 form to fill out during the application), as it was the current system validated at the end of the process which was a pain if you needed to fix an error on the first page.

However the problems this posed to me was I now had to figure out a new sequence logic, the order of form>validate>return to form>fix error>validate>progress did not already exist in the application and was something I created from almost new with the basis being from the old system. Tracing the steps through the old system then re engineering this around my system design was the part which took the longest and also the part I needed help to complete, because I was covering new ground for me I didnt know how to deal with some of the problems which arose as a result, such as validating checkboxes or returning to specific points to make changes in the form.

Throughout the build I have spent alot of time with another developer Petra, she has been highly valuable to my progress and my understanding of coldfusion. Petra has helped me to debug my software and understand what the error messages meant. Although I have now spent two years studying software engineering, in the real world I am coming up against what I would class as day to day issues and I feel that I am only encountering them now, things I probably wouldn't get to experience had I not been in the workplace.

I actually managed to finish the project just over half the alloted time, the application initially used hard coded internal navigation and according to my tests was servicable and robust as a commercial application. However, after a chat with Peter one of our senior developers he spoke about alternative coding techniques and given I was well ahead of the target I decided to have a go.

The end result was STU188_1.1, using dynamic coding through coldfusion lists & loops, a bit more advanced validation and a better error catching system. I'm very proud of this application because 1.1 was built by me, I was showed how the lists worked by Greg (another very good developer) and left to it.

Issues

Through this build I don't feel that I have been confident in my ability, I have felt that I was stumbling in the dark looking for solutions. I don't know how much of this project I will take forward into others because I feel that I failed here.

I had been writing the application in accordance to the adobe user documents however I've been told by colleagues (peter, greg) that this way is not the way we build applications here. Although the architecture described in the documentation is competent most builds here keep all the dynamic parts of the application and business logic out of the users access. This is not the case with the more procedural format of the user documents.

I do feel downhearted with this, however on the other side of this it also means that I will be exposed to and learn the proper way to develop applications.

To look at it another way its also a good measure of where I am starting out from, so there is a positive.

What did I learn?

• Further usage of regular expressions, now writing my own (basic) regexp using reference
• ColdFusion Lists & loops
• Importance if minimalising coupling
• EASE implementation
• Creating databases in MS access
• use of coldfusion debugging functions &
• Further usage of the standard debugging output on the web page

Summarise

Great project, learned alot from it. It has demonstrated to me that I am competant and progressing in the way I hoped as opposed to sitting and panicking. I finished this project in little over half the budgeted timescale and had enough time to build two, I hope thats not expected of me all the time:)

STU188 - Implimentation

This week I have been working on the implementation procedure for the project.

I have prepared an Implementation document (stored on the k drive, copy in evidence), this is my first time writing one and wasn't sure what was expected of me. I wasn't able to find a template for this so I used one that already existed and removed what I didnt need.

Before I went removing parts of the document I read over what was already there, I added in what I thought was required under each of the headings removing the original content as I went.

Although I was more or less adapting the original procedures to fit my application I still needed to ask for help in the areas where I wasn't sure of myself.

What I ended up doing is putting in too much information and had to remove some of the content as directed by veronica the pm.

Project: STU188 Scholarships

A new project should be starting today, this will be my first ColdFusion based project and consists of a re work of the Scholarships application which is part of the University website.

The purpose of the reworking of this service is to streamline it, the scheme currently attracts a wide number of applicants and a sizeable portion of applicants fall outwith the terms of eligibility, some are not even Edinburgh students.

We will now be offering the service through the single sign on method used here, this in turn will focus the service towards eligible user only.

Further enhancements will be applied such as a more advanced data validation process, customisation of the email acknowledgements and a redesigned database. A full task list relevant to myself is now in the STU188 evidence folder.

It is left to me obtain a copy of the existing application, this was provided by richard goode showing me where on the live system I could find it and how to set it up on my own development machine.

I am slightly nervous about this task as I feel that even with the coldfusion training material, I dont really know coldfusion.

Having looked at examples of existing applications, none of them appear to be built in the way outlined by adobe themselves.

I will follow up on this once the task has been completed.

Learning agreement - Initial feedback

Further update on the learning agreement.

My tutor has emailed and told me the draft looks good but some grammatical tidying needs done, besides being a bit disappointed with my grammar the news is really encouraging and I'm looking forward to our first meeting.

This should be taking place in around three weeks.

Again I'll update once its happened.

Project: STU186 Student Migrations

There's been some time between now and the last update, ill explain this as we go.

At the start of this week I was given the task of migrating client data across databases as part of a the Project STU186, this is the upgrade of the Student Counselling system.

STU186 has come about as a knock on effect of the EUCLID implimentation, as EUCLID serves as the central IT system for the university a lot of services provided here are coupled with this system. As a result, when the old system (DACS) fully comes of line there will need to be provisions made for dependant systems so their associated department or service can carry on functioning.

And of course downtime is always an excuse to upgrade.

I was given the week to migrate the data, I've not done any major database work for some time now so it was exciting to have a task which would test what I know and teach me something new.

The new database consists of eleven tables (versus the original db's 10), the new tables are looking to simplify the storage and referencing of the data meaning that the data is being rearranged according to the new db structure.

I wrote SQL scripts (these can be opened with notepad) which handle the migration of all data from table to table, there are copies of these scripts in the STU186 evidence folder. As part of the development process, I have written these scripts, tested them and used them to transfer the data in question. At this point the core task of data migration was complete.

Additionally to this another interesting task came up, since the old Student counselling system was taken down for development there are still new applicants to the counselling service, current UoE students have been stored on a table for non UoE clients using a second forename field to store their matriculation number.

In the table these new clients are going to the matriculation number becomes the client ID.

The problem this poses is how do we extract this data (matriculation numbers) from the column its in and migrate the associated records to the new database, seperate from the non UoE clients.

The solution sort of extended past my experience but a golden opportunity to learn something.

Creating this script was the harder part of the task and it took several attempts to get it right, the finished script fits my interpretation of what the objective is and I really hope its up to the job that is expected of it.

This script is also in the STU186 evidence folder (Evidence/August/STU186).

What Did I learn?

• Used SQL developer for the first time
• Set up databse connections to support SQL developer usage
• Transfer of data between databases, not just between tables
• how to write regular expressions
  
• How to use regular expressions in SQL queries
• How to contribute to the implementation document
  

Assesment Piece: Learning agreement draft submission

My Learning Agreement has been more or less finished since the end of July, I've sat with Mairi and Peter and read through it to get a bit of guidance from them as well a comparing notes with Sanccia who is now on her final report.

I have now been appointed a tutor for the duration of my placement and a draft copy of the LA has now been reviewed, amended where apporpriate and submitted.

One of the problems I've had with the LA is getting up to the wordcount quoted in the university guidelines. The only way I can explain this is at this point in time I cant further explain the methods by which my learning objectives can be achieved and as a result I am way off the targeted wordcount.

Another possible issue I might face here is learning outcome 4, design of solutions, during my time with peter pratt earlier he mentioned that I may not get to design any software packages, sanccia was only getting to do one now right at the end of her time and I would be at the mercy of the workflow at the time.

However, I am confident that there is good quality content in the agreement and to pad out the numbers would be to add unnecessary content.

Ill wait and see.

Back to work

Just returned from my stint in hospital, broken bones and skin grafts et al. No internet access in my new house and with only a teasing hint of an appointment from my new ISP, I'm delighted to be back at work.

This week has gotten off to a slow start, I have started working through tutorials and experimenting with two new technologies, they are MachII and ColdSpring, both of which are extensions to the ColdFusion development tools. So far I have been concentrating on MachII which is a Model View Controller framework for ColdFusion markup (images have been added to the evidence folder), I have read over the documentation for ColdSpring however I feel with all the reading in the world, without practical application I am not holding the information nor developing skills as much as I would like.

I spoke to Bill this morning regarding work and he has assured me that there is work there, however I also know how busy he and the team are. So with that I understand that its not easy for them to set development work aside for someone of my level to work on and be mentored on.

To date I have completed all training modules, installed and ran all the necessary software and tools I need and I am also up to date with all University assesment pieces that accompany the Work based learning module. I am now trying to learn more about about the technology and processes we use and filling my day with additional tutorials and study.

As we are only mid way through the second month I was not expecting to be carrying an in depth technical workload but I am finding it frustrating that I dont have any practical work where I can apply and develop what I'm learning, I'm also finding it more and more difficult to fill my time with relevant and usefull tasks.

Today is my last day before my stint in hospital, an utter disappointment but necessary.

However I had this in mind while studying the ColdFusion material and have written out enough of the study documents to keep myself busy over the next fortnight and keep the material fresh for my return, hopefully with some practice over while I'm away I can start be productive and make a contribution to the team when I return.

I have prepared notes on all the areas I have studied since I arrived at my placement and will be taking these with me, this includes:

• HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript
• ColdFusion

By the end of today I will have covered all units in the CF material and given myself enough of the basic techniques needed to develop for the web in this placement. I genuinely cannot wait to get back to work.

Meetings

Today was my first team meeting, these are held every month and ran by the department manager.

The subject of the meeting was regarding the parameters of job positions in and around development projects, who's responsibility was each task. This seems to part of an ongoing analysis of the partioes involved in the different aspects of the process, ie from design or build, analyst or developer.

From what I have understood, the results of this will be fed back to the senior staff through our manager and this may have an impact on the way future projects are run.

I will try to get a copy of the document used in the meeting and include this in my reports.

Technically, this week is still very much focused on ColdFusion and currently at two thirds completion. I feel this should probably be a bit quicker however I am writing up my own notes as I go along. I will do a small report on this once I have completed the course.

Hello ColdFusion

Today I have been working on the ColdFusion training material. The training actually started yesterday however today was a better day to update the blog as yesterday was generally taken up by some teething problems.

The problems I had were due to the initial setup and as follows:

• Although it installed ok there was a database function omitted from the setup which required a re install to fix (RDS functionality)
• CF required a plug in for the Eclipse IDE, the downloads from CFEclipse were temporarily unavailable but was resolved.
• Adobe training material was written for Dreamweaver not CFEclipse
• As a result of the above alot of time was spent learning about CFEclipse and figuring out the parallels between that and Dreamweaver.

These problems were resolved or workarounds were developed by this morning. You may ask why I used CFEclipse and not dreamweaver as recommended? The reason being that I had been learning Eclipse with OO software development, its an industry standard IDE and it used by the developers here in Development services.

Now at close of business I have covered a third of the ColdFusion training and enjoyed all of it so far, the CF package does seem to make web development less time consuming as it can dynamically write HTML and JavaScript, similar to the Agile development module in the first year of my degree, only without the Model View Controller architecture.

Tomorrow I will continue with the rest of the CF training and I expect this will probably take up the remainder of the week for me .

Still establishing an online presence....

Friday and the end of my second full week, as mentioned in yesterdays blog my current project is getting up to speed with web based engineering. I have now completed the W3 HTML tutorials and written an accompanying tutorial for cut/paste code snippets without having to trawl the internet. Yestarday I also started on the CSS tutorials (which is a bit bigger than I expected) and looking to make a dent in the Javascript tutorials by close of business.

Something worth mentioning here is that although I am still in my incubatory phase here I have noticed a big difference in how I am learning, I think I am being exposed to a wider range of techniques in software development and over the last few days I think I have covered more of the database procedures than I did on the databases module at Napier. I understand its pretty big of me to say that while not having applied the skills professionally however the difference seems to lie in that we were taught within the confines of the coursework we were working towards, although we touched on a broader spectrum of topics in lectures some of the methodologies and techniques we discussed were easily placed at the back of a folder since they weren't part of the working set or simply forgotten since there was no practicle application of the fringe subjects.

Given the time and resource constraints at Napier (in terms of lecturer time/workload/resources etc) I would imagine that there is not alot of opportunities for deviation in the run up to a coursework.

Here over the last fortnight I have seen deeper into the capabilities if the technology we use and still only really scratching the surface, whats next......?

Establishing an Online presence

Good Morning! Today I am working on HTML, through a series of training sessions using the W3 schools and WebMonkey websites, the focus will be on (X)HTML, CSS & Javascript. Up to this point my experience with Web Technologies has been restricted to the coursework given in the university environment, the coursework itself was very good and I learned alot from the two web applications I developed. In my opinion what I am doing now is revisiting alot of that work however it's now in a professional environment and it will pay dividends to learn how these applications are developed in real world situations, I also expect to learn more about these technologies, how they work and how I can create and manipulate them for myself.

I strongly believe that I need to be in a position of autonomy with regards to my technical abilities to be an effective software engineer which is the whole point of my 4 years at university.

Coldfusion was on the agenda for today, I understand that Bill had discussed this with Peter and Mairi and was worried that given the depth of the training material he would rather there was support available rather than leave me to it, a point I understand completely and I find it reflects the departments positive attitude to development.

Tuesday of week 2, Learning agreement was started yesterday covering the history and structure of the University, today will be more research into the departmental structure and that will see the first section finished, the next stage in the agreement will be to identify the study area's for the next year, although after speaking with my mentor Mairi yesterday there is a possiblity of project work coming my way today however I understand the Euclid project is keeping everyone here quite busy and time to fit in the placement student may be at a premium for the team.

Secondly I finished the Oracle course also and have set about typing my notes into a concise tutorial containing only the code structure and guidelines, this should provide a copy/paste template which in my past experience will provide assistance while I apply what I've learned.

I've just spoken to Mairi (9.30am) regarding todays workload, aside from typing this up I've also been working on my Database tutorial and setting up my diary for today, I have been trying to guage what work is in the pipeline for me so I can plan my workload around the tasks coming through the university. Today is pretty much a free day in terms of assignments so I plan to finish off my tutorial and section 1 of the learning agreement, what Mairi has said is Bill our departmental manager wanted me to start looking at ColdFusion (web dev) I plan on doing something with this in the afternoon.

4.30 pm now, all done as planned!

Nearing the end of week 1

Its now Thursday of week one.

Yesterday was my induction with Liam McDowal and Kevin Brogan of the Directors office, two other Napier students were also present at the meeting. The meeting covered generic operating procedures such as time recording and a ubiquitous health and safety brief.

At 1pm I had a meeting with Sanccia the current placement student to discuss some of the requirements for the year ahead with regard to coursework and a bit of guidance in terms of content for this blog.

I have also been seconded to the role of Computer representative, the purpose of this roll is to have a person in each department who can take on the roll of technician or typical IT guy, when a new computer or user comes into the department it's my job to prepare their pc equipement, same applies when it comes to any problems which may arise. The concept being is that there is a nominated rep in most departments who is on hand locally to tend to the technical issues, this in turn gives a certain level of autonomy to the department without over reliance on a central IT department. I had a discussion yesterday morning with Bill Lee, head of development team and the concept of the position was explained to me. I carried out the role practically last night when preparing a new PC for an existing member of staff, the irony is that even having this position I am currently without email, access to some drives, some access permissions and limited functionality when trying to use the CMS service (which is essential to setting up new users and machines). I am awaiting conformation that this has been resolved.

For now I am continuing with my Oracle database training, I am now 50% complete, screenshots to suppliment will be in the evidence folder.

Beginning of the new

This morning is the start of the the rest of the year, I started with Edinburgh University's Applications division on Thursday 1st of july. On my first day I was assigned my mentor and introduced to many of my new colleagues, I was also show my workstation and with my mentor we began the task of setting up the various tools and accounts I will need over the next year.

I also had a meeting at my desk with Bill Lee, he has explained to me how to use the Asta time recording application to manage and track my time. Time recording is a important part of the operations here due to it being instrumental in billing clients and providing data for the universities reporting information.

Friday, day two and far calmer from the offset, with my intitial setup out of the way and much of the surrounding administration completed I was given the Oracle training disks, 6 disks of SQL heaven, also an important part of my development in the sense of re familiarising and extending my knowledge of database procedures, also it will keep me busy during my early days.

Today was also the date of my first meeting, a project being developed by applications division for the Edinburgh college of Art is nearing its final stages of development and I was lucky enough to be given the job of testing the the application, an iphone based app which can show the different historic incarnations of Edinburgh dating back to the 1700's, my job was to venture out into the sunshine and see that the application was able to track and follow my movements around town and use the application to test for faults and bugs.

The meeting itself was a good experience, the atmosphere was informal and relaxed however I found it most interesting to see the steps of development in practice and I was able to gain a sense of the kind of work put into the project and the stages still to come. It is fair to say I was delighted to be asked to be a part of the project and despite my extensive experience in the field of software development tasks were still found where I could be included in the development process.

Monday 5th July, it is currently 3.15pm.

Today has been the start of my bit part in the Walking Through Time project, my task consisted of importing photographs of Edinburgh landmarks which support the Walks function of the WTT application, the photos are transfered into the images folder of the application and associated with the locations marked by creating pathnames via the Routes.plist file located within the application directories. The task was repeated for two sets of walks, using different images taken specifically for the project

Something else new for today is that I have been using a Mac for the first time, screenprints have been taken for the evidence folder to back up todays work and they also show the Mac platform being used.