Second jab

 At last, I had my second covid jab the day before Yesterday😁 After the first shot I didn't feel any side effects at all. Yesterday I was really sick but today I'm ok again. 

And I'm still working on my old Data warehouse. After all this years. I several times thought I left it behind, but no it is still there hauting me on it's 21 year of operation. I recently found two broken disks in the database raid 6. Not fun, it became  even worse when Dell told me they did not have any replacement disks for the old database server. Luckily I found a company selling refurbished disks. Later I found out Dell did have larger disks perfectly ok as replacements. The Dell representative I spoke to probably didn't know. Anyway now the old Irons are good as new.  

I'm working on reducing wallclock time for the nightly batches and eliminate different kind of errors. Right now I'm looking at posibilities of inject error correction code in the SAP data extraction engine. Normally this kind of processing is done after extracting data from Source systems, but this time it is not possible. A very clever guy has created an entire data warehouse engine inside one one ITL script. Really ingenious, but sort of closed, the extraction of data from SAP into the Data Warehouse is done in one go (actually in 25 parallel independent threads).  

Mars dust buster?

 I have not seen the most obvious question about the Mars helicopter Ingenuity. Will it be used for blowing dust off Perseverance?

That would really be cool, once every now and then Ingenuity takes to the air over Perseverance and blow off the dust.  At home I start my Neato each week to clean my apartment, but for Perseverance once or twice a year would probably be sufficient. 

Update: I just found out Ingenuity is only a PoC with a very limited life expectancy, so it will not be the first dust buster on Mars😟

Data Warehouse and winter

 Last week I had a call from the company they have performance problems with the Data Warehouse. It seems they want me to help them to fix the problems. While they make up their mind I’m enjoying outdoor winter activities.

After a dreadful November, December and January, no sun, slush and rain, came beautiful February. Lots of snow and proper winter temperature down to -10C. Even though the sky looks cloudy we had sun the entire Yesterday. And for the first time this year you felt the warmth of the sun, this is the best time of the year in Stockholm if you ask me.

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.