Rollout Part Deux

I did not end up rolling out my big project as most of the staff were not even in their office today.
That is okay. I had time to tweak some more things on the system and we will be even more ready for Monday. Specifically, I was able to get a good securities model in place into the system so we can have some control over users and their access. That is a great thing.

After we rollout this database on Monday, I will need to focus on their website and get their payment portal into the works. The SSL Certificate is now installed and we just need to wait for the developers in British Columbia to install the Moneris Payment portal part of the puzzle. After that, Moneris can verify that our website is secure and ready for payments… Yeeha!

I think it will be a nice weekend. I have a couple of hours worth or work that I can do if I desire, but I am not sure how much I will do. We are heading to Kitchener tomorrow to visit with friends for the morning and into the afternoon and then visiting Clara and Aunt Heather for a bit too.

Sunday is a potluck after church and then hopefully some downtime before we ramp up for next week again.

Have a good weekend.

Big day…

I am always a little concerned on days like this..
I have been working on a project off and on for about 6 months now and today we release it full blown to its users. Well, close to full-blown. Some of the elements are not yet written because the client has not fully laid out the specifications for those elements. Oh well, they will have a working system today anyways.

My concern and uneasiness always lies in the fact that the client can at any time say, “hey we should do it this way instead” Usually these statements revolve around a preference of doing things and not a standard…

I am hoping for not too too many preference changes today. I have worked through a good amount of the project with the client already and I think that they are pleased with what we have done thus far.

We shall see.

Stress levels WAY down!

I have been writing a particularly large bunch of code lately for a client.

We are building a Point of Sale system for his seven stores.
We are connecting his 7 stores to his main office nightly with dialup connections because he has little or no use for hi-speed internet in his retail locations. I cannot say I blame him. No internet means his staff are not surfing for half the day.

I have been building the system based with a front end of Microsoft Access. I have used it for years now and am very comfortable with it.

I am writing the data server in mysql. Actually each store will have its own little mysql server to store data on.

Here’s the catch. Everynight, I need the home office system to connect to 7 other systems, pull all of the updated and new data, amalgamate it and then return it individually to each store….

I got it working today. I knew there had to be a way to syncronize data between multiple databases and I was lucky enough to find a couple of articles about it on the web.

Yipee!!! This will now allow me to finish this project up ontime and right on budget. It is nice to be able to go back to the client and tell them we are right on target.

Sweet. So, my stress levels are way down. I am feeling that I can easily get a handle on this one now.. It was starting to stress me out thinking about the potential of what I would need to write if this syncronization thing was going to be sticky.
Thank you Lord for answered prayers…

Pivot Tables in Excel

I have been struggling all week with learning pivot tables in excel. For those of you saying..

what the sam hill is that boy jabberin’ about now…

pivot tables are a way to analyze data quickly and efficiently.
That is, if you know how to create and format pivot tables…

Thanks to my good friend Bruce who helped me limp along and put up with my code ID10T questions… Thanks man.

And now, I have to say that I really understand the power of them. They are so cool. I was able to analyze a table of over 10000+ records and view them in a table that was approximately 20-30 rows long. Now THAT is cool