Saturday, November 23, 2002

Earthweb on weblog software for IT managers. [Scripting News] This article reviews what we webloggers already know, and shares some ideas worth further exploration.  It also introduces me to the wicki, group editing of a shared document.  I am a bit nervous about this concept ... I am accustomed to shared programs in which it is clearly tracked which programmer made which changes for which reasons, where we have good consistent programming discipline standards. Currently I send e-mail to selected co-worker users every few days.  I select recipients based on nature of content situation.  Perhaps some of this sort of thing belongs on a weblog, with comments, and IT department subscribing to the comments, which might say YES this is a high priority to resolve, or NO there is some nuance you were not aware of.  However, rather than comments, I am more comfortable with the Manila group discussion format, that makes it easy for people to comment on other people comments, aside from the original author of a thread. I have identified a problem with some garbage in one of our files.  It is not doing dirt to the integrity of our corporate data base, but could contribute to invalid results for people doing queries over the data in that file.  Here is specificity of the problem, as I interpret it.  I seek permission to delete these records. We did have some costs that were negative and I fixed them.  I believe it is valid to have a negative quantity transaction, or temporarily negative on-hand due to transactions posted out of sequence.  I do not believe it is valid for the value of something to be negatively priced. The ERP has provisions to delete items, customers, vendors, etc. when we no longer need them.  I have discovered that unfortunately, history on those deletions do not go away, so that when we re-issue an item, customer, vendor, etc. for a new entity, it comes attached to history on the unrelated prior usage.  I am now inventorying contents of history files using control numbers that are no longer in our system, for the purpose of working towards purging these orphans.  (Orphans are child records with no parents, where widows are parent records with no children.)  I trust my co-workers concur with my efforts. Some Help Desk Challenge we were working on has come to the point that some new or revised software is ready for testing.  Here is how to conduct such a test.  Here is how to evaluate and report the results of the tests. Common questions to Help Desk => FAQ on how to accomplish standard activities that newcomers may need to know, especially if they come to us from a different Computer Operating System environment which probably did things other than what we are accustomed to.   2:55:05 PM    comment []

Thursday, November 21, 2002

IBM's Autonomic Computing Products. I.B.M. Releases Self-Fixing Computer Software. Autonomic computing is a major component of IBMs On Demand Computing initiative, the part that keeps systemic costs down.  Their first releases are functions in their DB and App Server products.  Look for similar advances to flow down the stack to support Grid Computing. ``All the IT staff does is define these business rules and the systems will then perform to those rules and make sure all the right things happen,'' said Miles Barel, IBM's director of autonomic computing. In addition to setting itself up and running, autonomic computing includes enabling systems to run in the most efficient manner and stay running, fixing itself when something goes wrong. [Ross Mayfield's Weblog] 10:15:57 PM    comment []

Saturday, November 09, 2002

I just started a directory of documentation sources for BPCS which is an ERP from SSA GT. 3:39:40 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2002 Al Macintyre.