« July 2006 | Main | September 2006 »
August 31, 2006
Oracle Analytics
Dale and I had a shortened time today, but we did manage to review a nice introduction on Oracle Analytics. Analytics allow you to use plain SQL (as opposed to PL/SQL) to gather data on row sets. There are about 20 or so Analytics functions, and they are similar to existing SQL functions such as sum and count except they can return multiple rows.
Today we managed to determine what Analytics is and also got some further research materials lined up. We feel that Analytics will help us to replace a lot of PL/SQL code with these advanced SQL functions for increased efficiency. The next step is to identify a real world problem and see if we can solve it using Analytic functions.
Posted by rossm at 11:40 AM | Comments (0)
Vacation, Sweet Vacation
Today is my last day before departing for the wilds of Montana. I'll be out camping in the woods, and trying my best to fool some of those Montana trout.
My office will be closed until September 13th. If you need help, please contact the UCS Helpdesk at 88925.
See you again in a week or so!
Posted by rossm at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)
August 28, 2006
MBS 2006.2 Installed
The MBS 2006.2 software point upgrade was installed on the bookstore server last week. The upgrade went pretty well, all things considered. It was an interesting time getting the system backed up prior to the upgrade. When I arrived to start the backup not only was the backup job messed up, but the temperature in the server room was over 78 degrees and steadily climbing. To make a long story short, the air conditioning system has since been repaired and the temperature has remained steady since that was done. One side note - you should see the fan we got to air the server room out if the temperatures rise again - it really blows hard. Anyway, night one was now shot, with some headaches to attend to first thing in the morning due to the botched backup. The second night went much better - the server behaved itself and a clean system backup was obtained. On the third night the actual point upgrade was installed. It did throw some errors, but I later learned that those errors were because it was trying to upgrade an application that we do not have. The end result is that the bookstore server is now up to date on all it's software.
Oh, did I mention that in between doing this upgrade, an Ingram database update also came in. These have to be run at night now, too. It went very well except for one thing. I forgot to start it at night, so had to hotfoot it into the server room at 6:30 a.m. and get that going so it would be ready when everyone came in to work at 8:00 a.m. It's a good thing I live so close by! I"m ready for a break from these evening/night projects.
Posted by rossm at 3:30 PM | Comments (0)
Sparky Gets An Upgrade
Sparky is a server that runs the HVAC communication program for all of campus. Because of software limitations from the vendor, Sparky has had a Windows 2000 operating system. Recently, a Windows XP version of the software became available, so we were happy to upgrade Sparky to a Windows XP environment. That means the HVAC crew does not need to use PC Anywhere to communicate with the server. They now can use Remote Desktop instead. Remote Desktop has a lot of advantages. Also, PC Anywhere used to lock Sparky up on a pretty regular basis. That seems to have been eliminated with this upgrade.
It was fun to watch Joe Crowe at work - he installed the OS, all the drivers, etc., and also set up a temporary box to use while Sparky was down. There's a guy who knows what he's doing!
All in all this upgrade went really well. One loose end is that some graphics files were lost and are in the process of being recovered from tape. Some earlier versions of the graphics are in use now, so it is just a bit of inconvenience until we can recover the newer ones.
Posted by rossm at 3:21 PM | Comments (0)
August 8, 2006
On the Road Again!
My electric bike is finally back on the road again. I got a lesson in patience getting this thing fixed. In the end, it all worked out OK, but it took awhile. First, the rear tire was sent to Tommy's bike shop in McMinnville. They put on a really nice looking tire, gave me a new chain, and replaced the gears for $85.00 which was pretty reasonable. Unfortunately, the new tire was just enough bigger that my hack job on fixing the rear brake with a short, BMX type brake arm caused the new tire to rub on the cable, so I just took it off and rode with the front brake only. This isn't as dangerous as it sounds because the bike would not go anywhere.
This is a long story.....
OK, so the chain would just wrap around the front gear until it bound itself up. This is when I contacted Eric and David at Ebikes NW - the place where I bought my bike. I sent them a nice email outlining the problem on June 28th. On July 7th, I sent them another email as I had not had any response from them yet. They sent me kind of a terse email saying they would phone me, and David did phone me on either the 7th or the 8th of July. He knew right away what was wrong and said he would order me a replacement FRONT gear as that was the problem - it was worn so the new chain was hanging up. Also, he said they had a used bike with the rear brake part I needed and he would be able to send that to me as well. About a week later, David called me again, and made arrangements to ship the gear and brake parts to me - it was about $32.00, again not too bad for the replacement parts.
So, the replacement parts came in due course, and I hauled the bike up to McMinnville to have them put on my bike at Tommy's. That wasn't a great experience, as the guy at Tommy's told me they have a shop rule that they don't do any work on electric bikes. Very confusing since they had already worked on my bike. I don't know, bad timing or something. I was allowed to leave my bike and they put the replacement parts on, and it works great. Cost - $35.00. Again, I thought the cost was very reasonable.
As all good and bad things come in threes, my batteries have gone sour so I just ordered a couple YUASA's from an outfit called AtBatt.com in California. $71.91 for two YUASA batteries (no shipping charge!) I thought was a great deal. The batteries should be here in about a week.
So, what did I learn? Well, an electric bike is not a mainstream item. Obtaining advice and replacement parts isn't impossible, but it does take a while. Also, otherwise reputable bike shops may well balk at working on the bike. I was not impressed with Ebikes NW response time to my request for help, but they were able to get the parts I needed. It would be a much better situation if I lived close to them so that I could just take the bike in for maintenance/repairs - something I never thought of when purchasing the bike. Purchasing a high quality bike like the Giant LaFree Sport was a very good move. The electric bike is a great way of getting around for short commutes except in the worst of weather we have around here. This whole thing cost me about $200.00 which isn't much considering that it's really the only maintenance I've had to do on this bike in 5 years of riding (except for battery replacement and the broken rear brake lever). The worst part was the length of time it took. I missed it!
Posted by rossm at 2:03 PM | Comments (0)
August 4, 2006
Comments
Like all other things that can be used for good, my blog developed a dark side - I don't know how many spam "comments" were coming in each day, but something close to 50. So, I was forced to implement some rather strict rules for commenting on my blog. Several people have just emailed me instead, which I suppose is a good idea. Porn sites and on-line casinos seem to be the ones who have the resources to ruin an otherwise good thing. Seriously, half of those comments weren't even intelligible. Even though this is a "rant", I'm not going to jump and down and wonder about who or what is "out there", but it's just another example of some people willing to ruin things for the rest of us in an awkward attempt at personal gain.
Posted by rossm at 2:32 PM | Comments (0)
I'm Back at the BLOG
Hi. Well, it's been awhile since I've Blogged anything, so thought this would be a good time to get started again.
The sleepy summer days have been replaced with a maniacal pile of work demanding to be accomplished. Some of the projects I'm working on right now include:
A new report for the Mailroom that shows totals for coded mail for either the current month, or the previous month. There is some clever code in there that figures out what "last month" was, no matter what day you ask for the report. I'll put that out in a future blog to see what you think.
A couple SWAMP forms need some minor modifications. A new search item needs to be added the the pre-req history form, and the employee form needs a minor change to put some input into upper case. The employee change came about as a result of modifying the charge-out rate for the physical plant (sorry, rest of campus)....
The bookstore had three point upgrades that needed doing. Last night I did two of them, and there is one more to go. The main upgrade performed last night modified our POS (it's not what you think, it stands for Point of Sale) system to comply with legal requirements for safely handling credit card data. That upgrade has been successfully installed, so we are in full compliance with the regulations for safely handling credit card information. Next week I'll be installing MBS point upgrade 2006.1, which is a series of minor program enhancements and bug fixes.
Dale and I have been working on our Oracle DBA skills on most Thursdays, and this week he helped me code up part of the Mailroom's report for SWAMP. I had the bright idea of showing Dale how SWAMP is put together so he could be a backup for me, and this coding project was a good introduction.
Another project I'm working on is cleanup of SWAMP data. We have some historical data that was migrated to SWAMP from the old FAMIS program that needs cleaning, and also some open PO's and prereq's that have accumulated over time. These don't really cause any problems with the day to day operations, but they could if we don't keep the data up to date - especially with the queries that rely on our historical data.
Posted by rossm at 2:12 PM | Comments (0)