Daves Raves

How 'e' am I?

2007-07-17T09:37:08-05:00:00

After succumbing to peer pressure, I've decided to do the e-Test.
Here's the results

your e-score: 88
your e-group: e-expert
your e-ranking: 381/9664

Try it yourself ...

How Right Thinking Australians Should Pronounce "Agile"

2007-07-05T00:30:59-05:00:00

Contrary to the opinion given in this article, I believe its important for us to realize that habitual contraction of words is in fact a phenomenon which degrades our language. In linguistics, the concept of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) shows that a person finds it more difficult to learn the basics of a language when the language structure becomes more simplified than their first language.

As English is not the largest spoken language (http://www.aneki.com/languages.html), it is only apparent that more people need to learn English to communicate in it. After all - English does power most of the worlds computers. So why is it so important to keep contracting the language?

Soon, if we followed the advice of Brian, our majestic British English will become like the following quote:
Source: http://www.qarxis.com/EuroEnglish

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of Europe, rather than German, which was the other possibilty. As part of the negotiations, Her Majesty's Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5-year phase-in plan that would be known as "EuroEnglish":

In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favor of the "k". This should klear up konfusion and keyboards kan have one less letter. There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with " f ". This will make words like "fotograf" 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkorage the removal of double letters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of the silent "e"s in the language is disgraseful, and they should go away.

By the 4th yar, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with"z" and "w" with "y". During ze fifz year, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaing "ou" and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leteres. After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no more trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech ozer.

ZE DREM VIL FINALI KUM TRU!!!!! (Und zen ve vil take over ze vorld!!!!!)

War of the Worlds - The MIS Saga Continues

2007-07-04T02:11:33-05:00:00

As seen in the previous posts in the MIS Saga category, the fight between huge, cookie-cut systems and smaller, custom made solutions has continued into another episode.

From the current status, it seems that Feathers TPMS has gotten the upper hand with management. It was voted a few days ago as the enterprise system of choice over SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW). From the public release notice it was chosen as it focused on the future with a customer-centric approach to its usability.

Whether it is a good decision, or one of those rants that just upsets the rest of the IT community in Australia by fragmenting the available solutions and picking the smallest and cheapest one on basis of TCO and cultural change.

As an aside, I am interested to see how the future of Feathers in a system where everything is delicately allocated and monitored for importance affects its livelihood and importance at an enterprise level.

Pitfalls of Management Information Systems - Feathers TPMS and SAP Business Warehouse (BW)

2007-05-29T19:55:02-05:00:00

Management Information Systems

These MIS systems are critical to business processes and as most executives say, critical for competitive profit. However, when the process of implementing and maintaining MIS and Decision Support Systems (DSS) becomes paramount, keeping middle managers updated with latest tools that follow industry best practices becomes a burden on the IT department. This is what happens when the IT department fail to see their vision...

Where I work, we have two separated IT departments. The "IT" department is the traditional infrastructure/support/etc department that is around in all food manufacturing companies. It plays a secondary role in business operations. My department is a sales team support department, focusing on providing the latest gadgets, programs and tools for the business marketing & sales department.

We're a highly organised and efficient work unit, pumping out solutions at ratios which embarrass the IT department. However, we have been hitting resistance from the IT department with certain solution implementation. This solution requires some Java JRE to be deployed to corporate computers. The trade-spend package, by Blueshift Corporation, called Feathers TPMS allows us to provide almost live trade spend and promotional data from our near Sydney, Australia headquarters to sales representatives, middle managers and executives in Western Australia, New Zealand and other countries. Its a great package which provides better functionality and easier integration than SAP Business Warehouse. For the record, the SAP BW has taken over 6 years to set up across 8 international sites, while Feathers has worked in a few months. SAP BW is being perpetually overhauled and upgraded with maintenance outages being common.

Structurally speaking, implementing SAP BW requires a redundant cluster of proprietary database (SQL Server, Oracle, Sybase) whereas Feathers TPMS runs happily with the open source MySQL. (We have it running on SQL Server, for SAP integration). About SAP integration - Feathers runs happily with SAP, both complementing each other.

The most important thing now is turning this great potential into a strong competitive advantage. Feathers blurs the boundary between a TPS and a DSS. This MIS is a great tool for managing retailer promotions with up to date data.

However, all this comes at a strong cost with a stagnant IT department. The IT department has come to realize the value of business processes over business solutions. Thats quite a contrast! What I mean is that the IT department can see that the Feathers TPMS solution is a better one, with more features and quicker delivery, however they also see that changing their existing infrastructure to empower the strengths of Feathers TPMS will disrupt their highly calibrated and smooth working information chain.

Its a great ability to be able to move, but unless the IT department sees value in harbouring technological solutions which provide better business intelligence to middle and senior management, the struggle for what is better over what works will continue.

I will keep you posted as this MIS saga continues....

SQL Server 2005 Large Data Types

2007-04-10T11:07:00-05:00:00

For some time now the Large Data Types has been trumpeted around as the next best thing in the T-SQL world. There is a great entry about it on Fotia (See here: http://www.fotia.co.uk/fotia/DY.13.VarCharMax.aspx) However, when you try to do a PRINT command in SQL Management Studio, you will only print out the first 8,000 characters. I still haven't figuired out why that is the case, but perhaps it is a limit on the text-box in SQL Management Studio. Anyway - hopefully you won't need to spend hours trying to find out why your VARCHAR(MAX) local variable is not holding more than 8,000 characters. A quick test is the function "datalength" which will return the 'intelligent' length of the character sequence.

An example of customer service

2007-03-28T16:56:00-05:00:00

Hey All,

Today I was purchasing a cake for my brother for his birthday, and it needed to be done by Friday. The checkout girl said the earliest would be by about Sunday. Anyway - I had a digital image which I scanned from the image that was to be the icing on the cake. So I asked to send it to them digitally.

They said that it would be fine, but a 2Mb limit. It was a huge A4 size poster, so I informed her that it would be a little bigger than that. Luckily the Regional Manager for Northern NSW was there - one of the top honcho's of Michel's. He rang up a friend back in the admin side of things and got the thumbs up for me to host the image.

I had to get the image in by 4:30pm. Got back to my computer in the office at about 4:12pm, and then had a call from the NSW Bakery Operations Supervisor who asked how things were as he had not got my image yet.

To cut a long story short, this amazing guy took it on himself to get my order all ok. It was incredible. I am REALLY impressed with their customer service. Looks like I'll get my brothers cake tomorrow, all because some guys cared about their customer.

So anyone of you who are going through a shopping centre and see Michel's Patisserie there - stop and buy a coffee or a slice of cake. They are really worth it.

An Open Source Initiave

2007-03-28T10:18:00-05:00:00

Remember my scathing comment about the FSF foundations BadVista Campain?

Well, here is something that somewhat redeems FSF in my eyes. Ironically, it comes from the Open Source camp.

This article describes how a group of individuals gave out Open Source Software that ran on Windows machines. Ie, they made the impression that Open Source was not just GNU/Linux.

This is an initiave to educate users into using applications which are available in GNU/Linux, in essence future-proofing those users.

The FSF - Good and the Bad

2007-02-22T09:57:00-06:00:00

Well, this is hardly a kosher topic to talk about - people get up in arms about the idea of Open Source and the free software movement.

Recently I was on the FSF browsing about when I found quite an interesting website: BadVista.org What the hell??? Now, I am quite open-minded about open software, but I found this website just childish. The reason for the existence of this site is labeled as: "The BadVista campaign is an advocate for the freedom of computer users, opposing adoption of Microsoft Windows Vista and promoting free (as in freedom) software alternatives."

Personally - I love Linux (GNU/Linux for those who are of the stoic nature), I use Fedora on my personal servers and Gentoo on some desktops, and would use other Free and Open Source Software when given the chance. However this campaign is a pie-in-the-face to the whole idea of Free Software. From the source (http://www.gnu.org/) of the ideology comes the statement that free software comes with freedoms:

* The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
* The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
* The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
* The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Perhaps the most important construct we have to make is the distinction of corporate environments. Microsoft is a commercial entity; a public company governed by its shareholders - and to these shareholders Microsoft must answer the question of how well it is using their money. The Free Software Foundation (http://www.fsf.org/) is a non-profit organization dependent of donations. Its funding of 'important projects' is the only direction of finance flow created by the interactions of funders and projects. There is no payment back to the people funding.

In the corporate world, finance has to flow both ways: Whether its payment of cash for goods, or a service. That is perhaps one of the clearest reasons why Free Software has failed to be swept up: It does not have a steady market recourse - the funds that are put into it, go through it, but never return. Hence the financial system is very lopsided and is potentially a bucket with no bottom for investors.

The converse system that Microsoft is running on returns to the investors at least a small portion of what they put in (sure - the risks of bankruptcy are there, but there is hope with Microsoft shareholders to gain a return).

With this important concept in mind, why is the BadVista.org campaign so stupid, childish and a bad face for the FSF foundation? Well, financiers are putting in thousands of dollars into software development for what reason? To make better software than the guy next door. That is the only reason that there is competition over GNU operating systems and Microsoft operating systems. However, Microsoft tends to emphasize why their software, OSes, and philosophy is better, while GNU / FSF tend to emphasize that their software is better.
I could not find a reference on the BadVista.org website that showed that Free Software was better. All it showed was that "The BadVista campaign is an advocate for the freedom of computer users, opposing adoption of Microsoft Windows Vista and promoting free (as in freedom) software alternatives." The BadVista campaign bad mouthes Vista (ok - thats what its there for) and is supposed to promote free software alternatives (such as? There are no alternatives. The BadVista campaign says that there are alternatives, and that it promotes their use, but doesn't say what those alternatives really are!)

How is Free Software supposed to compete in the corporate world where most of the important decisions are made on virtues not on hype? There is little in the BadVista campaign that says how Free Software is better. By implication, it suggests that Free Software in general is better, but that is always a bad thing to do. Sure, there is bad Microsoft software, and there is also bad GNU software.

While the FSF is a good idea to lobby mega-corporations such as Microsoft into being more consumer orientated, it really should curb the 'extremist' groups in its philosophical war as they are the ones that give the whole FSF a bad name. Since when did jumping around in yellow rain-coats and shouting that Vista is bad at a Vista party make anyone popular? (http://badvista.fsf.org/blog/a-badvista-at-microsofts-new-york-launch-parties)
What are your thoughts?

Lets Replace Phishing with SPAM

2007-03-28T09:43:00-05:00:00

According to this article [CNet News, in new window] a new start-up company has created a piece of software for ISP's. This software detects if a user is going to a known phishing site, and shows a warning, along with ads from Yahoo, and other sources.

So we are creating a good anti-phishing campaign with unsolicited advertising (spam). I don't know my stance on this yet, but why is every little bit of screen real-estate is being used for advertising.

There needs to be an Internet governing body for controlling the advertising on reputable sites. (Seen yahoo recently?)

ROLAP vs. MOLAP - A statistical case study

2007-02-21T15:13:00-06:00:00

I work as a systems developer at a large food manufacturing firm in Australia. Recently we have been fighting with Microsoft's Analysis Services about a certain cube we were wanting processed.

The quick details -
Database size: 25.6Gb
Dimensions: 9
Storage Model: MOLAP

The data was the entire set of sales figures for the years 2002 to present in weekly installments. We had to process this cube during off-peak hours as the server it was running on was a high-demand corporate server. Taking this into account we set it to run at 5:30pm (when most of the people using the server had gone home for the day) and were expecting it to be processed in the morning.

Arriving in the morning we saw a large red cross and a clever error message: "Error: General network error!"

Well - after a few weeks of fiddling and trying to process it we made it to the "Successful" stage - process time: 50 hours.

No way could we run it at that, so we started cutting things down. In the end we removed 3 unnecessary dimensions and culled the data up to 2005. Then switching to ROLAP for better aggregation of older data we doubled the size of the database with the aggregations. That failed miserably, so we took it back to MOLAP.

These are the statistical differences between the two methods:
Old Cube Setup

ROLAP
At 50% performance gain, 235 aggregations @ 3,434.6Mb
At 75% performance gain, 351 aggregations @ 16,509.7Mb
At 100% performance gain, 3624 aggregations @ 258,271.7Mb

MOLAP
At 50% performance gain, 235 aggregations @ 1,412.2Mb
At 75% performance gain, 351 aggregations @ 6,562.4Mb
At 100% performance gain, 3624 aggregations @ 99,826.5Mb

New Cube Setup
ROLAP
At 50% performance gain, 120 aggregations @ 1,052.9Mb
At 75% performance gain, 189 aggregations @ 5,700.9Mb
At 100% performance gain, 2079 aggregations @ 91,681.4Mb

MOLAP
At 50% performance gain, 120 aggregations @ 546.6Mb
At 75% performance gain, 189 aggregations @ 2,921.8Mb
At 100% performance gain, 2079 aggregations @ 45,820.4Mb

Astounding results on a 25 Gb database aren't they?

Well - the intricacies of MOLAP vs. ROLAP are well documented. However here are some empirical results which actually outline the size difference between the two storage models. For more information on Molap and Rolap data, see ROLAP and MOLAP data
As closure, the new cube processes in about 12 hours and query performance is reduced from 16 minutes to about 1 - 2 mins.

The Daily WTF

2007-02-23T07:55:00-06:00:00

Recently becoming a reader of this interesting website I urge all of you to see the curious perversions of technology! http://www.thedailywtf.com is where you want to go!