Monthly Archives: February 2009

D&D

I started playing D&D nearly 30 years ago. I remember when they changed it to AD&D, and I still have the book “Monster Manual” that includes the incredible copyright infringement stuff from other fantasy novels. I suppose its not terribly surprising that we picked up a copy of the 4th edition Dungeon Master’s Guide and Player’s Handbook recently – and have started gaming again.

When Karen and I moved to Seattle, we pretty much gave up role playing games. We had a terrific group of folks we gamed with in Columbia, MO – and they’re all still gaming as far as I know – just without us. In the past 20 years, almost none of our gaming was D&D: more a wide variety of other interesting games (some well known, others not) that came off more as “collaborative storytelling” than anything else. We were missing it a bit, but not incited enough to go try and find a new group of folks to game with.

Then this Christmas one of Karen’s friends from college suggested that sufficient tools existed to do this all online and that maybe 4th Edition D&D would be a good trial. We started playing three weeks ago – using Skype and a site called “rpgtonight.com” – and it’s been a blast.

The technology is “just there” in terms of Skype; a 6 person conference call can get a bit flaky upon occasion. The site rpgtonight.com is functional, but frankly looks freakin’ horrific. I’m not sure how they keep their doors open (advertising, I suppose). It’s functional at least.

The folks publishing D&D seem to be going gangbusters with this new version – don’t know if they’ll be raking in the cash from it, but they’re definitely putting a lot of effort into it. They’ve got an online setup that’s forming too – potentially some very cool online tools for doing exactly what we’re doing: playing games online.

I must admit, I never expected to be playing D&D again any time soon – but I’m having a blast with it.

Temporarily removed from sale

Since I haven’t been able to get the site providing the data back online within the week, I’ve temporarily removed Seattle Bus from sale on the AppStore. I’m working on a “fix” (changing the data provider) now that will hopefully be available soon.

I apologize for the trouble and annoyances.

If you have the application already, it’s worth noting that the application does work periodically. Unfortunately, the data feed is just so inconsistent as to be nearly useless.

UPDATE:

I have a new parser functioning correctly with by MyBus.org and King County’s Metro Tracker site. The update should be uploaded to the AppStore shortly. I’ll post when I get the new version uploaded, and when it’s available.

I must say, it’s incredibly embarrassing that the King County site doesn’t even emit well formed HTML. The new parser is an interesting screen-scrape accumulation of regular expressions to pull out the relevant data. At least they’re posting it online…

Why microsoft docs and systems suck so very, very much

In case you can’t tell from the title of this post, I’m in a rant. I’ve been building up this rant for a good hour now, having spent it reading through Microsoft TechNet, Channel 9 feeds, and other places trying to figure how what it’ll take to solve what I perceive as a simple problem.

I’ll start by answering the question I pose in the title:

Microsoft makes simple tasks unbelievably complex and arcane.

Here’s what I’m trying to do, and what led me down this primrose path:

  • I want to collect some data in a database. In this particular case, the data is CPU utilization metrics for a number of servers. Each row of this nifty data set is the mean “% utilization” of a server for the past 5 minutes.
  • For all the servers, I want to roll up that data and know what the 95th percentile peak of the usage is over a month.
  • Now I want to use that number as a “KPI” and report it in SharePoint 2007. Why SharePoint 2007? Because I’ve been asked to use it.

I thought “OK, how hard can this be?”. My thought was maybe I’ll put in a SQL statement with parameters somewhere in a form, add in some connection information, and away we go.

Nope. It’s quite hard apparently. From what I can tell of the documentation available in TechNet, I should have a Microsoft SQLServer database somewhere with a couple of things installed. Their Analysis services most particularly. Then I need to install Microsoft Visual Studio so that I can create a reporting cube to which I can link in the SharePoint system. I’ll also apparently need SSIS so that I can reach into the Oracle database where this data is already stashed and pull it into this cube setup.

From the descriptions, tutorials, and how-to’s on TechNet, I’m guessing this should be considered the work of 3 different specialists (SSIS, SSAS, and SharePoint) all working in conjunction and with requirements for the data, what’s a fact and dimension, where the connections should be set up, etc. Oh – and toss in a SQLServer DBA to manage the SQLServer instance, but that’s all background.

Why isn’t this one person’s half-day effort?
Assuming I know the data and the SQL to generate my “KPI”, you’d think that this could be a pretty straightfoward thing…

As much as I’d like to diss on SharePoint for being crap, SharePoint 2007 looks pretty reasonable in it’s linkages and options for doing this “KPI dashboard” thing. It’s when you start to reach back into something other than an Excel spreadsheet or a list managed in SharePoint that this world gets unbelievably complex and arcane.

It will take me longer to create this solution than it will to write a bit of CGI with SQL and hook it into a free charting widget and shove that up onto a website. ARGH!!!

Data feed for Seattle Bus stalled out

A quick update for folks looking for help with Seattle Bus:

The site that the application uses for it’s data source (mybus.org) has been intermittently available recently, and today it’s been down completely. This is a site run at the University of Washington, and I’m afraid I don’t have a direct contact with the administrators.

There is another site with similar data provided by King County Metro (not as well structured) – so I may end up re-writing my scraper/parser to pull data from that site as I have no details on when or if MyBus.org will come back online.

I wish there was a better way of providing this data to you – I’ll keep everyone informed through this developer diary as I have updates.