Getting Technical

Recently I was set up with a system without the correct SAP systems on my ‘logon pad’. This made it a little hard to access the systems I needed but here is the tip.

Use the sapgui.exe application to access the system you need.
Simply (from windows) hit the start button and then ‘Run’ and then type:

sapgui [appserver-domain] [system number]

If you add the switch /WAN it will treat it as a low speed connection.

One of the benefits of this is that it doesn’t start the SAP Logon application which will save you about 20M of memory. The downside is you don’t get the application in your tray that shows all the systems you are logged on to when you right click it.

More information here [SAP Service Marketplace link - credentials required]

It has been a long time coming this year, but I can now confirm that I will be attending TechEd in Vienna.

Vienna - I'll be there.

It will be a flying visit as I fly out  Thursday night so not much time to enjoy the highlights of the city.

So what will TechEd hold for me?

I have planned a few sessions to attend but there will be lots of SAP Mentor meetings , Demo Jam (SAP Entries notwithstanding), Hacker Night, catching up with virtual friends in the flesh and a keynote or two.

I note that Leo Apotheker will not be speaking. That is interesting all by itself.

The wonderful Community Network people have produced these badges and I love this one. “Come See Me Speak”. I know it is meant for people who have official sessions but you could come just to see me speak. I will be talking after all.  See you in Vienna.

Speaking at Vienna (well I am not a mute)

I was up for the go live of the Wolfram|Alpha site this morning and there is a new ‘Fail Whale‘ that I am sure everyone will be talking about soon.

I love recruiters. I really do. It really comes down to different skill sets for different roles. With over  a decade in this software game now I have learnt a few skills that makes my time salable to the highest bidder. Over time I have taken some skills off my cv as it generates false hits for roles that I have no interest in doing.

Having said all that I am always happy to talk to a recruiter or read their emails. Sometimes they start with ‘ Sorry if this is not right for you… ‘ you get the idea. I would rather build the relationship with them when I don’t need them than have to try and sell myself and my skill-set to someone who has no idea who I am when I do desperately need a new client.

I have a handful of recruiters that I work with I guess, but every now and then I get a call that even makes me chuckle. The guy was running through the specification for a new role that had ‘just come in’. It was all sounding pretty good until he read out “Must have ‘Double Zero’ skills”. For a moment I thought I was going to be required to save the world from some evil dictator.

“I think you mean Oh-Oh”, I said.

“No it says ‘Double Zero’”.

“It actually says Oh-Oh. It stands for Object Oriented. They are looking for object oriented skills.” I was being patient with him.

“Well you learn something every day.” He gave a little embarressed laugh.

And while we have a little chuckle over this incident I really hope he does learn something every day because I certainly am. There is so much happening in the wonderful world of software development not to be. I am currently  working on my Flex 3, WDA, ABAP, ABAP OO, PHP, Python, Dojo and one or two other things for good measure.

If you check the sylabus on most it ComSci degrees, it is unlikely that you will find a course or even a hat tip towards anything legal. Even the course that I took which included subjects on Communication, Managment and a full year project had no content on anything legal.

This is why my friend Thomas Otter is investigating in his efforts to become a Pointy Headed Doctor err… a Pretty Harmless Driver … err Purple Headless Dragon. Actually none of those. He is completing his PhD. Not to be confused with PHP which, I grant you, at some level is very similar but on others completely different.

Anway enough of the rambling.

I will let Thomas actually describe what he is doing:

Legal systems have evolved over centuries to codify rights and obligations in societies. Throughout history law and technology have interacted, modifying each other along the way.  It is often an uneasy relationship…

I want to ask as many software people as possible about what they understand of the law that can impact software, and what their attitudes are towards a couple of legal concepts in a software context.

It is designed to gather information about the knowledge, education and attitude of software developers towards the law related to software, and how law is or isn’t built into software. My goal is not to just have a small survey of a couple of hundred developers, but to really survey lots of them.

To do this, I want to tap as many of my readers  as I can to spread the news of the survey, and for as many of you to take the survey as possible. The more answers I can get from around the world, the richer the results will be. I will also be following up with telephone interviews with a much smaller sample group.

In this survey I have used the term software developer rather broadly. I define this to be anyone working professionally to design, build or maintain software (information technology). So if you are a product manager, solution manager, implementation consultant, systems architect, business analyst, or a systems tester, for instance, then we would be just as interested in your responses. The survey isn’t just aimed at those who code, but those who make a living from its construction and maintenance. Much of this group would fall under that definition. The Germans have a rather nice term,informatiker, but it doesn’t really translate very well.

You can access the survey here or use this link in twitter to get the word out to your friends social network, tribe or whatever the new word for friends is this week.  http://is.gd/eACI

In a world of SOX and Data Protection this is very timely research.

The goal is to get at least 1006 responses so that the data is statistically significant.  (You did stats 101 didn’t you?) I am reliably informed that it is progressing well but until you take 10 minutes of your precious time to add your response it will not be complete.

Advent Calendar

Last year the guys at OmniTI, primarily Chris Shiflett kicked off a PHP Advent calendar and while I was looking for it last week I was disappointed to not find one. At least not where I found it last year.

This year all your favourite PHP authors are back  at a shiny new domain with design assistance from Jon and Jon.

So count down the shopping days to Christmas with a great set of articles from some of the best authors around at PHPAdvent.org.

Photo Credit: *Regina*  used with permission.

Twitter was doing some maintenance today…

Twitter database maintenance

I like the ice-cream but where is the broccoli ?

I didn’t expect to take this long to announce the winner of the caption competition. Thanks to all those who took part.

Congratulations to Johan who came up with the winner.  SFLIGHT is the be all and end all. What else would you need? I am sure that the SAP Airline Industry solution is build on the solid foundation of SFLIGHT. (For all of you who don’t know the SFLIGHT is a simple database model that many introductory ABAP courses use as a learning tool.)

I’m convinced now! SFLIGHT is better than their current system.

Thanks for playing along and next time I am sharing aproximate space time coordinates with Johan there’s I’ll get the first round.

As a follow on from the talk at PHPLondon last week David has now posted this announcement.

Hi everyone,

after more than three years of development, Agavi has finally reached the first 1.0 milestone: 1.0.0 beta 1 is out! Grab it now at http://agavi.org/

As you might already know, it’s fairly identical to the stable Agavi 0.11 series, which has been ready for production use for a long time now and enjoys widespread use across many sites already.

This new release introduces a new build system for projects, and features a new XML configuration subsystem that is even more flexible and ready for the future while maintaining full backwards compatibility. Several other minor enhancements are also listed below, but as usual, the RELEASE_NOTES and CHANGELOG files know it all.
Please also pay special attention to the UPGRADING document which explains the changes to the configuration file formats (old configs will continue to work, however).

There will likely be another beta release before we enter the release candidates cycle as a couple of refactorings remain to be done, just like the new unit testing subsystem for applications. Note that use in production environments is not recommended at this time.

Also, I’m very happy to announce that a preview version of our new tutorial manual is up at http://agavi.org/docs/tutorial/. It covers the first couple of what’s going to be quite a number of chapters that explain the creation and improvement of the new official Agavi example application, which will also be used by other manuals, presentations and in trainings. Please have a look at it and let us know what you think; any sort of feedback is greatly appreciated!

But let’s talk about three important new features in 1.0:

- XML config subsystem with improved, namespace-aware handlers, support for multiple XML Schema (also using XML Schema Instance declarations), RELAX NG and Schematron validation runs in various stages of config parsing, support for XSL provided through external instructions and by <?xml-stylesheet?> processing instructions and convenient support for namespace versioning, which means we’ll have nice backwards-compatible configuration files in the future. Envelope and actual content of files are now separate, as described in the UPGRADING document.
- A completely new build system for creating and managing your projects. It features several wizards, as well as raw targets that work without interactive input. This allows extension and customization of build operations in your custom build.xml files.
There’s also an event listener system you can hook into for even more flexibility.
- Execution containers now have a request method. This means you can embed, for example, a slot with a login form, with the request method forced to “read”, so that this Action would never run the login operation even if another form on the page was submitted through a POST request. This should reduce a lot of request method related pains people have experienced when building heavily componentized web sites.

The rest is mostly refactorings and minor enhancements as explained by RELEASE_NOTES, CHANGELOG and UPGRADING.

Please test this first release thoroughly with your projects and report any issues you find on the mailing lists or the bug tracker!

Thank you all for using Agavi, it’s an absolute pleasure to work with such a great user base!

I am not a user myself – I am focusing on Zend Framwork. This is just a PSA.