[ ma | kii :blog ]

Why do some service providers, when I ask them kindly for an extraction of some translation resources, **ALWAYS** send these FU=)§(%=)"/%=)"!%/>= Microsoft Office Word files?!?!?

They know exaclty I need to load this data into our database! I guess they'll never learn...

Finally it's done. Half of my team (including me, obiously) moved to the new building in the Bahnhofstraße 45 in Nuernberg. Over all, everything runs smoothly here for the first day, except the printers didn't arrive today, but, as already mentioned on irc, why should anyone need printers in a paperless office *g*.

The building is mostly finished, some desks are still missing for coworkers which move here in the next few weeks. Network and all other services are pretty good available. Almost worked too good :)

Henning made a photo with his MacBook just before lunch, so see for yourself:

Well, one thing is missing: We cannot play table soccer yet!

As we're moving to our new office location these days, we hosted the last company table soccer tournament in the Deutschherrenkarree mid of december last year. My partner and I of team Wurzelprumpft achieved only the fifth place out of nine - average. Of course everything was his fault ;-)

There were taken some photos, see here for on flickr.

So, am Wochenende bzw. Samstag war ich ${ZIEMLICH_LANGE} im Büro um den Rollout von 'nem netten kleinen Release unserer Middleware zu mitzumachen. Da einer unserer Dienstleister auch einen Softwareupdate durchführte haben wir die Downtime einer Schnittstelle gleich mal für eine Datenbankaufräumaktion genutzt. Dabei wurde dann gleich mal ein viertel der Tablespaces frei! Schön dass jetzt alles wieder etwas schneller geht.

Nachdem wir den mit der Datenbankgeschichte genau fünf Minuten vor Plan fertig wurden hat sich bei mir schon ein ungutes Gefühl breitgemacht...

Das lief zu gut. Da passiert nochwas...!

Tja, hätt' ich da bloss nicht dran gedacht!

Prompt hat der ${DIENSTLEISTER} angerufen und mitgeteilt dass sie Probleme haben und die Tests wohl noch etwas warten müssen. Zum Glück. Bei uns hat sich dann auch noch was aufgetan, wenn auch nur ein kleines Schlagloch, und kein Abgrund. Jemand hatte vergessen einen Bugfix der auf dem "alten" Produktionsbranch im CVS gemacht wurde in den Entwicklungsbranch hochzumergen, so dass der vermeindlich gelöste Bug wieder da war. Der ist zwar nicht schlimm, sondern nur unangenehm, aber sowas muss nicht sein.

Da wir ja eh noch etwas Zeit hatten und nach einem Telefonat mit besagtem Kollegen klar war dass es sich bei dem Fix nur um ca. 25 Zeilen Code in 2 Dateien handelt habe ich den Merge mit einem anderen Kollegen zusammen ala "Extreeme Programming" im Vier-Augen-Prinzip gemacht und alles war in trockenen Tüchern. Unsere Internen Kollegen vom Produktmanagement waren ja eh noch im Haus zum Testen und der Dienstleister war mittlerweile auch fertig.

Auch wenn etwas lange, so war die Geschichte am Wochenende doch erfolgreich. Nur schade dass ich deshalb den Klausurtag meine LUG verpasst hab :-(

Ok, new years eve is gone, the frozen zone in my company lasts still 8 days, but for me nothing's the same in the office:

• New Desk
• New Computer (IBM P4/TFT) running Linux (which I still have to install)
• NEW TEAM I WORK FOR

I'll no longer have to argue with the content-team and the webdesigners why there is the w3c and why they set up HTML 4.0 or XHTML 1.0, and why it's good to try to produce valid code. On from the 1st of January 2005 I'm a member of the Middleware Team which writes software interconnecting the different trading frontends with the backends, the exchanges and the issuers.

I'm glad to be there, as it's one of the few teams running almost completely on linux. The only thing is that they all use Eclipse but I love this IntelliJ IDEA so much... well, I think I'll bequeath my license to my successor if he wants to, so he can struggle with it's ant integration.

The Linux Distribution of my choice is Debian, as I don't like these commercial ones like SuSE or Fedora Core. After downloading and toasting the Woddy ISO I asked Nobse now stable Sarge is. As his opinion was it's good enough to work with I'll try it out and see if he's right :) .

Ok, this wednesday we had the feature code freeze for our french portal project, it's currently available to selected customers of cortal france under this URL. Also if I'm not this convinced with the layout and the more or less dirty HTML code, it looks quite nice and runs fine in most browsers (except konqueror unfortunately ).

As we're finished with our part (mostly available under "Infos & Marchés) I'm currently rebuilding the Certificates Overview Page for the current german website available under this URL. As this page is quite trading oriented-only not much customers new to certificates get detailed information on what they are really and how they can earn money with them, so there will be more textual explanations on this topic and also new features for traders. This'll become another hack i quess, as what the website team wants to have can't be done in one or two backend requests... So let's see what it becomes.

so, one of my current project is doing a website relaunch for our french sister company. As it shall go live within the next month the code was freezed, and we have to concentrate on bug fixing.

This f***** project unfortunately never will die.

Well, actually I never won't pronounce myself as something like a guru or whatever. But today Karin from the product management team asked me to review the source code of an external developer. I was really amazed they came to me to do this. So the guy really did a good job I think, the only thing was that he did almost no javadoc inline documentation.

So, now he fixed this, so I'm pretty happy with this small tool for our platinum customers team, also if we'd have to fix bugs on our own.

Yeeehaa! It's done. Was easier than thought
I used Apache's Jakarta POI to parse the excel file from our partner company to get a list of keys we shall sort into separate categories. The initial read of the the original excel files fails, as there is an image embedded in the file, what obviously causes a ClassCastException while the single Cells are sorted into a TreeMap, while it's sorting in the new added Entry.
Maybe, when I've time, I'll fix this and submit some classes, also if I don't believe... As always when I'm saying such things I never find time :-(

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