I had been planning on writing up a big summary of my CS307 Software Engineering project. But after thinking about it for a bit, I'm not really sure what would be achieved by doing so. It would probably have just come off as complaining and whining, which is certainly not my intention. I loved the class, and thought it was incredibly valuable. In fact, I think it should be required of everyone who isn't going to grad school & planning on becoming a professor (and maybe even they should take it).

So, about the project. First, a bit of background: it was a client & two-tier server system, in this case for medical records. I was on Team A, the largest team (we ended up with 9 people). We divided into three sub-teams of 3 each: Client, Communications, Data. I volunteered to be the sub-team lead for Data. We also had a team leader, documentation manager, and development environment expert.

Now, as I see the project, it was a failure. We failed to complete the Regional Server (the second server tier) portion, and so we failed to meet the requirements. This failure was a result of the people involved in the project. As a team, I do not think that we were motivated to work on the project. And we never seemed to find that motivation. Consequently, we didn't work hard enough to try and get everything done. Furthermore, the problem was not one of which we were unaware. It was blatantly obvious that some members were not contributing their share. We were just unable to come up with a successful resolution to that problem.

The other big problem with the project was a lack of testing. The majority of the team was unfamiliar with developing using the platform and tools that we picked, and just didn't have any experience working on this type of problem. This let do a lot of bugs appearing, which testing could have uncovered earlier. But we didn't test early, and even at the end we did not test thoroughly. Hence the GUI crashing during our demonstration because of an invalid entry of a date, and hence the server responding with failures because the Event Log had filled up. We were using unit tests and regular builds, but having good process techniques is not enough if there are only 20 test cases (for a program that was in development for 10 weeks!), and those test cases don't test anything.

In the end, it didn't really matter. The project wasn't worth any of the grade; the paperwork, documentation, and presentation were the grade. So 5/9 people (including me) pulled off A's in the class without any problems. On the presentation day, we were awarded all the website awards (Best Organized, Best Aesthetics, Best Updated – Go SharePoint!) and the team awards (Best Conference Calls, Best Work Sharing – yes, it's a good idea to PAY ATTENTION TO PREVIOUS CALLS and address issues raised during the next calls). The Work Sharing award kind of left me scratching my head, because that was an area I felt we could have done better on. I guess we did a good job of dividing it up, and people did a good job of reporting about it – whether a task really got done or not. It also makes me wonder about who did what on the other teams…

Finally, I had some individual accomplishments. During the awards granting, my justification of our platform choices during the presentation was singled out and applauded for being, well, the only justification of platform choices from any group. On my team, I was voted the MVP (all other teams had pairs of people as their MVP's). And I got the A for the class (only the 3^rd A for me in a CS class!).

Okay, this is just cool. Completely and utterly pointless, but cool.

Anyone else want to go to that bar?

http://jwz.livejournal.com/719722.html

So this site has been down for…a while. The hard drive in my old domain controller died, taking all security settings with it. Which, because of the restricted system policy that I got from the MS lockdown recommendations, meant I couldn't login or use the other servers in my old domain. At all.

Not to mention the fact that the database for ntldr.net was on that dead DC, which meant that ntldr.net was dead. In any case, I was stuck in a situation where I couldn't turn off the ISA box, because it wouldn't come back up without the DC. Oh, and I couldn't log into my 64-bit desktop either. And the Exchange server was unusable. Hmm…and now that I think about it, my old TC1000 probably can't do much either. But I use that so infrequently that I haven't even thought about it until now…

So, with that nasty situation set up, I rolled up my sleeves and got down to work. On other things. Like the CS307: Software Engineering project that sucked up tons of time. And the CS490T Robot stuff. And the Technical Writing papers that kept coming up from nowhere, only to disappear and never be heard from again just as fast. And the usual drone of probability, counting, and graphs that make up Discrete Mathematics. Not to mention the interviews, CERIAS work that I finally had to get around to, and the dealing with SSCI no longer being SSCI but instead becoming part of Aptuit.

However, despite working on all that stuff, I was able to do a preliminary damage assessment and begin trying to repair things. I have a SharePoint backup of ntldr.net, and just need to figure out/find time to restore it somewhere and get the data out (I've already got a tool that I wrote a while ago that will do that data extraction for me, as long as I can get everything back in SQL Server). I also had my daily backups of Exchange intact. Unfortunately I can't figure out how the fuck to actually get data OUT of those backups, and apparently there are a whole bunch of rules for how you can do disaster recovery with Exchange, and you apparently only get one chance per forest to get it right, and I screwed it all up. Yes, I know this would have been a wonderful opportunity to get reacquainted with PSS. I just don't care enough, especially since I got email working a bit ago using Windows Live Domains.

I also got ISA back up and running (finally), which explains why the site is back up and visible to everyone again. Surprisingly, I remembered the firewall rules better than I remembered things like server & organization names, so it was really pretty painless.

First snow fall of the 2006-2007 winter has begun.

Amusing/saddening page/video linked to by this blog entry: http://jwz.livejournal.com/703624.html. Enjoy.

In light of the recent Activation news for the Volume License versions of Vista, and the news that Windows Vista will stop working if it suspects a licensing violation, it looks like I probably wont be able to afford Windows Vista. At least, I wont be able to if I follow my current process of reinstalling every few weeks. Oh well, it's not like there's that many new features anyway…just updates to the kernel, the new audio system, new video system, new networking system, the Desktop Window Manager, full IPv6 support, Aero, search folders, UAC (a feature I LOVE, regardless of what everyone says), the new Offline Files mechanism (now that it works, unlike all of the pre-beta 2 builds), more granular power management controls, group policy control of power settings (!), the Sidebar (fine, I admit it, the ability to have multiple clocks and the weather constantly off to the side in a nice, subtle manner finally won me over), updated take on the Media Center interface, pen flicks for Tablet PC's, Mahjong and Chess as built-in games, the new, learning, recognizers for Ink on Tablet PC's, and the cleaned up login screen with user icons that work even in domain environments. Oh, and what really has me won over:

Yes, that is my Windows Vista desktop with sidebar, glass, and animated background.

This is the 7^th major version of ntldr.net. But, it's also the Beta, which is why it's at www.ntldr.com instead of www.ntldr.net. Basically, it's just Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Beta 2 Technical Refresh with the Blog site template and the Lacquer theme. Oh, and it now has (most of) the blog content from the Ntldr.net site.

Currently missing are: comments and any non-blog content (pictures, documents, etc.).

Pictures will probably be getting their own subsite, with a nifty tab letting people navigate to it. Comments probably won't get migrated. Not entirely sure on that part yet. Right now, anonymous commenting is allowed, but I'm going to be looking at using the fancy authentication provider support of WSS3 to see if I can't make that a register user thing.

Unfortunately, more changes to the site will probably have to wait until Thursday, since I've wasted too much time working on it already when I should have been trying to get some of the class work I have due done in advance of the (soft) deadlines.

Oh, and being able to use Word to make this blog entry ROCKS.