November 2, 2008 by roland.

Don’t get me wrong, most of the time, I’m very happy with OpenOffice. The thing which infuriates me about it is the lack of control being exercised over the developers. It appears to be designed by committees which communicate haphazardly rather than with some Queen Bitch riding herd over them and directing their efforts.

The move towards XML Style Sheets was not a high point for word processing in general. Something which should have been handled behind the scenes simply keeps rearing its head in the middle of the user interface. Today, I had to re-learn something I have done in every “The Minimum You Need to Know” book: How to get numbers into my headings. This is one shining place where the XML back end needlessly slipped forward into the user interface. First let me explain what I’m talking about.

Chapter 9
Working With Stupid People

9.1 They Don’t Know They Are Stupid

The Number’s I’m talking about are the chapter number in the chapter heading and, more importantly, the 9.1 in the secondary heading. What you want to have happen is the chapter number increments with each new chapter and the subheadings keep count.

Everybody beats their head against the exact same wall. You hit the F11 key to bring up the style menu and try desperately to modify both Heading 1 and Heading 2. That is the logical place for such a feature to exist from a user interface perspective. Well, you are not even close when you look there. Why does everybody make this same mistake? Because you only need to do it once for the document and it just rolls merrily along after that. In the case of a book, it could well be a year before you need to know this again.

Hidden under the Tools menu is a menu item called “Outline Numbering”. You must click on this, then select “Heading 1″ for level 1, insert “Chapter ” in the _before_ field. (Don’t forget the space.) You must also choose 1,2,3 as the numbering format and tell it to start with 1. Next you click on the “2″ entry to choose the style for the second level. Here one must choose “Heading 2″; “1,2,3″, and most importantly, set the sublevel value to 2 or more. If you don’t change this value, you don’t get the nice little “9.1″, you get “1″.

I understand why the developer put it there, but they were just plain wrong for doing it.

Perhaps some day OpenOffice will be able to generate ePub file formats for the Sony readers and iPhones out there. Then, and only then, will the word processor focus shift to XML based storage begin to pay back a tiny fraction of the frustration it has inflicted upon the world. OpenOffice isn’t alone in this XML move, but currently it is the only one I see which is letting the XML back end slip through to the front end.

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November 2, 2008 by roland.

‘ve finally bitten the bullet and am porting an expense tracking system I use for taxes from Lotus Approach to a Qt program which runs under Ubuntu. I decided to use PostgreSQL for my database instead of XBASE file formats because it is easier to trap dependencies (expense category and payee) than with XBASE type files. Yes, it is far more convenient to keep everything for one tax year in one directory as I used to do with XBASE files, but not as reliable.

Because of several upgrades and installs, I had both PostgreSQL 8.2 and 8.3 installed. The standard package manager would not remove 8.2 because it was automatically started when the system booted. Rather than read through a lot of startup documentation and find the script to remove 8.2 startup, I found a command which would do everything for me.

sudo apt-get –purge remove postgresql-8.2
This command is smart enough to shut down the database server, then uninstall the product. Yes, I probably could have gotten the package manager to uninstall it once I shut it down, but when it comes to database administration, the less I have to dig, the better. Keep in mind that this database will rarely have more than 1000 records in it. It could have easily been dealt with using RMS files on OpenVMS, but I have a desire to learn a little more Qt programming before tackling a patch/fix to Konsole so it actually supports the keypad when in VT emulation mode.

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November 2, 2008 by roland.

Over the past two years I have encountered companies which spent huge amounts of money purchasing SDLC templates and even larger amounts of money customizing those templates for their own location. Once they have their customized templates, they spend piles of money sending people suddenly titled “Business Analyst” to training on how to fill out the document templates for each project.

Why are they doing this? The root of this evil is Sarbanes-Oxley, but the vendors of SOX solutions have taken their marketing queue from penis enlargement commercials. “Get a big boost of confidence knowing your IT projects can no longer fail.” I have even been to sites that were stunned to find IT projects cratering. Managers were circling the wagons trying to figure out what part of the SDLC process the failed project skipped.

SDLC has a lot in common with “male enhancement” products. They both require you to believe and see what you wish to see. Where they differ is that investigators will have actual signatures on file when a project fails and someone tries to hide the cost in the books. SDLC documentation doesn’t ensure a project’s success, but it does identify who will go to prison when the failure is covered up.

Am I against SDLC doc? I am against many of the process steps imposed by commercially vended versions. Those vendors designed the SDLC so MBA’s could have input. They created a “Work Initiation” step which was more than a single line on a “to-do” list and less than a detailed analysis. The actual detailed analysis gets spread across three-four different documents, presumably to be filled out by three to four different people. Isn’t that just what you want on any project? Four different people all trying to steer the boat without any of them manning the sails. In actuality, this is exactly how the SDLC process is implemented at pretty much every client site I’ve been to that is SOX compliant. Guess what? If you aren’t publicly traded you don’t have to be SOX compliant.

To start with, no SDLC process can guaranty a project outcome. If any hint of that was in the sale pitch, you need to press criminal charges against the vendor. As currently implemented at most companies, an SDLC process serves only two purposes:

1)Turn tiny bug fix projects into massive things requiring sign off from many different people
2)Provide a predefined list of names to the criminal justice system.

You see, each and every SDLC process makes the grand assumption that “someone” working at your company actually knows what is going on. That assumption is the ultimate fraud. The process allows everyone who “thinks” they are in charge to feed their own ego by requiring them to sign off on various stages of the process. The process provides absolutely no defense from clueless ego feeders.

An even bigger threat for each and every SDLC process out there is that each person on the project will know only a little piece of the system you are working on. Each step in the SDLC process will pull the project in a different direction as each new player is encountered and your final system delivery won’t look anything like what was requested in the Work Initiation.

The most common train wreck every SDLC process creates is one which stems from piss poor management and scope narrowing. You have a system which has been in place for 20-30 years. It was originally purchased, then heavily customized. The only documentation which exists for it is the original system documentation, prior to modification. Other departments have taken over pieces of the system, rolling them into a new application by a new name. Some portions of the system are still using fixed width flat or indexed files for data storage. Other departments have written systems which makes use of the data at this stage, but they didn’t bother telling you. When you finally install your change in production, applications which haven’t been touched in over a decade suddenly fail and nobody has any idea how to recover them. All of your testing went perfectly, because you only tested for the couple of interfaces you knew about. There was no full scale production sized development system to run a complete production simulation, so you had to test only what you knew about.

This entire series of train wrecks gets even funnier when you toss in software development which is performed by illegal aliens who have no frame of reference when it comes to your business. They just code what they are told and don’t put up a fight like a seasoned professional would.

I don’t believe anyone reading this is willing to take before and after pictures using a ruler, and announce the “study” of a male enhancement product prior to some perceived “big boost of confidence”, which is why those products all promise they are shipped in a plain brown package without identifying markings. Did the SDLC product you purchased make the same promise?

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