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.