Retail trade show, ERP troubleshooting, Wear leveling, Developer mag catch-up

Post date: Mar 18, 2012 6:47:49 PM

• Attended retail trade show 2012 in Helsinki. It was nice to see all competitors in the sector. But after all, there actually wasn't anything new. Checked out all web store platform / service providers and POS hardware providers. RFID and digital signage services were widely visible. Cloud services, not so much, because this wasn't IT fair.
• Did some ERP integration performance troubleshooting. It's good to know that many of these tests are really simple tests. Unfortunately if you don't have very good understanding how the system works as whole, you're most probably going to have very long sessions straddling with the problem. As we all know, you don't have luxury to trouble shoot production systems for ages. So swift action is required and that's where I come in with my wide experience of networking, operating systems, TCP/IP communication, threading etc. This time it turned out that for some strange reason customers firewall was delaying forming of outbound web service HTTPS sessions for up to 20 seconds. Unfortunately I didn't have management access to that particular firewall so I don't know what they did to fix the issue. But ISP fixed it in less than an hour. Yes, it was even stranger, because faster some straddling I knew that only one of target servers were affected and only from customers production server network. If I tried similar test from any other network to target server or to any other server (or port) from source network, there was no issue what so ever. I really would have liked to receive in detail report what was causing this issue.
• Read long article about wear leveling with lab tests. It was quite interesting, it seems that even cheap USB sticks got today very good wear leveling. In test USB stick with 30k write cycles was filled with data and then one sector was updated over and over again. It took over 90 million writes to get the el-cheapo USB-stick to wear out. So it's not a real world problem for most of USB-stick users.
• Catched up on IT System Developer magazines. I had eight issues in my read queue. Main topics covered were: software product life cycle management, extending system life cycle, (data) enterprise architecture, agile software development, service oriented architecture, managing software quality issues, business intelligence solutions, user interface design, measuring software development, team collaboration tools, creating bug free applications, managing requirements, change management, agility + quality is it possible, quality assurance, usability, modeling quality, distributed agile testing, using end user for software testing (bad idea), designing clear and easy to use web sites.
• I got many meetings about housing company's business, and have even more in future.