Yellerdog

As of last week, my most recent article for The View is available on-line and in the print edition. It's called "Notes client application makeover for the Web, Part 2: Improving the user experience with AJAX" and is the second of three articles. I am pretty proud of this series of articles, as they describe the most complex Domino web app I have ever created for my own purposes. The series describes how to take an R7 Notes client app and move it on to the web. The database (which you can download even if you are not a subscriber) shows how I used AJAX, JavaScript, LotusScript, Java, and CSS to create a single-window application.

I have been writing for The View for eight years now, and have published 10 articles with an 11th currently in edit. I have really enjoyed it, and am already planning my next article. My articles have gotten longer and longer, and each one has been more work than the last. Considering this last three-part series was originally conceived as a single artcile I think you can see the trend. I hope this next one will be a little shorter and less complex.

Yesterday was Memorial Day here in the U.S. The holiday was first established to honor Union soldiers who perished in the Civil War, and has since been expanded to commemorate all who have perished while in military service to the United States.

I have always been a patriot, a lover of my country. I believe that the United States is unlike any other country, never having has a king, and having been founded as a place where government serves the people, not vice-versa. Is it perfect? No, but it is mine, and I will serve it as best I can.

Freedom is not free, and it is both precious and fragile. Many, many men and women have died to preserve, protect, and defend my right to live how I see fit. I can work at any job I can attain. I can travel without papers, anywhere in the country. I can spend my money as I like. I can vote how I like, or run for office myself. I and my wife can raise our daughter however we like. We can send her to any school our means allow and teach her anything we like.

In most of the world, for most of history, this has simply not been the case. A hudred years ago, in this country, women could not vote. Fifty years ago, practically speaking, blacks could not vote in large parts of the country.  If you fail to pay a fine in Switzerland today, the police show up on your doorstep in force. If you're female and don't wear a hdead scarf in much of the world, you risk stoning. And we've seen how China views dissent, as a threat to be crushed.

This Memorial Day was particularly poignant for me because we visted my father. He has been struggling with Parkinson's for three years now. Last month he fell ill and went into the hospital. He's now out, but is in a nursing home, and his return home will probably never happen - he can no longer care for himself and needs more care than my mother can provide.

Anyhow, Dad is a vet. He served five years in the Navy, inlcuding Operation Deep Freeze. He was one of the first men to winter over in Antarctica. Now he is frail. His speech is slurred, his vision is failing, and he needs help just to get up out of bed and into his wheelchair. When I think of him, one of the things I am reminded of is how each generation stands on the shoulders of their predecessors, and what our predecessors have handed down to us. We hacve freedom, and prosperity, and peace at home. These are things I want to pass on to my daughter and her generation, and her children as well. While I never served, I will do my best to impart those values to her and work through the political processes to make sure the America she inherits will be one where freedom is still a reality.

I realize that Bleedyellow.com is a tech site, but I'm gonna discuss some  politics anyway. To give you some context, I am a Republican and consider myself a conservative. I also am really unhappy with the current administration and believe that civil liberties must be preserved.

So here are some random thoughts on the candidates.

Hillary Clinton

First off, how can she say she's experienced? Yes, she has spent 30+ years in public life, but her presence in the public sector was a result of her marriage to Bill Clinton, not a result of her winning elections. Rosalynn Carter did that too.

Her key achievement as First Lady was the failed health-care plan. She also managed to embarrass herself and her husband several times by saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Then she got a lot of sympathy for the Lewinsky affair.

Once she and her husband were forced to move from Pennsyvania Avenue, she really did accomplish something, winning the open New York Senate seat. And by all reports she's ben an effective senator.

But I don't consider her career one that qualifies her to be President. She's never been chief executive of anything. Six years in the Senate does not a good chief executive make. She has a good understanding of capitalism and the law, having worked as a lawyer and made good money through her work and investments. But she still seems to think it is the government's job to create jobs. Lousy idea. I think she might, perhaps, make a good cabinet-level staffer, as policy and politics are her strong points.

But I can't see her as qualified to represent the US to, say, China, or to make the best decisions for us in energy policy. I'd like to see some Senate chairmanships, some sponsoring of significant legislation, and perhaps a better understanding of how taxes really effect the economy.

Barak Obama

OK, I understand he's popular and different. And he speaks well. But the guy's a paper tiger, and one with bad judgment to boot.

He has less time in the Senate than Clinton, and fewer accomplishments.

While an Illinois representative, he basically did nothing.

His three most prominent acquanitances are Rev. Jeremiah Wright (a flatly ant-American, divisive preacher who promulgates a polically motivated distortion of Christianity), Tony Rezko (a Chicago political manipulator/real estate developer currently on trial), and Bill Ayers (a terrorist who made bombs in Greenwich Village).

He has no grasp of the realities of international politics. He has never been chief executive of anything. He does not understand most of America, as he has never spent any time living, working, or governing anywhere except in wealthy enclaves. He thinks he can change things with words alone. Ideas and actions are needed, and much better decision-making than this young man has shown.

I doubt he has any significant grasp of economics. His policies, to date, are not significantly different from those the Democrats have offered over the years. The last time we had Democratic economic policies in the White House (the Carter administration - Clinton was an economic moderate who mostly ride the doc-com boom to prosperity), we had double-digit inflation and a withering economy. Those ideas don't work.

Frankly, I'd like to see much better judgment and a hell of a lot more experience in a candidate for mayor, much less for President.

John McCain

McCain can knock the experience ball out of the park, as a long-term Senator with a record of military service.

He also has significant Senate accomplishments, some of which I really admire. McCain-Feingold was an OK attempt to tackle a thorny issue. His key role in the Gang of 14 broke a terrible Senate logjam.

His vocal (and, to date, correct) positions on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars show that he has both the judgment and experience to be an effective commander-in-chief, a key requirement at this point in history.

I'd like to see a better grasp of economics, and I suspect he is working on it. I like his center-right positions, and I think a McCain administration would, for the first time in years, result in a truly smaller, more effective government.  I disagree with his tax plans, and I suspect, if he is elected, he'll have to contend with a very Democratic legislature.

Summary

Truth be known, I voted for Rodolph Giuliani in the Florida primary. I am not truly excited about McCain, but I think he is the only qualified candidate left in the field. Neither a former first lady nor a one-term junior senator have the experience, the clout, or the judgment to be President, so McCain is my choice.

Happy Memorial Day!

 Are you one of those "bitter" people that Barak Obama seems to so deeply mis-understand?

Last night  I attended my local IIBA chapter's May meeting. This meeting was formatted as a 'lightning round' information exchange workshop. The room had five tables, each with three discussion questions on a topic relevant to BA work. We each rotated around the room in 10-minute sessions and, during each session, discussed the questions at each table. Ground rules similar to a brainstorming session (safe environment, respect privacy, everyone is allowed to speak, etc.) created an environment encouraging honesty and openness.
 
Topics included scope management, requirements elicitation, managing stakeholders, tools, and career management. Some questions were obvious ("what is your favorite tool for BA work? " ), while some evidenced a good understanding of the challenges of BA work ("how do you manage a stakeholder who dominates a brainstorming session? " ).

I learned a few things about myself and my area.

1. There are a surprising number of BA's in my area. Disney, Wyndham, Marriott, credit unions, banks, they're all employing significant numbers of BAs.
2. With 15 years of consulting experience I am one of the more experienced analysts at the table. I'm not used to that, as most of the team I work with has tons of experience.

I also learned some things about the software marketplace.

1. Just about everyone uses Word, but most users aren't happy with it. The chief complaints seem to be the complexity and, over time, the messed-up file format. There's a real opportunity for Lotus Symphony, this tells me.
2. Just about everyone struggles with document and information management. There's a real need for a lightweight, cost-effective document management system for departments and the SMB space. I can see a stripped-down version of Lotus Domino Document Manager filling this space quite nicely.
3. SharePoint is starting to get to the place that Lotus Notes has been in for years -- if you don't assign plan and resource your deployment adequately, you get a lousy implementation and the product does not perform as advertised. My employer is a big SharePoint shop, so I think I see an opportunity to sell our SharePoint expertise.

Are you a business analyst? Do you perform business analyst activities? You may do BA stuff and not know it. If you...

• Gather requirements
• Interview users
• Run workshops
• Create specifications
• Perform prototyping or JAD sessions with users
• Participate in or facilitate brainstorming sessions
• Design test plans

...then you are performing BA tasks. Most software developers, whether they know it or not, perform some BA tasks at least part of the time. It's pretty hard to get anywhere as a developer without understanding business requirements, after all.

So what is a Business Analyst?

A business analyst works as a liaison among stakeholders in order to elicit, analyze, communicate and validate requirements for changes to business processes, policies and information systems. The business analyst understands business problems and opportunities in the context of the requirements and recommends solutions that enable the organization to achieve its goals.

 

The role of the BA differs from the role of the Project Manager in that the BA is responsible for defining and managing the scope of a business solution, while the PM is responsible for the work necessary to implement that solution.

Last year the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA) founded a chapter here, and I have been a member since. As someone who has been doing BA activities for over 15 years, I think the establishment of a BA professional organization like the IIBA is long overdue.

If you do BA work, or check out http://www.theiiba.org ASAP!

I have been running my own Domino server out of my home since about 2001. We run our family e-mail and web sites from it.

I started with an old HP Pavilion back in 2001. In 2003 I upgraded to Windows 2000 and moved to a new box with a gig of RAM and a huge, for the time, 20Gb hard drive. This server is still up and running today. It's gone from Domino R6 through 6 and 7, and currently runs 8.0.1. In, I think,. 2005, I added a second hard drive (30Gb). The transaction logs go on C: and the Domino data goes on D. I also upped the memory to 2 GB. But other than that, service packs, and a new LAN card, it hasn't changed much in years.

The neat thing about this server, aside from its longevity, is that through all the version permutations and my experiments with Tomcat, DB2, and other products, it has always met my needs. Windows 2000 has, overall, been a great OS for me. I'm planning to finally retire this server this summer, and will (reluctanlty) probably move to Windows Server 2003. I'm sticking with Windows primarily because I know it, it works on my hardware, and I own the licenses so it's free. If I knew Linux I would consider it, but since I don't know it I can't be bothered to learn it unless there's a good financial reason to do so.

So this Windows 2000, 2 Gb RAM, 2-disk server has pretty much been an ideal solution for me, perfectly balancing out cost and performance while being extremely low-maintenance. If you could picture the perfect server for an SMB organization, what would it be? And remember I don't mean "the most powerful server"-- imagine you are paying for all the costs out of your own pocket, so you'll need to balance cost, performance, maintenance, utility, and longevity.