In this new job, I will be the Administrator of an installation of Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Customer Relationship Manager). The Microsoft CRM product is a popular product in which there are not a lot of choices for larger companies. It has some interesting features. But mostly, it has been a series of one frustration after another for someone who comes from a programming background. I do realize that most of my frustration has come because I have not yet learned how to do what I may be wanting to do. But still, there are problems with CRM that are truly problems. Where to start…..

At my new company, a consulting group has been in place for over a year, mapping out the business of the company and how it will be represented in the CRM system. This consulting group has built-out a large portion of the implementation of the system. Most of the pieces are in place and it will be my job to polish things as needed once the consultants leave.

My problem is that the customizations available to the end users (my company) are limited to what the CRM can support. Basically, we have to map the business of the company using tools and concepts that are supported by CRM. We are not modifying CRM to meet the business model of the company. That is the first problem:

We’re adapting our business to suit the limitations of CRM.

Because of this there is no real programming for me to do. This frustrates me. I did manage to write one plug-in which integrates with CRM to perform a specific task. I have also had to write some Javascript modules which interact with the CRM system. But in both of these cases, the limitations and requirements of developing for this system are PAINFULLY frustrating. Something that can be coded in a few minutes to the exact requests/specifications of our users takes hours (perhaps days) to implement. Worse the implementation is almost always not exactly what the users want (sometimes, we have to admit that what the user wants can not be done in CRM).

The system that the company used previously was an open source system. So if a custom page/form was needed, it was coded up using normal .NET/ADO code and the user’s requests were met exactly. Those days are gone.

Basically, I am a power user. Not a developer.

As bad as I feel I have it, my “pain” is nothing compared to the pain felt by the DBA (Database Administrator) with whom I’m working.

CRM uses a thrid-party tool named Scribe to perform large data importing / exporting tasks (it’s not really a third-party tool since it is also provided by Microsoft as part of the CRM installation). Scribe can interact with CRM during imports so that CRM events are fired as data is imported into the system. But Scribe does not appear to be well-behaved. Often, our database is slow or non-responsive. In every case, it has been due to Scribe locking up our system or hanging our server. In fact, the consulting team that is installing our system will not use Scribe to perform a CRM installation in a sister company. Instead they will be developing a custom application as a replacement for Scribe to import data. But still, we will have to suffer with Scribe to perform our bi-weekly data imports. This will be a painful experience for our DBA with no relief in sight.

We have been given a tool that doesn’t work well and which has been abandoned by the consultants who put our current system together.

Is there any solution to my concerns? Of course. I’m a programmer. Anything you or I can think of can be coded up, given an environment that will support it.

Our current environment consists of several virtual servers onto which Windows Server 2008 software has been installed. The .NET framework is installed on to these servers. SQL Server has been installed onto a supporting server. So everything is in place to support a truly customizable web application to supplement/replace the parts of our CRM installation that just don’t work well.

In CRM 2011, the bulk of the work is done using web service calls from the client-facing web server to an application server. Were we to replace the bad web application with customized web forms, we would be able to meet our users’ needs completely. All the limitations imposed by the CRM web application could be eliminated. All while using the security provided by CRM.

We could build a custom application that meets the needs of our users. But we can’t.

Our management team is sold on anything that has the word “Microsoft” on its shiny, shrink-wrapped cover. So all my suggestions on how to improve our users’ experience have been cast aside in favor of the “they will get used to it” attitude from our IS Director. They have spent several million dollars on consultants to install a system that just doesn’t work well. They could have spent less money on a team of developers to put together a system that meets all their needs exactly. Instead they chose a shrink-wrapped system that only meets some of the needs of our users.

And I have to make it all better.

A challenge to be sure. Time to get to work. Updates to follow.

The job in Roseville was a pretty sweet gig. I was part of a small team that was developing a somewhat cutting edge distributed application that dealt with Futures trading on the Chicago Board of Exchange (you know, the exchange where you can buy Pork Belly futures). But, the client who was paying for this application hit a “bad patch” and was no longer able to pay for our services and so my project came to a somewhat sudden halt. Which put me back in the job market once again.

So, I polished up the old resume and updated my profiles on Dice and Monster. I applied for a bunch of jobs and I managed to get an interview or two with HR people who are young enough to be my kids.

NOTE: From my interviews, it is pretty clear that THE skill to have right now is jQuery and AJAX. Not the Microsoft version. But the generic AJAX/jQuery kind. So learn it, know it, be it!

Eventually, I landed a gig working for a company in downtown Sacramento. I got the job because I’d have some passing experience with a prior version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. That, and because an old-timer like me knows how to interview when the interviewers are not 22 years old.

Downtown Sacramento is interesting. The neighborhood in which my office is located is composed of houses build from the late 1800s through the 1930′s (more or less). Most of the larger homes have been split into condos, apartments and duplexes. But there are still a handful of homes that are single family dwellings. Most of the people there are of lower/middle income variety, and there seems to be a large concentration of Asian people/families. All – in – all your basic working class neighborhood. The only troublesome part is that there are a handful of houses being renovated with high-end features. Which generally means that in about ten to twenty years, most of the people living there now will probably be priced out of theirs homes and apartments.

But I digress……

My new job centers around Microsoft Dynamics CRM (see Why I hate Microsoft CRM). This is a very powerful tool that our users abhor and that frustrates me to no end. But our management (more on this in the future) is sold on this product. So I will be struggling to conquer it. But, this position requires virtually no programming which for me is frustrating.

Being as how my job is now 50 miles from my house, I am now a “commuter.” What this entails is getting up a half-hour earlier, driving for about an hour in some stop-and-go traffic so that I can be at work at 8 AM. The commute home would be worse, except for the fact that I have discovered a particular surface-street route that saves me twenty minutes of freeway-parking-lot time. This long-ish stop-and-go commute made driving my Ford Mustang expensive and not very enjoyable (more on this later, as well). So I’ve switched to a new commuter-friendlier Kia Forte. Basic transportation to which I will need perform some upgrades.

And the last straw: a reduction in income. I do realize that in today’s economy any job is a good one. So I am happy to be working. But, I did have to take a sizable reduction in pay from my last job to this one. We are still doing OK by any standard. But the frustrating work situation coupled with the reduction in pay and increase in responsibility is, once again, frustrating.

So, in the last 90 days, I have undergone a handful of changes which have become a bit of a challenge. So I will be straightening out my tie, lacing up the proverbial boots, and hitting it hard, once again until things change. Hopefully for the better. And hopefully sooner, rather than later.

Enough complaining. Time to get back to work.

I finished the year with some big changes. After living for over twenty years at our last location, we’ve moved to a new part of our home state. There are several reasons, but mostly, we’re moving to be closer to my work. But there are challenges.

I’m the primary income earner in our household. But, the opportunities at our last location were somewhat limited for programmers like me. There are a handful of companies that employ more than one or two programmers. I’ve worked at one of them. I wouldn’t work for another. The rest don’t offer much in the way of a challenge or compensation.

For these reasons, I’ve been working remotely for five out of the last six years. Living mostly out of hotels, it has been a worthwhile sacrifice because it has allowed us to send our kids to the college of their choice (schools in the University of California system) while incurring minimum debt. For the last three years, I’ve been working for a company near our new location. So, all things considered, we moved.

And then, (after we sign ALL the documents related to purchasing a home), the client that is paying for the development project that I’m working on has some financial trouble. Almost overnight, he has stopped paying his bills. Which puts my employer in the tough spot of trying to pay us what he can without going broke himself.

For sure, that has added some stress onto our move. However that is not the worst of it. Worse, than having to worry about where your next paycheck is coming from, is the fact that we are having to make do without… television.

When planning on moving to our new place, our thought was to use the internet as a source for much of our television watching (we only watch a handful of channels anyway), supplemented with over-the-air (OTA) broadcasts of the main television networks.

So, we have set up the HD television (which we are borrowing from our youngest daughter; long story there!) and perform the “auto-scan” of channels.

Nothing. As in “no channels found.” How can that be? This is one of those new-fangled High Definition digital flat-screen TVs. They get everything, right?

It turns out that our new home is about 100 miles from the transmission towers used by the broadcast stations in this region. To make matters worse, we are in a television “shadow” such that most television signals simply pass over the top of our area, without giving the people here a chance to catch the signal. So that’s why all the neighbors have satellite dishes on their homes.

On the plus side, it has allowed us to find some new shows like Misfits and some old ones like Corner Gas. Also, since most network shows are available on the networks’ websites, we will still be able to watch most of our shows. Just a day later than most people.

Maybe this will make me read more books…. Nah!

Worse than the protests themselves, has been the police reaction to many of these protesters. In New York city there is corroborated video evidence of  police reaction that was inappropriate in scale and force. VIDEO.

In the (formerly) great state of California, we have one of the premier public university systems in the nation. The ten campuses in the UC system consistently rank in the top forty in almost every listing with several of the campuses almost always in the top five.

In the last few years, California has hit a speed-bump economically (like most other states). That has resulted in cuts to public education which include, not only the UC, but the wonderful California State University  system, local community colleges and the local school districts.

My children have had the privilege of attending UC Campuses. This is no mean feat, as admission to these campuses is reserved for those students who finish in the top 10% of students within the state. These campuses are research-oriented and employ many distinguished professors in a wide variety of areas of study. To see a Nobel laureate walking across campus is not uncommon.

In the last two years, there has been a 30% increase in tuition for attending these campuses. This is a drastic increase, out of line with the amount of services the state has had to cut elsewhere. To add insult to injury, these increases in tuition have come with increases in pay to chancellors, regents and campus presidents throughout the system.

This is not acceptable. Increases in tuition, should be met with decreases in compensation for the people administering the campus organization itself. But much like the people that OWS is trying to shame (to no avail), the chancellors, regents, and campus administrators seem to have their human sense of shame removed.

Yesterday, on the campus of UC Davis, a student protest was met with a disproportionate police reaction. VIDEO.

But enough is enough. A professor on campus, has sent an open letter to the Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi spelling out in no uncertain terms why she MUST resign. I agree wholeheartedly. My students have benefited from the time they spent on this campus. For a Chancellor to put students in harm’s way, for any reason, is not acceptable.

As an insult to the intelligence of the people who have seen the video of the incident, Katehi has sent out an email that is nothing short of outrageous. EMAIL

Am I advocating for the sort of out-of-control actions that we have seen elsewhere? Absolutely not. But I am advocating for the end of disproportionate response to what was (until then) a truly peaceful protest.

Lastly, I have included a small sample application to illustrate the process.

I hope some people find this useful.

For most of that time I’ve used the Priceline “Name Your Own Price” system with good success. That system allows you to specify a “star level” that you want and a “price level” that you are willing to pay and through some black magic they (often) find a hotel matching your requested star level at your offered price.

But every so often, something goes wrong. Today, what went wrong is that the hotel that I “won” is not up-to-snuff with regards to its assigned star level.

This week, I ended up bidding on 2.5 star hotels. In this area, 2.5 star hotels include hotels such as Marriot’s Courtyard Inn, Springhill Suites, and Hilton’s Hampton Inn. But this week, I won a stay at hotel that is not in that league. Not by a long shot. If I were to give this hotel a star rating, it would be a 1 star hotel.

Where did things go wrong? Priceline’s custom ratings system. If you visit the priceline web site, you will see that they rate hotels:

We consider a number of factors in evaluating the quality of participating hotels such as: amenities, facilities, reputation, brand, other rating services, customer feedback from guests who have stayed at the hotel, etc to assign a single star rating.

What’s missing? Quality. A hotel may have a pool, but if you wouldn’t even fish out that pool why should it count as an “amenity”?

This “1-star” hotel offers a pool, spa, breakfast and other amenities. However, the quality of those amenities is poor enough that one would not recommend them to anyone else. That is the case with this week’s hotel. The amenities are of poor quality. But in the Priceline world, the quality of amenities does not seem to be of any importance. Just the number of amenities.

So, next week, I will have to go up a star level and have to pay more, just to know that my chances of getting this hotel again are diminished.

Finally, to add insult to injury, I had to pay $70/night to get this low quality hotel. Whereas, I normally pay $50/night for a much better quality hotel (timing is everything n the Priceline world).  But the “normal” price for this hotel is $82/night. So I only saved $12/night. On a normal week, I pay $50/night for a room that goes for $130/night. That’s a savings worth mentioning.

In a perfect world we all can agree on what a 2.5 star hotel. Until then, we can just hope that some day Priceline begins to fall in line with everyone else.

So, now, I am trying to decide whether to convert that page (and its excellent SEO state) into a more general page that would be useful to more people, or whether to let my page drop down the rankings over time.

Decisions… decisions….

You can download it here: Complete MySQL and iTextSharp Project (C#).

This is just a sample / how-to. The code provides no error checking, nor does it provide any optimizations. It simply generates a PDF from a MySQL data source.

Some notes: This project follows the model which we use on a GoDaddy hosted site. Because of this, the MySQL command that we use is a “Text” command and not a stored procedure. If we were on almost any other host, we could (and should) use stored procedures to minimize attacks, especially SQL injection.

As for the iTextSharp code, we create some tables for display using the “long way”. I create and populate a Table object at a very granular level. A much more elegant way to generate the PDF would be to generate some HTML (suitable for a display/ preview) and then parse that same HTML for use as the content of the PDF.

However, difference in version 4.x and 5.x of iTextSharp have changed HTML parsing. Whereas, the code I present here, will work in 4.x and (hopefully) 5.x.

Again, this is just a simple example project. I’m sure that your particular application may have some differences that prevent this code from working as-is. But no warranty/guarantee is expressed or implied. So if this doesn’t work for you, or if you end up wiping your hard drive, it’s your fault!

I hope that you find this useful.

I work as a programmer by day. So downloading source code, modifying it, and compiling it into a usable application is not foreign to me. Nor should it be. After all, I’m a professional (I still can’t believe that they pay me to do this!)

Most of the developers who contact me ask pretty normal questions about getting iTextSharp on GoDaddy such as “Why can’t I generate any temporary files?”, “What is your strategy for cacheing the PDF output?”, etc.

But I am staggered by the number of contacts that I get from *ahem* professional developers who don’t know how do any of the tasks mentioned above.

I wrote the new step-by-step instructions after I was contacted by a developer who started out with the normal questions, but who finished by asking me to download the latest source, compile it and provide it to him for use on his site. (I had pointed him to a downloadable version of the DLL which I use on my site; but he insisted that he needed the newer verion of the DLL).

With these new step-by-step instructions, I have done everything except click the mouse and type the code change required for anyone to create their own version of the latest iTextSharp DLL.

We’ll see what kinds of questions these new step-by-step instructions prompt. “Winners” will be posted here!

Zatoichi (from the first movie)

This morning I was getting dressed and I happened to grab an old T-Shirt that I had made at CafePress. It features a picture of Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman and the phrase “What would Zatoichi do?” That got me reminiscing about about the Zatoichi series of movies which starred Shintaro Katsu back in the 60′s.

Up until recently, the Independent Film Channel (IFC) showed movies, un-cut. In fact, that was their slogan “always uncut” or something along those lines. Now, they’re just another commercial laden cable channel. But more on that later.

IFC used to have a “Samurai Saturday” during which they would show an older Samurai

Drawing his sword

movie, usually released through Janus Films. Fortunately for me, the Janus film collection apparently includes the Zatoichi series of films.

The quick-n-dirty on Zatoichi goes like this: Zatoichi is a blind swordsman whose other senses have made up for his lack of eyesight. So much so, that he has become and adroit swordsman who uses his skill to write wrongs along Japan’s countryside. He travels the countryside using the cover story of being a masseuse. We also get to see that he enjoys gambling, sake and a rollicking good time. Often, the local citizenry is besieged by a bad or corrupt crime boss who is bullying the townspeople. Zatoichi, being a defender of the downtrodden, usually comes to the rescue and forces the bad guys to relent to his superior skill with a sword.

In the first two movies we see him fall in love with a woman who is subsequently killed. This leaves him unable to truly love another until later in the series when he proposes marriage to a woman who, again, gets killed.

Zatoichi has a soft spot for kids

Like any good traveling good guy, Zatoichi has a soft spot for children. In at least one movie, Zatoichi is in charge of a young boy and we see Zatoichi forgo some rice balls so that his charge can get a meal. If there is one thing that we learn, is that Zatoichi loves to eat, so in that scene, we see that his heart truly goes out to that boy.

We also learn, in another film, that he was born with sight, and that he lost his sight when he was about six or eight years old (I’m writing this from memory, so I may be off a bit here). But that he can’t really remember “colors” anymore, as an adult. It makes one think about the concept of losing something like sight or hearing and later not being able to remember “color” or “sound.”

Then of course is his iconic “cane sword.” Since Zatoichi travels as a masseur he doesn’t want to draw attention to himself. So he carried a straight sword encased in a sheath that looks like a simple, straight walking stick or cane. Everyone is unsuspecting, until trouble starts. Then Watch Out! When he brings the sheath up to his face and begins drawing out the sword, you know that mayhem is coming, and soon!

Since he is blind, Zatoichi uses a unique fighting style in which he often handles the blade in a reverse/inverse fashion. That is, he holds the sword upside-down such that it is pointing down and back with the sharp edge facing front. From this position Zatoichi can swing the blade using what kind of resembles a punch which causes the blade to swing around and strike his opponent. Hard to describe. You need to see it for yourself.

In the end, we see a battle-worn Zatoichi triumphant, yet realizing that he must move on, since the bad guys will be coming for him.

These movies brought me a great deal of enjoyment. The stories are simple: good guy vs. bad army, with the good guy always winning. And on Saturday morning, that’s a nice thing to wake up to.

You can find the movies on Amazon and elsewhere. I hope that you take the time to see one. Hopefully you will enjoy them as much as I have.