Weblogs for ajt

Today we had a hardware failure of the IBM SAN which took our SAP system out. This is not good as were busy this week and running very close to the wind on a project.

I can't even start some Perl work on new hardware interfaces as I've also lost two of my Linux systems to hardware failures. This is not a good start to the week.

Good day today: Perl 5.12 is out; it's nice and sunny and we completed the purchase of our own house. Going off line now for a week or two while services and such move.

I'm on holiday today. While I wait for the solicitor to phone to tell me that we have at long last exchanged contracts on our new house I've got plenty of Perl patching to get done.

Just as we went off line for the last move I got an email patch for my Log::Trivial module. Since that I've received two patches and suggestions for my fdf app. We're currently on line in our temporary home, but with the move imminent we are going back off line shortly, so now is the best time to get any changes uploaded onto the 'net.

I have a number of Perl modules and stuff out there. I seriously need to update some of them but the last few months have been a hectic! In the past two weeks I've had two patches sent in, one for Log::Trivial and the second for fdf.

All I need to do now is study them and integrate them into my code. In both cases they are good suggestions and I will respond, I just need to find the time between moving houses...

Last week we went live with a revised EDI process we have with one customer. The original process has been running since I started my job - how to implement it was an interview question - but it's been running on a Windows box. Our IT department wanted to decommission the box so I took the opportunity to port the application from Windows to Linux.

It's still a Perl application but the new one has better logging and configuration. It's been live for a few days and so far it's working perfectly well. It'll be a real shame when it's finally replaced with a vast SAP PI middleware framework, but in the mean time an awful lot of money has flowed through that simple Perl application!

Today I'm performing some minor enhancements to a hardware interface I wrote some time ago. The program isn't a perfect example of object orientated bliss, with automated regression tests, but it's a fairly cleanly written procedural program that is divided into subroutines, however it's not to hard to maintain.

Padre has made it into Debian Squeeze (testing). This is good as I can now test it without having to do a custom install. So far on my desktop system it looks okay, but on my notebook (cleaner KDE install) it looks much better. It seems to integrate with KDE4 okay and looks nice, the display is a bit sluggish to update but it looks like it's worth investigating.

When I say it's sluggish, I mean it scrolls slowly, but that doesn't mean it's any slower than Eclipse or Komodo. It does start a lot faster than the other IDEs though.

Yesterday was the 2009 London Perl Workshop. It was a really good day. There were lots of extremely well presented talks on a wide range of topics. Hats off to the London.pm for yet again organising a fantastic event.

I've been on a SAP PI Mapping course this week. It's not been the best experience, because Feltham station isn't reachable because of major problem with a railway bridge caused by the recent weather - and I suppose decades of poor maintainance. That's not SAP's fault but it doesn't make for happy bunnies...

The course has been quite interesting. We have been using the PI tool for about 12 months now to map XML files to plain text files (on the whole). Every interface we map does seem painful & awkward and we had just assumed it was our lack of experience with the tool. Having been on the mapping course, I now think that it's just a dificult task to do and it's not us afterall.

It's not managment friendly but it would be a damn site faster and more reliable to do all the mapping in Perl...

This week I've been drawing out our system interfaces in Visio. It's an annoying tool, I'm sure there are better but the diagrams are now done.

Very scary stuff, interfacing, lots of data going in/out and all over the place. At least the interfaces written in Perl are fast and reliable, you can't say the same for the Java ones...

It's not that I hate Java, it's just that the Java examples we have are not the best in the world. Mind you I've yet to see a well written Java application that is fast, stable and fully featured...