GeekForce

Hi everybody, Dave here…
No… It’s not time for Dave to take a vacation. It’s not time for some chillin’ listening to all those new CD’s I just bought at Vintage Vinyl.
I aint got time for that.
My brain is THE data blender these days.
Often I stop, consider what I’m doing, and am downright amazed. Then I realize the two systems that I’m working with, I sigh. And that when it really hits me. My brain is quickly becoming mush.

Man, could I use a vacation.

We have this tool called RB. It is our job tracking system. It is painfully bad, and works only 55% of the time. Plus its’ more than 5 years old.

I dont if any of you realize that a system that old CANT possibly be any good…
Well, for me its not really that. What is really scary is that you sit down with our end users, and really talk to them about how much time it takes them to get work done, and the number of workarounds they have to use to do simple stuff, and … well … RB just doesn’t cut it.

So that’s my data source. For you accounting types. RB is simple enough that it creates an invoice THE MOMENT you create a JOB! How’s that grab you in the invoice numbering department eh?

Let me just get this off my chest: I am so glad that I know nothing about accounting. If I did… I’d be much worse than I am now.

So, the goal was to take data out of RB, and create records in Great Plains. Well, one thing led to anohter, and I started to learn DTS in some detail. I have to admit that I’m still a novice, but I’m starting to understand how the workflows fit together.

So, now we have a DTS package that does inserts and updates, plus it generates an audit trail, that is accessible via a web page on our intranet. Thanks to some other code I’ve written - displaylist.asp Dave’s general purpose datalister…

Anyway, so we now synch jobs, salespoeple and customers in about 5 minutes everynight. So the accountant comes in in the morning, and validates the nights feed via the audit web page…

When we tried to use this technique to import Invoices, it was a totally different story.

More on this later. Thanks for listening.

Dave

I was in the local Mac store a few weeks ago, buying the new iLife.

A customer was looking around, and asked one of the salespeople if it was possible to skip installing the languages on the system during the install.

“They slow down the system.” he said.

“Yes you can choose to skip the languages” I said “It’s in the customize pane”

“You know, the system only uses those files when it needs to… So, they dont really slow things down.”

“Dont try and talk me out of it, I’ve studied it, and I know.”

“How’s that?” I asked.

“Well, the system still has to read over those parts of the disk to get to the other files…” He said.

“Well, the heads PASS over those sectors if they need to… but they do not read anything from the disk while they are doing it.” I pointed out that it is possibvle to slow down reads by spreading data accross the inner and outer physical sectors of the disk - this is called thrashing. But it is rare.

And on Mac OSX it’s nigh impossible to do. MacOS automatically defragments files that are large enough to merit it.

MacOS also includes a hot zone, a place that it keeps applications that are used frequently. This is how the OS makes sure that your apps are nice and snappy.

So… No. Languages do not slow down your computer.