A Tangled Web

April 18th, 2009

I took a deeper dive down the social networking rabbit hole today. I established an account at LinkedInd.

I am sure this isn’t news to those who have been swimming in the web 2.0 end of the pool, but I am fascinated by how connected all the social networks have become. I update this blog and you can read the post on my LinkedIn profile. I send out a tweet and it’s fed to this blog, plus it’s integrated with my Facebook account.

Those hesitent to start a Facebook or Twitter account fear of too much time spent keeping all these social networks up to date. But as time goes by it appears to organically growing into one network.

We’re all jacked into the matix now.

No Big Deal

April 18th, 2009

I am finishing a project at work that represents an initial plunge into the cloud computing world. With all the buzzwords and bleeding edge characteristics, the actual implementation was really not that painful. Having written some pretty basic web services I know there has been large effort behind the services we are consuming.

And so my appreciation of service oriented architecture had grown beyond an intellectual curiosity. One can take advantage of existing functions and services, stitch them together with your own business logic, and build enterprise class applications with less effort, and lower infrastructure overhead.

A brave new world (well not all that new).

What’s the big idea?

February 17th, 2009

This past weekend I started exploring Windows Workflow, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Window Presentation Foundation (WPF). There’s a great deal to to soak in and it all sounds grand. I am buying into the whole concept of serivce oriented architecture, but it all seems a bit huge to grasp.

Taking advantage of all this new technology requires a significant shift not only in skills, but a way of thinking. If you’re not starting from scratch, or working in a shop with several developers, getting the collective buy in (i.e. drink the Kool Aid) appears to be a big effort. However, these frameworks show the promise of more tightly integrating business processes (and business analysts) and application development.

Live Mesh Fun

January 25th, 2009

I have been kicking the tires with Microsoft’s Live Mesh recently, and I am finding it pretty cool. As I do more work from home, or places for that matter, Mesh appears to be a good way to access documents from device to device.

One thing I hadn’t considered is a the social or community aspect. A blog post at SSIS Junkie announced a project using Live Mesh to manage a SQL code repository. I am just getting started with this, but so far it looks quite promising.

The collaboration angle is rather important to me as I work in Northern Michigan. There are plenty of DBAs in the area, but finding people with an interest and skill in things like SSIS and functional programming is not that easy. The nearest organized .Net or SQL Server user group is two hours away in Grand Rapids. So finding collaboration opportunities is a welcome thing.

Reset

December 23rd, 2008

Time to hit the reset button. I started writing this blog and then activity fell off the table. I’ll blame it on the birth of my daughter.

In the meantime I’m catching up on the whole social media world. I now have a twitter acount and a Facebook account.

When not at work, changing diapers or makeing BBJ sandwiches, I am boning up on model driven software design and functional programming languages such as f# and Haskell.

Context

September 16th, 2008

The Profound

This week saw the arrival of a new member of our family. My wife and I are now the proud parents of a baby girl.

The Geek

A long time ago I was a hospital orderly at the old Traverse City Osteopathic Hospital, and the nurse midwife who delivered our baby was a nurse at the same hospital. During a calm moment after the delivery we started going to memory lane talking our late lamented “Osteo.” I started remembering how with some patients we documented I & O, or ins and outs. The “I” tracked food the patient ate. The “O” tracked, well, output (insert scatalogical joke here). This data was used by the nurses and physicians as a diagnostic metric for assessing the patient’s condition. Now more more than fifteen years later as a DBA, I document I/O, or Input and Output as a diagnostic metric for assessing the condition and performance of a SQL Server instance.

Politics

September 6th, 2008

I can’t say I am a political junkie, but I do follow political comings and goings like baseball box scores. My own personal political views look more like the “liberal media bias,” but I am as interested in the process as who actually wins. I would equate this to a baseball fan that cheers for his or her own home team, but is interested in what the rest of the league is doing.

With the presidential campaign shifting to its final phase, I again started thinking again about politics and IT. I started my first job in IT ten years ago, and was working for an ISP during the 2000 hanging chad drama. Since I live in a predominately Republican area of Michigan, I am used to being a minority side of the political spectrum. But I was still surprised to see how conservative IT people are. Granted most can’t be bothered with politics, but still I find IT department’s tilting to the right of the spectrum.

Now with the 2008 campaign I started watching to see if Barack Obama would make any headway in this world. As far as politicians go he’s the most wired person this side of Al Gore. He walks around with multiple phones on his belt, he hired a Facebook co-founder to co-ordinate his new-media campaign, and has otherwise used the internet like nobody’s business. John McCain on the other hand doesn’t now how to use a computer, is merely “aware” of the internet, and aids have to remind him not to say “The Google.”

So does that mean the IT people I work with would warm up to Barack Obama? Not exactly.

I am finding my current set of colleagues more libertarian in their worldview. If they have a view at all they are more sympathetic to Ron Paul, who is no slouch himself when it comes taking advantage of the internet in a political campaign.

Intelligence

August 20th, 2008

Over the past few months I’ve been working on a data warehouse project that’s been at times both rewarding and exasperating. Today I thought we were nearing completion of the project when several data quality issues jumped up and presented themselves. As I worked through the issues I was struck by the notion that I am encountering business intelligence in its most nascent form.

Until recently a select few people have analyzed data. The data’s quirks and oddities were handled in the brains of those crunching numbers, and not by some formal business process. So with each data issue came an oh-by-the-way moment and new details would emerge. These missing details resulted from people not articulating knowledge they use intuitively.

Imagine you are lending a co-worker your car. You hand over the keys with instructions on where it’s parked. Your co-worker gets to the parking lot and is flummoxed because your car has a manual transmission. The co-worker doesn’t know how to drive a stick shift. You’ve never owned car that has an automatic transmission and the thought never occurred to ask if they knew how to use a clutch. And so it is with emerging business intelligence and data.

As painful as it is sometimes, we are formalizing and standardizing knowledge. This knowledge can now be passed on as personnel changes take place. Years down the road some poor soul is not going to look at a mound of data from 2008 and how wonder how it all fits together.

Control

August 16th, 2008

She points out all the errors and mistakes and says I’ve lost control again. [Joy Division]

I was reading a family member’s blog about the practice of non control and found the timing impeccable. This relates to a couple of situations in my own life. At the heart of the blog post is the notion that we can’t control our circumstances, but we can control our response to them

Personally, I’ve experienced a series of home repair issues. In one week my cable modem quit, the refrigerator followed the modem into oblivion, and finally something broke in the bed frame. When the cable modem broke I cursed as I was trying to get some web updates for a friend out the door. That week happened to be the pay period were my company handed out semi annual bonuses. That bonus paid for the modem. The question then was I lucky the bonus came along when it did, or was responding to the circumstance with that awareness?

With the refrigerator, we purchased a new one with savings earmarked for such emergencies. The hassle of living out of coolers until the new refrigerator was delivered was lessened by the awareness of having the emergency cash ready. My response to the refrigerator was less frustrating because I responded to the circumstance with an appreciation for my wife’s diligence in building that emergency fund.

I handled the bed worst of all. A bolt broke in the bed frame and everything fell apart. All it took was a trip to the “guy zone” in the basement to retrieve a new bolt. The repair was easy and simple. But this happened as I was focused on some chunk of code on my monitor and was irritated by the interuption. In the end, my negative response made a simple problem into a needles fit of cursing and swearing.

How I stopped worrying and learned to love Share Point.

Professionally, I’ve also noticed being mindful of one’s response to circumstances helpful. At work we’ve rolled out Share Point. I can’t say what the reaction has been company wide, but among the people in my immediate vicinity there has been some resistance. My department has its issues with Share Point, but as a group we took the attitude that it’s here, it’s paid for, it’s not going away, so let’s see what we can take advantage of. As a result we’ve done some things that other departments are looking at as a model for some new initiatives.

How I stopped worrying and learned to love SSIS.

Last year I moved from being a head down code monkey to a DBA and database programmer. I found myself faced several ETL projects sending data to external sources and retrieving external data for our data warehouse. We are a Microsoft shop, which means I have all the tools of SQL Server, SSIS and so on.

Looking at the projects I saw that I needed to become an expert in SSIS. But the attitude I got from others about SSIS was one of disdain and frustration. There was considerable skepticism about SSIS and lots of complaints.

Here comes the part about being mindful of your response to circumstances. I recalled an adage from my days as a pipeline construction worker. One day someone was complaining about some equipment and this old timer barked out “bad operators always complain about equipment… good operators make bad equipment work.” With that in the back of my head I plowed ahead with SSIS. As a first generation product it has it’s quirks, but I’ve been able to do some pretty powerful things.

Putting it all together, I am now working on a project where I am integrating Share Point with external data using SSIS. I have a new refrigerator, a new cable modem, and Share Point is playing well in the same sand box with SSIS.

All Hail Word Press

August 7th, 2008

Here we go. Entering the fun and exciting world of blogging. I can’t say that I am giving in, but I am finding far to little time to code my own web site. Kind of like a mechanic who never wrenches on his own car. So I have installed Word Press.

I have to say, Word Press is a beautiful thing. In the next couple days I plan to write some thoughts on SSIS.