Another year

 It's been a while since I wrote a post now, this year is not so much to write home to mum about. Actually it's been a bad year for 11Dim. Not much €work, not much work at all really. Since the Covid struck business have been bad. 

I have helped the DW guys with odds and ends, and also given them a little hand replacing the DW (which seems to take some time). We also spotted a bug in the DW, a combination of options and invalid utf8 data extracting data from SAP, triggered a synchronizing problem resulting in broken jobs. It was a bit tricky to fix the bug (timing problems often are). The fix is in place for the failing job and will be implemented in full when the holidays are over. We also have a problem with a SATA disk we will replace in mid January. Otherwise nothing of interest has happen, the planned upgrade of the DW has been cancelled.

11Dim had a board meeting at Christmas eve. We summed up the year and decided we could not make plans for 2021. Axel have decided to leave the company. 

We at 11Dim wish you all a better next year.

At last please stay safe and healthy. And take the vaccine when offered!   

Google home and power outage

Tuesday morning at 04:20 (AM) - "Hey Google Good Morning". Nothing happens, no lights no nothing. WTF, after some fumbling around I realized there is no power in my flat. I found a message in my phone from the electric power supplier there is an outage since 04:08 2836 households affected. and they expect the power to be back 06:00. Power outage in Stockholm is extremely rare it just do not happen, but now it happened anyway. 06:06 the power came back, now my google home pucks told me there was no internet connection so they could not do anything. I suspect they checked for the wifi connection before the router was operational and then refused to do anything else than complain about the internet connection. 

This is not acceptable and also very bad behavior of the Google Home pucks. When powered on they should loop around connect to internet with lets say a minute delay. As it is now I have to manually turn off and on the power to the pucks after the router is wifi operational. 

Actually there is two things involved, first connect to the router, then connect to the internet. I do not see why Google home cannot turn on my lights without an internet connection, a router connection should suffice for internal domestic chores.

VNC remote session hell

Today I was about to start up TigerVNC server in a SUSE LEAP 15,02 server. I decided to try the SUSE way, start vnc with SUSE VNC manager. Now starting up a VNC server is always a thriller sometimes I manage to set it up in just a few hours of trial and errors, sometimes it is like banging my head bloody against a brick wall for days and sometimes the VNC server just refuses to startup. But the SUSE 15,2 way seemed very simple :

1. Start YaST › Network Services › Remote Administration (VNC).

2. Activate Allow Remote Administration With Session Management.

3. Activate Enable access using a web browser if you plan to access the VNC session in a Web browser window.

4. If necessary, also check Open Port in Firewall (for example, when your network interface is configured to be in the External Zone). If you have more than one network interface, restrict opening the firewall ports to a specific interface via Firewall Details.

5. Confirm your settings with Next.

6. In case not all needed packages are available yet, you need to approve the installation of missing packages.

What can go wrong? Everything of course. Whatever I tried, all a got was a black screen. Asking my friend Google for advice revealed I was not alone, I found number of desperate people asking for help, none of the replies gave any help, actually most of the helpful advise I did not even understood. 

I then tried the old VNCSERVER command, with the same poor result. Then i tried to set it up exactly as in SUSE 42 still the same black screen grinned at my face. It turned out almost everything backing the VNC remote sessions was changed from the old suse version.

I have been working with Linux VNC servers since 2020 and for every fucking distro and version VNC setup is always different and the documentation never works, you have to trial and error change one thing at a time until it works.

This time after some hours of GOOGLE GOOGLE GOOGLE I stared at at a line:

Setup by yast2 & started as regular user -blank screen; started as sudo vncserver -works fine. 

The old vncserver command was started with sudo, I never in twenty years started vncserver as a privileged command. Now I tried with sudo and then the vnc session worked just like that. Tomorrow I will use the session I hope it still works😖

UPDATE:

Stupid me, sudo makes the remote session root, I should have known. I blame the present heat wave, we have temperatures above 30 centigrade, it is extreme for Stockholm and I can't think. For now I'm ok with a root session this server is for development and testing purposes and I'm the only user. In the end though I have to find the root cause. It will probably take days I have bo idea how to debug the vncserver.

SharePoint - unbelieving bad

In a blog post Microsoft? announces a plan for 'stop using SharePoint for application development'. This is not one day too early. I have from the very first day I came in contact with SharePoint development criticized SharePoint as a platform for IT applications, it is appallingly bad and buggy, and I have said so, (not always popular among colleagues and managers in the company I previously worked for). Now Microsoft states Sharepoint was stretched far beyond what it was originally intended to do. Indeed true so true, the problem I have with this statement, both MS sales representatives and some MS premium consultants have during the years promoted SharePoint as the platform for small and mid sized applications. This has led many organisations to spend large sums on developing crap applications.

Anyway I (and many with me should) feel vindicated by the MS blog post, and it is a good thing MS is so candid about SharePoint. The question is, should we trust Microsoft now when they claim the successor is a fine platform for applications? I prefer to test the product first. After all SharePoint as an application platform is definitely on my top three list of crap software, unbelieving bad.

P.s. I'm not sure but I think the blog post is from Microsoft, if not disregard I commend Microsoft for being open and honest about the shortcomings of SharePoint.

Are you alive?

I have not checked the status or jobs of my data warehouse, not even checked if someone is fixing broken jobs since almost a month now. This is the longest period I have totally neglected my data warehouse since the start 2001. This morning I checked the twitter account and it seems the data warehouse runs along fine. If someone attending the failed jobs I do not know. I'm told there are jobs that can fail without affecting the operations, so it is probably OK. Why is it ok to have failing jobs? I know about jobs only have input randomly but fails if there is no input. Personally I do not like this coding style, but it is a matter of taste it really does not matter. I assume everything is ok with my Data Warehouse. The tweets look a bit strange, but I have not cared to fix them, and now it's not really my business. After an unusual first half year I will see if the company wants my services at all. If not I might end up as retired. I think I can live with that😏. Now I will go out and sit in the sunshine and read 'Our Mathematical Universe' by Max Tegmark. 

The Swan Song of my Data Warehouse

It is not the end, but the beginning of the end. Finally the finale is approaching for my Data Warehouse. I have for some months participated in a project migrate my Data warehouse to the cloud. For reasons I do not understand the decision has been taken, the first step to decommission or rather replace the Data warehouse is to move it to the cloud. My Data Warehouse must live for yet some years until the replacement whatever it is can take over. Something must be done to upgrade the  Data Warehouse it runs on 2012 hardware and most software is from about the same time. After years of hesitation we will now take a grip on the accumulated technological dept, upgrade all software to current versions and move it to the cloud. There it will run happily until it is replaced in its entirety. In the end, no funeral feast or commotion of any sort, it will just fade away with a silent Fzzzz.

The Data Warehouse started as concept or some ideas I had back in the mid 90ties while working as a Business Intelligence Analyst consultant (now it is called Data scientist). Year 2001 I had an opportunity to put my ideas into practice. Some years later I developed version 2, after 2008 I only added a few changes and fixes. The last hardware upgrade was 2012, since then the Data Warehouse has been 'maintenance free', just accumulating tech debt over the years.

Data Warehouse is a misnomer, it is a hybrid of a Data Lake and a Data Warehouse, more of a Data Lake than a Data Warehouse, but the name 'Data Lake' was not invented at that time. In the company no one knew the what a Data Warehouse was, so I humbly took the name 'the Data Warehouse' for my system. Data is imported from various sources and stored in tables and Business Query Sets, a self contained super set of reports in tabular form. The Business Query Sets are excellent for self service BI or as a source for graphical front ends.

From the beginning my Data Warehouse was separated into a processing server and storage i.e. a database server, with a dedicated gigabit switch in between for uninterrupted fast communication between the processor and the storage. This has now proved to be a hurdle when migrating the Data Warehouse to the cloud. I wanted to move the database server first to the cloud, but the response time from the cloud database server has been way to slow a round trip in between is about 25 times slower than present setup. We are investigating this delay right now but since this is in the cloud we cannot analyze the problem ourselves, we need to ask the cloud supplier still we have not got answer. In the meantime I will start look at upgrading the processing server. This is not a simple task as it involves replacing and adjusting code, quite a lot of code. The total upgrade and migration of my Data Warehouse will probably keep me fairly busy the rest of the year.
Right now we have a heat wave here in Stockholm with temperature of 30 Celsius grades. This is very hot for us swedes, I cannot think about work now, just sit in the shade an sipping ice cold beer. I should not complain though, there are those who have worse problems these days.

Sunshine and eating cake

Yesterday the first day this spring I had the opportunity to sit in the sunshine on my balcony. With a cup of coffee and my Samsung Tab S6 I had planned to read from the book "D Web Development". I could barely see there were letters on the page, no chance to read anything on the tab screen. Luckily I could switch to my Kindle Paper White, it is better than a paper book in the sunshine, a pity its only black and white and the screen resolution is not something to write home to mummy about. Out in the sunshine however it is great. Unfortunately the book is some years old and as with all "computer books", very few example works, "D Web Development" is no exception. My friends try to talk sense to me. " 'D' is a dead end, go for something else" (pun intended). But I still am determined, I will try to learn 'D' and now is the time, at the moment I have no steady assignment and I'm thinking about real retirement. When I was retired some years ago, I said from now on I only work with things I find fun. Still up to this day I have not worked with anything fun only boring $jobs. Many years ago I read about 'D' and I found it very interesting and I have started three times i.e. written the 'Hello World" program, but stopped as I did not have the time. I do one last attempt. the thing interesting me is the "low level" possibilities with 'D' and that it is a bit different and not used by many. All these things appeal to me, but mostly of course it is a well designed language. But the thing that really makes me tick, 'D' has both high level and low level constructs, you can go high and low. Ilike low level programming but I recognize high level is often more productive. With 'D' you can have the cake and eat it too. At least I hope so. For now I hope it will not be to difficult to make the example in the book work, in that case I probably give up.

Bex Bax Dax Pax

Recently I have participated in some BI meetings where the participants were discussing how to create new applications. Nowadays this seems to be very complicated, they use BEX DAX and all kinds of esoteric cryptic query languages. All tasks very complex, offloading data from one multi-dimensional data warehouse to data lakes into tabular data cubes stores.'You have to move the data to a data lake because you cannot have measures in BEX, then DAX with measures to a tabular cube and then we can apply PowerBI and create the application'. I use tables and SQL, after listening to the modern BI workers, SQL seems like an attractive option. What the modern BI consultant needs days or weeks for, I can do in hours.
The only interesting thing said at those meetings were tabular cubes. Tabular Cubes!? I do not know what that is, it seems to be a scaled down multi dimensional cube, the human brain can comprehend, still complex enough keeping business people out. O tempora, o mores.

Lost in the cloud

I'm sitting here and thinking how sharp I am

I'm the under assistant blob store contrib man 

Lasse Phelge & Lars Nanker

Recently I have been promoted to an Azure Blob Storage Contributor. We are trying to move my old Data Warehouse to the cloud. So far we have moved zero bits, we are fighting the network. You see these YouTube promos how easy it is to work with the cloud, you just click here and there and you are done the mysterious cloud fix everything for you. The reason why I fail is probably because I'm old and daft and that is reason I'm now a blob storage contributor. I'm at the bottom of the new cloud business food chain..