I've done sales, technical sales support, post sales engineering, and hardware engineering for several companies. There are short term and long term pluses and minuses going into sales:
Short Term Pluses More pay Travel Socializing
Short Term Minuses Meetings Repetition Performance Pressure
Long Term Pluses Money
Long Term Minuses Travel Socializing Meetings Repetition Performance Pressure Dated Engineering Skills and Network
In the short term it might be just the fit for you to try sales. You'll broaden your experience with the company and make yourself much more attractive for a management position. You'll learn first hand sales versus cost that make up a software company. If you believe in the product then doing the sales gig is really easy. Evangelize, Document and Network aggressively.
In the long term, this is a dead end unless you are a skill socializer who's only interest is making money.
Without any knowledge of how this will impact your family, I'd say take the job as a short term project with a promise to return to engineering or management.
What value does html add to email. If you need html go to the web. If you want to send someone a message use text and send attachments as necessary.
This is a good thing. MS breaking html standards in email will signicantly force most email back to text, and text is much easier to parse for spam. Hell we might end up just blocking all html.
Consider getting storage that can provide data point-in-time copies (Snapshots). Use Snapshots of your production database for development. Using different Snapshots for different releases. If you don't like the changes, make a new Snapshot and rework the tables. You can also use Snapshots for upgrade testing.
You should use caution here. Moving your production data is never trivial. Snapshots are not free. Developement machines can load the point-in-time copy to the point where it could impact the production system. If your production load can't handle providing Snapshots, you should consider clones (Snapshots/Copies) of your database for development.
If your development application is on a virtual platform, (VMware in particular), you can do a Snapshot of your application (in VMware), test an upgrade and then rollback to the pre-upgrade OS. In this environment you might be able to script nightly baseline testing of builds.
I too wanted to get a handle on my power usage. I found this site that details how to build a complete power meter and interface it to your computer. Let the slashdot effect begin.
Wow, Bali, that sounds great - great to visit. Living there is an entirely different story.
I've lived on a tropical island for twelve years and returned to the US. From experience:
1. The natives won't make your life easy. If you want to live there, you want to live there with all the rights and privileges you had in Britain. Fat chance. Will you get to vote? Can you own land? Do you speak the language of your local representative. If some local thug takes an interest in you or your business, do you have any recourse?
2. Life changes. I went to paradise with my wife and returned with three children. The educational opportunities are limited. When my oldest child took a first grade standardized US test and failed after graduating highest in her class, it was time to leave.
3. All thing rot in paradise. Bali, Thailand or anywhere in the tropics is fecund, incredibly fecund. Things grow. Fungus grows - everywhere. Bugs grow everywhere. Everything is green. Computers are not green. Modern appliances are not green. All the conveniences we enjoy in the middle latitudes rust or fail in the tropics. Expect many difficulties maintaining your equipment and lifestyle.
If you want to go to Bali and telecommute, do it. Save up enough money. Start your own business doing contract coding over the internet and go.
Your eye sight is only a piece of the problem. Glasses won't fix it.
Your body was not designed to sit for 15 hours doing nothing. Your hands were not designed to use a keyboard for 15 hours. Your eyes were not designed to focus at one point for 15 hours at a time. The ability to mate and parent won't be advanced by sitting at your laptop for 15 hours a day.
It is likely that you are overweight, out of shape, have no love life and rarely interact socially other than through your computer.
Get a life. Spend several hours a day interacting with other people. Exercise. Get a hobby. Watch your food intake.
Apply to yourself, the attention and commitment you apply to your laptop.
It has been a while since I used their advise, but I have always found it appropriate. If you want specs for computers, check out the Ars Technica System Guide
Having read the patent, I too am stunned that they received a patent for this. The patent is far too broad and should have no authority.
My arguement:
The patent defines a data type as:
Physical form property of a data value, e.g., numeric, alphanumeric, photo, drawing, sound, video, time series, geo-spatial, etc.
So their patent applies to any data type. Which means prior art would apply to any data type. I propose that "web pages" are a data type within the patent definition and their properties, boldness, paragraphs, words pictures, etc. are all nuetrally stored and transmitted via HTML.
They are trying to enforce this patent on database data information transfer, but I think the patent is too broad to be limit this view. These guys have a patent on the web, but the web is prior art.
They should never have received it. Shame on the Patent Office.
The only people to profit from this exercise will be lawyers.
Preventing downtime is an expensive, time consuming exercise, with few limits.
Before tackling the problem of downtime you should consider how much downtime is acceptable. See the discussion on downtime at the Uptime
Institute regarding what is acceptable. Are you looking for 99.999% uptime? Dream on.
Specifically you need to make everything in your system redundant. The web servers need to be redundant, you need to have redundant copies of the data. The paths to the internet need to be redundant and the environment should be remote and redundant.
Once you get a handle on your environment, you should consider some sort of clustering technology for server duality. I suggest you read "In
Search of Clusters" by Gregory F. Pfister to get a fundamental understanding of the technology.
As was posted earlier, you might just want to throw in the towel and accept web hosting. Use the Uptime Institute specifications against the ISP's service level agreement.
You might also consider a local ISP co-lo and do your own remote clustering.
grub has the right idea. SNMP, intelligent switches, perl and webpages, and if possible upgrade to out of band consoles. If you are going to diagram, and want to roll your own, look into SVG.
with SVG your perl scripts can also make basic diagrams. If you don't want to generate with SVG, try using Graphviz.
I've also had success using Visio 2000 and formatted text files to generate diagrams, but its very difficult to automate.
Whatever you are going to do, automate as much as possible. NetAdmins don't do Photoshop.
If you want to make a GUI for your workflow scripts checkout using an HTML: application (.hta). This is a Windows only, HTML protocol which bypasses most HTML security and is ideal for doing quick and dirty script GUIs. Download HTA Helpomatic (hta_helpomatic.hta) from MS. Once you see HTA Helpomatic in action, you'll understand just how easy this is.
If you're going to script on a windows box moving NTFS files you might as well do it in VBScript. All the other scripting languages have to call a Win32 API anyways and MS rarely makes it easy.
For help, you should download script_center.chm from MS. This help file has plenty of basic scripts to cut and paste.
I've never tried it, but among the newsgroups, the MS guys say PrimalScript by Sapien is the best IDE. I'm, just now, trying to see if mse8.exe, the MS Web Scripting Editor, that comes with Office 2003 has any use my systems administration. So far it doesn't seem much more helpful than notepad. Until now I've been using PerlIDE as an editor just for the line numbering.
As others have pointed out, use AutoIT to automate keystrokes of any programs that aren't scriptable. Beware that AutoIT is a keystroke scripter and if you hit a key during execution, you can get some very strange results.
Other posters have gone to great lengths to explain how color perception is environment and beholder dependent. So calibration is of little value. More importantly if you are generating images to be displayed on any users screen, then you have no control over their brightness, contrast, gamma or white balance or the end user's color experience.
But if you want to calibrate a monitor, I can tell you how I used to do it in broadcast.
First you set the black of the monitor: Generate a black screen image. Adjust the cut-off for each color so it just barely illuminates the phosphor. When finished, black is barely perceptable and has no pronounced color.
To calibrate white: Generate a full red screen, 100 hue and brightness, and then use a calibrated light meter to set monitor output to the color temperature of the red component of your final white. Do the same for green and blue. Display an all white screen and see if the screen is proper temperature. Check that the values of black didn't change. Get a feel for where your monitor best performs and run the monitor in a manner that doesn't cause blooming. In other words make sure that the full white value is not beyond the luminance output of your monitor.
Once black and white are correct, display a black and white stairstep signal. If all the channel gammas are correct, the steps should appear even to the eye and all the steps should be grey. If not, the trick is to adjust gamma of the color you don't see to correct the problem. Gamma correction can be very gross and you might not be able to make every step grey.
These steps correct the color balance of a monitor, but you still need to check purity, pin cushioning, convergence, horizontal and vertical linearity before you can be sure that the image on one monitor is the same as the image on another calibrated monitor. I can't image why you would go through this type of trouble.
Of note: The same calibration issues can be applied to audio. Years ago I wired up a new audio system at a recording studio. The studio had done several gold albums including one by the Rolling Stones. All the mics were adjusted to remove bandwidth irregularities. The engineers recorded and set levels for all sessions by listening to the audio from huge JBL speakers set-up with perfectly flat amplifiers. However, when they went to generate the final mix, the did it by listening to the audio through cheap 5 inch speakers. In this manner, they could provide the best listening experience for the majority of users.
If your datacenter is 24/7, doing costly (financial), life critical (healthcare) or corporate production, then cabling ranks right up there with A/C and power. In fact all three of these are more important than apps or server platforms.
I mean, most signal cabling is now part of a network, (IP, FC, ESCON, Token Ring, etc.). A single cable failure can lead to a network failure which, like an A/C or power failure, affects a good portion of the datacenter.
I've seen poor cabling take out a datacenter on a couple of occassions. In one case, the engineers had loosely laid fiber cable for their network backbone under the computer floor. The cable draped over metalic power conduit. A year later, the datacenter contracted to have the power upgraded. The electrician pulled out the old conduit taking about ten fiber pairs with it. The company lost a good portion of their IP connectivity for several hours. Cabling is critical.
Cabling should be well thought out and properly run. The best systems I've witnessed are seperate trays under a computer floor for copper signal, fiber signal and a third for power. Cable runs go down the rows under the backs of the racks. All trays have proper feeds for each rack. All new cabling is quoted, and contracted before installation. Any equipment removal entails cable removal.
The best cable management system I've ever seen was at a TV station. The chief engineer kept several different cable lists depending on the cable function. Each cable was given a number. Once the cable was run, on his inkjet printer, he printed up cable labels using a Brady label sheet. The label identified the use, local connection, remote connection and number. There were never any problems disconnecting or reconnecting equipment.
Cables tell the story. If you are ever going to contract a datacenter for rack space, a visual check of the cabling will tell you more about the establishment than any brochure or spec sheet. If the cables are well run, you can bet - the power and A/C are properly spec'ed and redundant, their bandwidth adequate, and their building secure environmentally and physically.
I too, use access to the internet as a carrot (or stick) over my kids head. It works well. They want to be on line 14 hrs a day, which I feel is unreasonable.
However, metering them x hours per day of usage or x GBs of IO doesn't seem practical. It could lead to many arguments and hair splitting about how much they were really on.
I mean, how do you measure it? Do I measure the time a socket is connected? If they open the NYtimes and walk away from their desk, they will eat up their meter. Do I measure bandwidth usage. Say they download 2 movies one day, poof metering over. All this would lead to mush complaining and gnashing of teeth. It would also lead to them using the internet when I don't want them to.
Instead, I set my router to disconnect them by script during the hours I don't want them on the internet.
My kids loose the internet 1 hour before bed, and during weekend days. During the summer, I limit them to different hours.
If they give me grief, I take an hour off at night . Surprisingly, even an hour is plenty of stick to get my kids to behave.
If you don't have a router, make a cheap one out of an old PC with Linux. Easy to setup and script. (I'm actually using W2K Ad. Server as a router and scripting their access using netsh.)
I have no qualms about using the internet to keep my kids in line, and I sleep better at night knowing they can't get up and start surfing instead of getting a good nights sleep.
I accept your apology. I wish I knew of a full blow n package you could use for your requirments, but I don't.
If I were in your shoes, I would try designing (not making) a database to match your requirements. The process of enumerating every field and relationship will give you a much better understanding of what you require.
Once you understand the size of the database and the scope of the queries, you will have a better idea of how to specify and evaluate packages that do what you want.
Except for the report writing and diagraming, there are plenty of software packages that do customer tracking, billing, and time management. It is only a matter of looking for a package that can accommodate your extra requirements.
Then you can decide how you will integrate the package with your present bill system, or are you prepared to retrain all your bean counters to use a new package. Will the engineers need to be retrained?
Finally, don't forget a whole package could mean single vendor remorse. Once you accept a package, and spend some 500 man-hours getting it intergrated into your system, what happens when it needs to be upgraded, or maintenance costs jump 500 percent, or the company downsizes, or it just doesn't work.
Glueing what you have together with scripts around a simple SQL database seems pretty benign and organic, but thats just my opinion.
I do network consulting for a small company for a living. My diagrams are automated. I generate site specific reports by parsing systems data with Perl and outputting a text file. My reports are templated with forms and I've scripted in the perl text files. I use AutoIT to generate Appendix Diagram docs from the automated Visio diagrams.
I'm working on slurping customer information for the report forms from our company database to which I VPN into from the road.
My billing is done by the day, so I don't need your customer granularity. I don't participate much in billing, so I have no need to automate it. I don't use Outlook for historical reasons so I can't say if my suggestions for billing are valid, but I suspect it is pretty easy to do. I gave a wild array of solutions for remote access to company file server, as it isn't my speciality and I don't know your situation, but I never suggested giving your customers access.
I know my solution works in a small company and that it isn't appropriate for a large enterprise. I have no idea at what size a company need to be to leverage the time and effort for a customized package. If your company is big enough to afford a couple of programming analysts, then ask them. And when the whole thing is done you will still be outputting pdfs for your customers.
And Serge, When you get done laughing on the floor or crying in your cups, then why don't you ponder the real problem, which has less to do with managing your IT consultancy info and more to do with how much you enjoy your work. If you can't script or find the process loathsome, then maybe you shouldn't try and find some free, as in beer, pie in the sky solution for your personal challenges and try working at something you enjoy, like in a bike shop instead.
Script it. Batch it. Perl it. AutoIT it. VBA it. Don't start over with a package. Make what you have work.
You write reports in Microsoft Word: Make a template of your reports with all boiler plate data. Create a form to open with the template to enter the necessary data. Automate the form to a database for other reports, Statements of Work, Invoices etc..
You Draw network schemes in Visio: Generate automation scripts to build your drawings. Visio has all the tools. In Visio 2000 you could import well formed text files. As I understand it, in Visio2003 you can import xml. Write a script to parse your sys data and make diagrams.
Export offers to PDF: Look at AutoIT (http://www.hiddensoft.com/AutoIt/): You can automate whatever you need to do by keystroke.
Stack it all together on a nice Windows file server in a per customer directory structure: And what is your problem?? Harden and put the file server in a DMZ with IPsec. Update the files from the road. Work alot behind an enterprise firewall, use SSH on the file server. Or VPN into your company system.
I could pull a query on all those logs from one day to give a daily report to the customer: Try using Outlook journaling features (unfamiliar). Get the journal to generate time usage by time spent on Visio or Word doc work per File|Properties|Catagories string which would be scripted in.
I could input my working hours to bill later on: Isn't that what Outlook Journalling does??
integrated with our helpdesk software: What do you want to integrate? Diagrams? Reports?
If your file structure is clear enough, you should be able to script that pretty easily. \Customer\Service Date\Reports \Customer\Service Date\Diagrams etc. One push of a button should open the customers latest diagram.
would manage each customer's to-do list: This is probably more difficult as you want to now integrate with your financial package (open POs). Still it can be scripted.
Need help? Google: Microsoft Script Center Scriptomatic Perl AutoIT VBscript tutorials
Enable VBA in Word, Outlook and Visio. Read the help files
Or as all the other OOS zealots will tell you, start all over, learn Linux and roll your own.
Make directories and file stuff as you get it. Email attachments, USB drive files, floppies, CDs - don't just put them in your home directory.
Make a temp directory for any scratch pad stuff or files you know are short term. Learn to work with them there. Any products of your work get sorted and moved to known directories. Then every so often delete all the files in the temp directory.
Make a clean directory tree that you can navigate over and over. I have four main folders: temp, company, personal, and computer. The three permanent folders have sub directories that I use regularly.
Finally, Get a GUI. Tree navigation is much easier to remember and use with a visual aid. "ls" is so 20th century.
You are now a mid-manager. Your job and your success depend on your employees providing value to the company. You are between a rock and a hard place.
Management needs to make money and cut costs to say competitive. If they don't, the company fails. Management is going to bring down directives on your department that are inane, tedious, disconnected, burdensome, and time consuming, to try and achieve their goals.
Your job is to recognize why these directives are there and to abide by them within reason for the health of the company.
Your job means pushing back on commands that have no visible productivity. It means protecting your staff, to the best of your ability, from any directives that will diminish them as employees. It means listening to your workers and pushing their productive suggestions up the pipe.
As a manager, you need to demonstrate a clear understanding of what your staff needs to accomplish. Disseminate, not just the instructions from on high, but also explain the reasoning behind these rules. You must carve out enough authority to reward the employees who deliver on these directives. You must have the skills to train and motivate your staff and you must have the insight and spine to recognize, and if required, remove the employees who hold back your department.
Your job sucks. You take this sucky job so you can get to a higher position where directives don't come down from on high, they come down from you. That job doesn't suck and is highly rewarding, but requires much grovelling and compromise for a long time to achieve.
Slashdot Mirror
Short Term Pluses
More pay
Travel
Socializing
Short Term Minuses
Meetings
Repetition
Performance Pressure
Long Term Pluses
Money
Long Term Minuses
Travel
Socializing
Meetings
Repetition
Performance Pressure
Dated Engineering Skills and Network
In the short term it might be just the fit for you to try sales. You'll broaden your experience with the company and make yourself much more attractive for a management position. You'll learn first hand sales versus cost that make up a software company. If you believe in the product then doing the sales gig is really easy. Evangelize, Document and Network aggressively.
In the long term, this is a dead end unless you are a skill socializer who's only interest is making money.
Without any knowledge of how this will impact your family, I'd say take the job as a short term project with a promise to return to engineering or management.
I agree
What value does html add to email. If you need html go to the web. If you want to send someone a message use text and send attachments as necessary.
This is a good thing. MS breaking html standards in email will signicantly force most email back to text, and text is much easier to parse for spam. Hell we might end up just blocking all html.
Consider getting storage that can provide data point-in-time copies (Snapshots). Use Snapshots of your production database for development. Using different Snapshots for different releases. If you don't like the changes, make a new Snapshot and rework the tables. You can also use Snapshots for upgrade testing.
You should use caution here. Moving your production data is never trivial. Snapshots are not free. Developement machines can load the point-in-time copy to the point where it could impact the production system. If your production load can't handle providing Snapshots, you should consider clones (Snapshots/Copies) of your database for development.
If your development application is on a virtual platform, (VMware in particular), you can do a Snapshot of your application (in VMware), test an upgrade and then rollback to the pre-upgrade OS. In this environment you might be able to script nightly baseline testing of builds.
I too wanted to get a handle on my power usage. I found this site that details how to build a complete power meter and interface it to your computer. Let the slashdot effect begin.
http://www.edcheung.com/automa/power.htm
Install devcon.exe
If the GUI is really simple and does fairly simple things, try writing an HTML application (.hta). You can find the "hta helpomatic" with google.
a teit.mspx
You'll need to script instead of code, and if you need help with scripting download "scriptomatic" (google).
You can also find a complete list of Windows scripting samples in a help file called the "Portable Script Center" which you'll find here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/cre
Wow, Bali, that sounds great - great to visit. Living there is an entirely different story.
I've lived on a tropical island for twelve years and returned to the US. From experience:
1. The natives won't make your life easy. If you want to live there, you want to live there with all the rights and privileges you had in Britain. Fat chance. Will you get to vote? Can you own land? Do you speak the language of your local representative. If some local thug takes an interest in you or your business, do you have any recourse?
2. Life changes. I went to paradise with my wife and returned with three children. The educational opportunities are limited. When my oldest child took a first grade standardized US test and failed after graduating highest in her class, it was time to leave.
3. All thing rot in paradise. Bali, Thailand or anywhere in the tropics is fecund, incredibly fecund. Things grow. Fungus grows - everywhere. Bugs grow everywhere. Everything is green. Computers are not green. Modern appliances are not green. All the conveniences we enjoy in the middle latitudes rust or fail in the tropics. Expect many difficulties maintaining your equipment and lifestyle.
If you want to go to Bali and telecommute, do it. Save up enough money. Start your own business doing contract coding over the internet and go.
Keep enough money to come back.
Your eye sight is only a piece of the problem. Glasses won't fix it.
Your body was not designed to sit for 15 hours doing nothing. Your hands were not designed to use a keyboard for 15 hours. Your eyes were not designed to focus at one point for 15 hours at a time. The ability to mate and parent won't be advanced by sitting at your laptop for 15 hours a day.
It is likely that you are overweight, out of shape, have no love life and rarely interact socially other than through your computer.
Get a life. Spend several hours a day interacting with other people. Exercise. Get a hobby. Watch your food intake.
Apply to yourself, the attention and commitment you apply to your laptop.
It has been a while since I used their advise, but I have always found it appropriate. If you want specs for computers, check out the Ars Technica System Guide
2 00511.ars
http://arstechnica.com/guides/buyer/system-guide-
They have everything you need to know, current and accurate.
Having read the patent, I too am stunned that they received a patent for this. The patent is far too broad and should have no authority.
My arguement:
The patent defines a data type as:
Physical form property of a data value, e.g., numeric, alphanumeric, photo, drawing, sound, video, time series, geo-spatial, etc.
So their patent applies to any data type. Which means prior art would apply to any data type. I propose that "web pages" are a data type within the patent definition and their properties, boldness, paragraphs, words pictures, etc. are all nuetrally stored and transmitted via HTML.
They are trying to enforce this patent on database data information transfer, but I think the patent is too broad to be limit this view. These guys have a patent on the web, but the web is prior art.
They should never have received it. Shame on the Patent Office.
The only people to profit from this exercise will be lawyers.
What????
A mothballed deathstar,
a big picture on a skyhook or a mass hallucination?
We never put a man on
the moon ya know.
I'm sure the scenes are intentionally shot and shelved for future product enhancements, but I still have my doubts about this man on the moon thing.
Preventing downtime is an expensive, time consuming exercise, with few limits.
Before tackling the problem of downtime you should consider how much downtime is acceptable. See the discussion on downtime at the Uptime Institute regarding what is acceptable. Are you looking for 99.999% uptime? Dream on.
Specifically you need to make everything in your system redundant. The web servers need to be redundant, you need to have redundant copies of the data. The paths to the internet need to be redundant and the environment should be remote and redundant.
Once you get a handle on your environment, you should consider some sort of clustering technology for server duality. I suggest you read "In Search of Clusters" by Gregory F. Pfister to get a fundamental understanding of the technology.
As was posted earlier, you might just want to throw in the towel and accept web hosting. Use the Uptime Institute specifications against the ISP's service level agreement.
You might also consider a local ISP co-lo and do your own remote clustering.
grub has the right idea. SNMP, intelligent switches, perl and webpages, and if possible upgrade to out of band consoles. If you are going to diagram, and want to roll your own, look into SVG.
with SVG your perl scripts can also make basic diagrams. If you don't want to generate with SVG, try using Graphviz.
I've also had success using Visio 2000 and formatted text files to generate diagrams, but its very difficult to automate.
Whatever you are going to do, automate as much as possible. NetAdmins don't do Photoshop.
I almost forgot.
If you want to make a GUI for your workflow scripts checkout using an HTML: application (.hta). This is a Windows only, HTML protocol which bypasses most HTML security and is ideal for doing quick and dirty script GUIs. Download HTA Helpomatic (hta_helpomatic.hta) from MS. Once you see HTA Helpomatic in action, you'll understand just how easy this is.
If you're going to script on a windows box moving NTFS files you might as well do it in VBScript. All the other scripting languages have to call a Win32 API anyways and MS rarely makes it easy.
For help, you should download script_center.chm from MS. This help file has plenty of basic scripts to cut and paste.
I've never tried it, but among the newsgroups, the MS guys say PrimalScript by Sapien is the best IDE. I'm, just now, trying to see if mse8.exe, the MS Web Scripting Editor, that comes with Office 2003 has any use my systems administration. So far it doesn't seem much more helpful than notepad. Until now I've been using PerlIDE as an editor just for the line numbering.
As others have pointed out, use AutoIT to automate keystrokes of any programs that aren't scriptable. Beware that AutoIT is a keystroke scripter and if you hit a key during execution, you can get some very strange results.
I would be nice if you could post a story that was still active:
The Salt Lake Tribune
The content item you have requested is no longer available.
Other posters have gone to great lengths to explain how color perception is environment and beholder dependent. So calibration is of little value. More importantly if you are generating images to be displayed on any users screen, then you have no control over their brightness, contrast, gamma or white balance or the end user's color experience.
But if you want to calibrate a monitor, I can tell you how I used to do it in broadcast.
First you set the black of the monitor: Generate a black screen image. Adjust the cut-off for each color so it just barely illuminates the phosphor. When finished, black is barely perceptable and has no pronounced color.
To calibrate white: Generate a full red screen, 100 hue and brightness, and then use a calibrated light meter to set monitor output to the color temperature of the red component of your final white. Do the same for green and blue. Display an all white screen and see if the screen is proper temperature. Check that the values of black didn't change. Get a feel for where your monitor best performs and run the monitor in a manner that doesn't cause blooming. In other words make sure that the full white value is not beyond the luminance output of your monitor.
Once black and white are correct, display a black and white stairstep signal. If all the channel gammas are correct, the steps should appear even to the eye and all the steps should be grey. If not, the trick is to adjust gamma of the color you don't see to correct the problem. Gamma correction can be very gross and you might not be able to make every step grey.
These steps correct the color balance of a monitor, but you still need to check purity, pin cushioning, convergence, horizontal and vertical linearity before you can be sure that the image on one monitor is the same as the image on another calibrated monitor. I can't image why you would go through this type of trouble.
Of note: The same calibration issues can be applied to audio. Years ago I wired up a new audio system at a recording studio. The studio had done several gold albums including one by the Rolling Stones. All the mics were adjusted to remove bandwidth irregularities. The engineers recorded and set levels for all sessions by listening to the audio from huge JBL speakers set-up with perfectly flat amplifiers. However, when they went to generate the final mix, the did it by listening to the audio through cheap 5 inch speakers. In this manner, they could provide the best listening experience for the majority of users.
Behold the Rat's Nest,
If your datacenter is 24/7, doing costly (financial), life critical (healthcare) or corporate production, then cabling ranks right up there with A/C and power. In fact all three of these are more important than apps or server platforms.
I mean, most signal cabling is now part of a network, (IP, FC, ESCON, Token Ring, etc.). A single cable failure can lead to a network failure which, like an A/C or power failure, affects a good portion of the datacenter.
I've seen poor cabling take out a datacenter on a couple of occassions. In one case, the engineers had loosely laid fiber cable for their network backbone under the computer floor. The cable draped over metalic power conduit. A year later, the datacenter contracted to have the power upgraded. The electrician pulled out the old conduit taking about ten fiber pairs with it. The company lost a good portion of their IP connectivity for several hours. Cabling is critical.
Cabling should be well thought out and properly run. The best systems I've witnessed are seperate trays under a computer floor for copper signal, fiber signal and a third for power. Cable runs go down the rows under the backs of the racks. All trays have proper feeds for each rack. All new cabling is quoted, and contracted before installation. Any equipment removal entails cable removal.
The best cable management system I've ever seen was at a TV station. The chief engineer kept several different cable lists depending on the cable function. Each cable was given a number. Once the cable was run, on his inkjet printer, he printed up cable labels using a Brady label sheet. The label identified the use, local connection, remote connection and number. There were never any problems disconnecting or reconnecting equipment.
Cables tell the story. If you are ever going to contract a datacenter for rack space, a visual check of the cabling will tell you more about the establishment than any brochure or spec sheet. If the cables are well run, you can bet - the power and A/C are properly spec'ed and redundant, their bandwidth adequate, and their building secure environmentally and physically.
I too, use access to the internet as a carrot (or stick) over my kids head. It works well. They want to be on line 14 hrs a day, which I feel is unreasonable.
However, metering them x hours per day of usage or x GBs of IO doesn't seem practical. It could lead to many arguments and hair splitting about how much they were really on.
I mean, how do you measure it? Do I measure the time a socket is connected? If they open the NYtimes and walk away from their desk, they will eat up their meter. Do I measure bandwidth usage. Say they download 2 movies one day, poof metering over. All this would lead to mush complaining and gnashing of teeth. It would also lead to them using the internet when I don't want them to.
Instead, I set my router to disconnect them by script during the hours I don't want them on the internet.
My kids loose the internet 1 hour before bed, and during weekend days. During the summer, I limit them to different hours.
If they give me grief, I take an hour off at night . Surprisingly, even an hour is plenty of stick to get my kids to behave.
If you don't have a router, make a cheap one out of an old PC with Linux. Easy to setup and script. (I'm actually using W2K Ad. Server as a router and scripting their access using netsh.)
I have no qualms about using the internet to keep my kids in line, and I sleep better at night knowing they can't get up and start surfing instead of getting a good nights sleep.
Serge,
I accept your apology. I wish I knew of a full blow n package you could use for your requirments, but I don't.
If I were in your shoes, I would try designing (not making) a database to match your requirements. The process of enumerating every field and relationship will give you a much better understanding of what you require.
Once you understand the size of the database and the scope of the queries, you will have a better idea of how to specify and evaluate packages that do what you want.
Except for the report writing and diagraming, there are plenty of software packages that do customer tracking, billing, and time management. It is only a matter of looking for a package that can accommodate your extra requirements.
Then you can decide how you will integrate the package with your present bill system, or are you prepared to retrain all your bean counters to use a new package. Will the engineers need to be retrained?
Finally, don't forget a whole package could mean single vendor remorse. Once you accept a package, and spend some 500 man-hours getting it intergrated into your system, what happens when it needs to be upgraded, or maintenance costs jump 500 percent, or the company downsizes, or it just doesn't work.
Glueing what you have together with scripts around a simple SQL database seems pretty benign and organic, but thats just my opinion.
Serge,
I do network consulting for a small company for a living. My diagrams are automated. I generate site specific reports by parsing systems data with Perl and outputting a text file. My reports are templated with forms and I've scripted in the perl text files. I use AutoIT to generate Appendix Diagram docs from the automated Visio diagrams.
I'm working on slurping customer information for the report forms from our company database to which I VPN into from the road.
My billing is done by the day, so I don't need your customer granularity. I don't participate much in billing, so I have no need to automate it. I don't use Outlook for historical reasons so I can't say if my suggestions for billing are valid, but I suspect it is pretty easy to do. I gave a wild array of solutions for remote access to company file server, as it isn't my speciality and I don't know your situation, but I never suggested giving your customers access.
I know my solution works in a small company and that it isn't appropriate for a large enterprise. I have no idea at what size a company need to be to leverage the time and effort for a customized package. If your company is big enough to afford a couple of programming analysts, then ask them. And when the whole thing is done you will still be outputting pdfs for your customers.
And Serge,
When you get done laughing on the floor or crying in your cups, then why don't you ponder the real problem, which has less to do with managing your IT consultancy info and more to do with how much you enjoy your work. If you can't script or find the process loathsome, then maybe you shouldn't try and find some free, as in beer, pie in the sky solution for your personal challenges and try working at something you enjoy, like in a bike shop instead.
Script it. Batch it. Perl it. AutoIT it. VBA it. Don't start over with a package. Make what you have work.
You write reports in Microsoft Word:
Make a template of your reports with all boiler plate data. Create a form to open with the template to enter the necessary data. Automate the form to a database for other reports, Statements of Work, Invoices etc..
You Draw network schemes in Visio:
Generate automation scripts to build your drawings. Visio has all the tools. In Visio 2000 you could import well formed text files. As I understand it, in Visio2003 you can import xml. Write a script to parse your sys data and make diagrams.
Export offers to PDF:
Look at AutoIT (http://www.hiddensoft.com/AutoIt/): You can automate whatever you need to do by keystroke.
Stack it all together on a nice Windows file server in a per customer directory structure:
And what is your problem??
Harden and put the file server in a DMZ with IPsec. Update the files from the road. Work alot behind an enterprise firewall, use SSH on the file server. Or VPN into your company system.
I could pull a query on all those logs from one day to give a daily report to the customer:
Try using Outlook journaling features (unfamiliar). Get the journal to generate time usage by time spent on Visio or Word doc work per File|Properties|Catagories string which would be scripted in.
I could input my working hours to bill later on:
Isn't that what Outlook Journalling does??
integrated with our helpdesk software:
What do you want to integrate? Diagrams? Reports?
If your file structure is clear enough, you should be able to script that pretty easily.
\Customer\Service Date\Reports
\Customer\Service Date\Diagrams etc.
One push of a button should open the customers latest diagram.
would manage each customer's to-do list:
This is probably more difficult as you want to now integrate with your financial package (open POs). Still it can be scripted.
Need help?
Google:
Microsoft Script Center
Scriptomatic
Perl
AutoIT
VBscript tutorials
Enable VBA in Word, Outlook and Visio. Read the help files
Or as all the other OOS zealots will tell you, start all over, learn Linux and roll your own.
Make directories and file stuff as you get it. Email attachments, USB drive files, floppies, CDs - don't just put them in your home directory.
Make a temp directory for any scratch pad stuff or files you know are short term. Learn to work with them there. Any products of your work get sorted and moved to known directories. Then every so often delete all the files in the temp directory.
Make a clean directory tree that you can navigate over and over. I have four main folders: temp, company, personal, and computer. The three permanent folders have sub directories that I use regularly.
Finally, Get a GUI. Tree navigation is much easier to remember and use with a visual aid. "ls" is so 20th century.
Antiqua Nice,
Your job sucks.
You are now a mid-manager. Your job and your success depend on your employees providing value to the company. You are between a rock and a hard place.
Management needs to make money and cut costs to say competitive. If they don't, the company fails. Management is going to bring down directives on your department that are inane, tedious, disconnected, burdensome, and time consuming, to try and achieve their goals.
Your job is to recognize why these directives are there and to abide by them within reason for the health of the company.
Your job means pushing back on commands that have no visible productivity. It means protecting your staff, to the best of your ability, from any directives that will diminish them as employees. It means listening to your workers and pushing their productive suggestions up the pipe.
As a manager, you need to demonstrate a clear understanding of what your staff needs to accomplish. Disseminate, not just the instructions from on high, but also explain the reasoning behind these rules. You must carve out enough authority to reward the employees who deliver on these directives. You must have the skills to train and motivate your staff and you must have the insight and spine to recognize, and if required, remove the employees who hold back your department.
Your job sucks. You take this sucky job so you can get to a higher position where directives don't come down from on high, they come down from you. That job doesn't suck and is highly rewarding, but requires much grovelling and compromise for a long time to achieve.
Good luck.