Aug
28
Down down down
August 28, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Well, I guess apologies are in order on two counts here….
First off, the site was down for a few days. This was the result of a power cut caused during a very severe thunderstorm when a falling tree branch brought down power cables across the road from my house. We had no electricity for a few hours while the power guys did their thing and sorted out the electricity.
Unfortunately, the Database Server did not come back up when the other servers did, so the webserver was up but it had nothing to display as the database was not available.
Unfortunately, I was not a position to fix it for a few days as I only found out about the problem last Tuesday after I moved out of my hotel and it took me three days to get the Internet connection in my flat working as the password I had was wrong so that is why the site was down for a few days.
The actual problem was that one of the BIOS settings was wrongly set so the machine never booted into windows.
Please accept my apologies for the downtime.
The other problem is that I have not posted any comments here for a few days and posting in general has been down.
Well, that is nobody’s fault but my own.
I have just started a new Siebel project in Germany and I have been quite busy getting stuck into learning Siebel 8 and into the requirements of the several integrations I have to build. Additionally, my client who shall remain nameless has a very strict internet policy at work so I cannot post the odd blog entry at work when I see something interesting.
I will try and post more often, I promise.
Aug
10
Siebel 8 - First Impressions
August 10, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Anyone who has bothered to read my previous entry will know that I have just started a new contract in Europe last week so everything is still a bit new of course.
Interesting, the project is my first Siebel 8 contract and I finally got a look at the new version of Siebel Tools on Friday and it seems that Siebel/Oracle have finally paid some attention to the beast.
As an Integration guy, I have to use Siebel Workflow (aka Siebel Business Processes) a lot and the editor in Tools has always had some annoying quirks, one of which was that you could only ever have one Workflow open at any one time and if you wanted to compare workflows or copy logic from one workflow to another, you had to open Tools a second time.
Well, finally, Siebel/Oracle have done the obvious and made the Workflow Editor window MDI rather than SDI so you can have multiple Workflows open at the same time and switch between them.
Finally! What took you so long?
Aug
10
Back Online Again!
August 10, 2008 | 1 Comment
Well, its been a while since I commented on here, but then its been a hectic few weeks at home and now I am back at work again having returned to Europe on Monday for a new contract.
In addition, this site and my other blog was down for a couple of weeks or so because I was moving all my web sites from their temporary home on my database server to the new VIA Mini-ITX box I built when I was home to be my new web server.
This took some time but I got it all completed on Friday from my hotel. The main problem is that it is a bit difficult to get PHP running on IIS especially if you have installed PHP via the MS Installer rather than via the Zip extract, so I had to reinstall PHP from the Zip version of the download and then tweak the php.ini file. I finally twigged that the reason I had a problem is that my database server did not have a port open for MySQL and that my php connector files were pointing at the localhost machine which was now wrong since the web server and the database are no longer on the same box. Phew!
Well it was nice being at home for a month, I built both my new boxes, got everything configured, did my accounts for the year (always fun) and finally finished the rewrite of my windows client for my order of battle database system.
I had hoped to take a contract in Ottawa which would have been pretty convenient for coming home at the weekend, but, sadly, the client moved too slowly with the paperwork and as we all know “time is money” and I cannot afford to hang around weeks and weeks waiting for paperwork especially when someone else wants you to start on a new contract the very next week. So, off back to Europe it is!
