Our talk went very well - though there were only a handful of attendees. I wasn't able to cover any of the technical detail of how we did it all - legal wouldn't let us say anything useful. It was all done with standard Perl and ABAP but if I told you how I'd have to kill you!
The train ride home was slow and tedious but I made it home all in once piece with all my SAP user group mementoes...
Dinner at Old Trafford was good, got back to my MASSIVE suite at the Midland at a civilised time for a decent night's kip.
Breakfast was good - don't know if it was worth the £10 that the company paid for it though.
More talks today, ours is towards the end. First off there was some body language person, interesting but not really that relevant. So far the talks have been very below par, poorly constructed and not very well presented. The more you look round the more you realise how really good our SAP system and team is relative to other firms.
Today was the first day of the SAP UK&I User Group Meeting. Lots of scary looking vendors circling over lots of scared looking users. It's a very predator/prey atmosphere. At least I'm accumulating lots of useless "swag".
Tonight we have dinner at Old Trafford, my dad will be jealous!
I've just completed my SAP ABAP Object course today. Very interesting technology. SAP's ABAP technology may be obsolete, proprietary and slow but it does work in it's given space. The object bolt on is a bit Heath-Robinson, but that's not to say that the object model in C++ or Perl is a bit of a hack either.
My instructor for the course has his own web site, it's very different from the world of SAP: The Naked Gene Juggler (safe for work)...
At the moment I'm testing a new browser at the moment. Arora is very fast but lacks a built-in adblocker. I could just install Squid on my home server and route everything through that but I'm finding most community sites not too badly plagued with adverts unlike many commercial sites that are overloaded to the point of being unusable.
For my own amusment here are some Perl community adverts:
This week I'm on a SAP delta course between SAP R/3 4.6C and ECC6.0. So far the commute hasn't been too bad, the instructor is good and the material has been well paced.
It's really good to see the new stuff in the latest version of SAP, it is a vast improvement from 4.6C. At the same time some of it is clearly incomplete, immature and not very stable and worst of all other programming languages had this kind of technology a long time ago.
For historical reasons I maintain two separate Perl blogs as well as Perl content on this blog. As I've been doing a lot more Perl at home and work of late I thought it best to update things.
I've blogged on use Perl; for a long time, but frustrations with the interface and the development of better syndication technology makes it less important to me and many of the people I follow.
The Perl is Alive site is a newer site, which I'm blogging on at the moment to help it grow. I need to add some more articles to it as well.
For much of the last and this week I've been working on an interface between one of our pumps and SAP. It's been not the easiest process, lots of little problems but it had mostly come together by yesterday. Today we learned that the pump in question will be manufactured for at least another 6 months with three incompatible interfaces. It means a lot of unexpected work at a time when I don't have any extra time to do more work.
I think the business will be reasonable and accept a delay - they are after all getting three times the work, but that eats into following projects which other parts of the business won't be happy with.
The Perl and Unix/Linux side of the work has been dead easy. Even the SAP development has turned out to be quite simple, I have mostly just made minor tweaks to existing code. The Windows side has - as to be expected - been the most complicated and difficult part of the development. Nothing on Windows is easy or straight forward - everything is complicated and obtuse - it's no wonder most software for Windows systems is buggy and unreliable - the underlying platform is so awkward.
We've been running with the QM2 project now for a few days and it's been going mostly quite well. There have been a few stability issues with Windows but other than that it's been a positive experience. Yesterday the line assembled a pump using the old method and the staff complained quite a bit - they very much prefer the new style after using it for only a few days.
Another win for Perl and open-source!
The "Quality" project has now been live for almost a week at work. It has been a really interesting project and though there have been challenges, I've come through with a solution that I'm mostly happy with.
One of the nice unexpected outcomes has been that throughput on the line has risen by 15% now that staff are not writing numbers down and instead using bar-code scanners or interfacing the test equipment directly with SAP. This means that they can do what they are paid and trained for - build product - rather than filling out endless forms.
One of the less good outcomes was a report I wrote sometime
ago for a different part of the business started to produce
strange results. The reason was that there was a subtle bug
in my report that no one noticed before but the new data
in the system exposed. Thankfully it was a one line change
to a SELECT statement and it's all fixed now.
It's been one of the best projects I've worked on at work for ages, partially because it's been a "multi-disciplinary" project that I'm best suited to, being a generalist rather than a specialist, it's had a large Perl element and it's been actually fun to do with good people to work with.
Today was the London Perl Workshop for 2008. Though a tad hectic and it didn't have me speaking, it was a much better and cheaper event that the UKUUG Linux 2008 meeting a few weeks ago.
I've started to use the ikiwiki wiki-engine. It's a really nice wiki engine in it's own rights but from my perspective it actually makes for a good web CMS.
It all stemmed from an interesting talk at this year's UKUUG meeting: Organising sysadmin documentation. I knew about ikiwiki but not bothered with it previously, preferring to to use the Kwiki wiki-engine. I've made really good progress with ikiwiki so far, I even plan to write something up for DA.org.
Day three didn't start well, the train was late and short, so I was forced to stand all the way to Clapham Junction, and I wasn't able to get the early connection to Feltham. The course got more interesting today though and I got home in sensible time.
Day four started better, the train was on time, I got a seat and made the earlier connection at Clapham. Today was technically the last day of real course work and with yesterday the only useful part of the course. I managed to leave early and got home a home hour early today!
The fifth and last day started well with good connections to Feltham. The morning was pretty much just a "teach back" followed by a small but very interesting piece about integration and stateful message flow. We broke early for lunch and then were free to go.
I'm glad it wasn't my money that was spent, SAP charge over £2 000 for a course like that and I don't think it was good value - it certainly wasn't 5 days of training.
First day was a late start and slow day. XI or as it's now called PI is just an XSLT engine on steroids. However it's mostly written in Java so it's pig slow, a serious resource pig, and very buggy. However it's "free" with SAP products and probably a good enough alternative to 3rd party middle-ware for us at work.
Day two started badly as my train is running 3 minutes earlier than I anticipated... but I still managed to squeeze through the door in time - lucky connection at Waterloo making up for my bad start.
It's interesting that others on the course have a such a negative view of Java, it's not just the Perl community who think Java is buggy, bloated and slow...!
I've discovered a few Linux "people", so I hope to exchange emails with them in the future - it's always good to meet like-minded people on courses to exchange ideas off.
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I am not a PC,
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