Progress

I’m finaly making progress with OTK v3(Operations Toolkit V3).  It took me a little while today but I finally got a feature working that I had in my head but could never do with the current architecture of OTK V2.  This is domain substitution.  What is that you ask?  

As my company we use Xmedius for our e-fax solution.  Unfortunately - and this is a big sad pile of fail - the interface to said application is a horrible MMC snapin with the ability to sort an already alphabetized list of email accounts - but no ability to sort or filter the list of actual data of accounts tied to fax numbers.  Due to this (and other issues) whenever a company changes their domain - for example from @examplethisislong.com to @example.com - there is all of a sudden a disconnect.  The data in active directory does not match that of our exchange environment which does not match our xmedius environment but matches our ad environment. 

Big pain.

The exchange <-> ad environment sync is easy to accomplish(if not a little time consuming to let everything run) but it can be done easily.

The other portions - syncing ad(or exchange) with xmedius is highly impossible - especially without backend database access.

So that leaves us at a quandary - with data that is not easily updatable in an autonomous fashion - what to do?

When I first looked at the issue it was a daunting task - something which could and should not be taken lightly.  But I had an idea (along with my idea for virtual role groups - another time perhaps?) to use domain substitution when checking email accounts against the read only version of the xmedius database.  Obviously the substitutions would need to be stored in a database - and not just use the list of domains available (since jsmith@longexample1.org may be(and probably is) different than jsmith@longexample.org) in active directory.

this required some creative thinking and debugging - especially after running into a particularly nasty bug in powershell’s database methods used to populate an array with the results of a database query.  For whatever the reason - the database query upon being fed into an array would always return the number 3262 - no matter what query I in fact was performing.  Im not sure why this happened - but it took me a good while to finally find the exact line doing this.  It didn’t help that the code I had written was running as a background task for powershell either I suppose.  A simple |out-null was able to resolve the issue but it brought to light another fun issue. 

Sometimes you can not plan for what the end user is going to present to you datawise.  I know - I should know that already.  I do- just that sometimes you need a good reminder - iin this case a good swift kick to the pants when debugging whould be enough to keep me in line.

I think this week - the ability to disable accounts will finally come to OTK V3 - the one major fun part of the whole process is going to be the disable triggers virtual machines I will need to create - have not created those in a while and I am looking forward to the challange.

Maybe one of these days I’ll post some screenshots to show how things are going.

Too Long

It has been too long - too long since I have done anything on here.  I would like to say that I was too busy with life - but that is an excuse that has been used too much and too often.  But I can promose this - life has been busy and it has been something that has not stopped.  Especially now that I am officially an operations engineer - im trying to learn everything that goes with this role and at the same time trying to find a way to balance life and being a professional more and more.

One thing that has been great and I have enjoyed going full speed into is working on OTK V3 - and making it domain and setup agnostic.  Its been a fun experience on making something from scrath and making it multi-threaded.  That has been the key - as the interface no longer hangs when procssing and doing operations - operations that used to completly hang up the old version of the toolkit.  Man - toolkit v1 was a start - but now that toolkit v3 is coming out - it will be something which will make even the current version of the toolkit look like something which was made by a third grader

Weighted Heart On The Eve Of My Birthday

Birthdays. 

They only occur once a year and usually are a joyus occassion which you celebrate with family and friends.

This year, however, I find myself on the eve of my birthday with a heavy heart - and not sure if celebrating is the correct way to proceed at times.  Whilst I know that it is never good to just dweel on the things in life which put you down (otherwise youd be in a constant depressive state) I also am a realist and know that some things - no matter how much you try - affect you more than others.  As the clock is close to turning midnight signifying that I have survived another rotation around the sun on this planet called earth - things just keep weighing down on me and I just keep asking “why?”.  I ask this - then remember - everything is out of my control.  Actually, its out of every humans control.  And in this I find hope.  In the fact that God, in his infinite power and wisdom, is the one driving the whole thing - bringing together everything for good.  Sometimes we don’t like - from a human perspective - what that looks like.  Sometimes we see what happens and look and just wonder what is going on.  And yet it is not the wondering which is wrong - as it sometimes can be a mechanism to draw us closer.

I don’t know what the future holds - God does - and while these items may weigh on my heart heavily - I know the ultimatly in the end - no matter my opinion or thought on the matter - God will have his final say in what happens.

With that in mind - if you do happen to see these words - pray.

Pray for the Boyd family - as David Boyd was swimming in a river in Arkansas and swept downstream.  Pray as the search and rescue teams look for him - and by God’s grace - he is brought home safely.(For those who don’t know - he used to attend Fellowship Baptist Church in Racine until he moved down to AR.  He is an amazing person who was always serving and you could see (quite literally) had a heart for God - and until I hear otherwise - I believe he is still out there waiting to be rescued) -http://www.baxterbulletin.com/article/20110526/NEWS01/105260315/Search-under-way-man-missing-Buffalo-River

Pray for the Davis family from Cornerstone University.  Details are few - but Ryan Davis who worked at the campus died this past week unexpectedly.

Pray for my mother - shes undergoing surgery soon to remove a mass from her colon while at the same time doctors are finding more areas which are wrong and may complicate the surgery further.

Three things - all out of human control - and relying on the strength and power of God.

Three things to pray for.

Three things to think of.

And three things to watch God do miraculous things through.

Until then - 

Paul

Operations Toolkit V3 - WEEE!!!

Well not too much.  Life has been busy.  But I do have one exciting thing to share.  

A while ago I create a toolkit which is currently in use/employed by my work.  It is version 2 of the Operations toolkit - and while it is somewhat good - it has many many shortcomings.  One of many, is that everything (all the rules) are hard coded.  Well that isn’t any good if it is to be used anywhere else right?

Well starting today - I am happy to announce that those limitations are being removed.  The creation of the Operations Toolkit V3 is currently underway

The heart of the new version is based upon version 2 - but all settings are now stored in a database instead of being hardcoded into the code.  The hope is that this toolkit will be flexible enough to be used by multiple locations/corporations with little not no modification of the code base.  The code will be released free of course.

As I have more information - i will release it - currently - its under development and utilizes a .net framework windowing system.  Yeah .NET!

Apple, iPad, money, politics, and hippies

In case you were living under a rock this past week - Apple finally announced what had to have been the worst kept secret in history.  The iPad 2 is finally official and going on sale in less than a week.  

When Steve took the stage to offically announce iPad 2 - the hipsters rejoiced as their savior from “complex technology” (and their paychecks) took the stage to reveal how Apple was going to milk another 500 - 800 dollars out of them this month.  Nothing is more fun to watch than a hipster who foams at the mouth as he lusts over a new hipster item which every one of them will have in less than a week.

But what is probably more disturbing than anything else - is that with everything else going on in the world - the iPad 2 took up a majority of the online news cycles.  We have protests around the world, civil unrest, state budgets in the red, and the hipsters sit foaming at the mouth for their newest piece of technology.

Now - I can’t continue without being totally honest.  I am seriously considering getting an iPad 2.  I have finally found room in my life where it could be of use - and I do have an idea for an application I would like to do on the iPad which wouldn’t work on the iPhone.  I will note - I DO NOT have an original iPad.  I didn’t get into the hype of the “magical” iPad before it was released.  Instead I have observed the device after it had been released - playing with it here and there - and critically considering getting it (it is not a light investment).

With all that is going on in the world - it never fails to amaze me what goes through the social spheres which I am connected in and the online news networks.  While the protests and civil unrest have a few stories which appear on the front page - the majority of this past week was devoted to the iPad.  People debated in forums and chat rooms whether it was worth purchasing, what the advantages of the device over the previous iPad was, as well as speculating on the total ram of the device.

And yet….

And yet we have people protesting across the world for their freedom from oppressive governments.  Something that you would normally associate hipsters with taking up the cause for.  Instead they are glued to Steve Job’s black turtle neck getting their marching orders for the next few weeks on where to devote their cash.

Life does continue to go on - but somtimes its good to stop and observe what is going on in the rest of the world.  We can’t always continue on with our plans in life - just look at how thousand’s of people’s lives have been disrupted by protests and the like around the world.

And while people protest for their freedom from oppressive govements around the world - public workers in Wisconsin are protesting due to them having to pay a little more into their benefits.

What have we devolved into as a society where we don’t even protest for worthwhile causes anymore.  What we have become is a group of hippies - wanting to protest anything we can in the name of “sticking it to the man.”

With all of this going on - its been funny to see a recent trend of people crying foul of parents raising their kids how they choose to do so.  Stating instead that kids should be raised gender neutral - how dare a parent decide to raise their daughter to like dresses and pink?  That is just “destroing” civilization - at least according to them.  Let parents raise their kids how they want.  If they want to allow their daughters to like pink frilly dresses and have imaginary tea parties then let them.  If they choose not to - then let them.  To them I say - get a job hippie.  

It’s time to de-hippify life.  Lets get back to reality.