This blog contains experience gained over the years of implementing (and de-implementing) large scale IT applications/software.

Blog Readership, Almost 7,000

Since December 2013, my blog readership has really taken off.
It’s nearly at 7,000 page views per month:

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Which is the most popular post of all time, well it’s still my multi-post guide to basic performance tuning a SAP system (published in 2011), but very closely followed by my recent HANA installation into a VM post.
You will also notice that a lot of readers are looking for the FICO authorisation objects F_REGU_BUK and F_REGU_KOA:

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We can see that the US is very dominant in the stats, secondly India and then Germany.  The UK is in 4th place:

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It’s a close call between IE and Chrome in the browsers used.
Good job I’ve written my free extension for searching SAP notes, in Chrome!

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Thanks for reading everyone.
I hope I’ve provided you with the solutions you’ve sought.

Darryl

Fuci Fuci insect Italia

Whilst in Puglia in the south of Italy, I’ve come across the locally named Fuci Fuci insect (in dialeto) which is Puliese dialect for “run run”.
A quick search of the internet doesn’t tell you what this insect is actually called, based on the dialect name, not surprising.
It’s a member of the centipede family and is known as the House Centipede.  It is documented here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scutigera_coleoptrata
It’s harmless and is probably on the hunt for spiders!
Still, it creeps me out that something can run 0.5 meters in 1 second!

Broken 2,000 page views per month!

Just a quick note to say thanks to all readers who have recommended this site, my posts and articles, commented or just browsed.  I’m glad that it has served so many people and I’ve really enjoyed seeing the reader count increase over the past months.

I’ve finally made it past the 2,000 page views per month target after only 18 months of being an active blogger.  I’m now hoping to hit 5,000 in the next 6 months…

If you have found this site helpful, then help others find it by clicking the Google +1 link on posts, or linking on your own blog site or Linkedin or Facebook.

Many thanks,

Darryl

Downtime & Language Barriers

Whilst I took some time out on holiday, I was able to get away from the almost non-existent UK summer and off to a much warmer climate.
It got me thinking about the language of IT and the difficulties that other non-native English speakers may be exposed too when trying to decipher Oracle docs or SAP notes, or any other form of documentation.

In my experience, I’ve often had difficulty reading SAP notes that have been translated to English from German and Oracle docs that have been written in English from the off, but badly worded.
I think the Plain English Campaign would have a field day with some of the material I’ve had to put up with.

If you’re working with a mission critical system and you can’t be 100% sure on what the documentation is asking you to do, could it reflect badly on you as a professional?  Possibly.

I guess Google Translate is probably the most preferred tool for translating notes and docutentation, unless the reader is confident enough in what they already know.
So would this mean those that perform IT as a profession, in a non-English speaking country, must know the products more in-depth and rely less on the documentation?  Maybe.

Make Blogger.com Show a List Of Labels By Title Only

NOTE: I have since stopped using feed2js as blogged about below.  I’m writing a new post on how to do this using the Google Feeds API.

Do you use Blogger.com for your blogging?
One of the short comings of Blogger.com is the categorisation of posts.  Also known as tagging or labeling.
There is no neat way in Blogger.com that you can list all posts by a specific label.  The standard method produces a massive page listing all the contents of all the pages containing your selected label.
This is not very helpful if you’re looking for something and it’s also very slow to load.

After spending much time looking for a solution I found feed2js.  A Google Code project that allows you to embed an RSS feed into a web page using JavaScript.

Here’s an example I’ve been using on my blog since day one: https://www.it-implementor.co.uk/p/all-blog-posts.html
Not only is it just what I need, but I’ve managed to program it so that it can dynamically take a parameter on the end of the URL and display any specified label.
Example: https://www.it-implementor.co.uk/p/all-blog-posts.html?label=Musing   will only display pages containing the “Musing” label.

Want to see how it works?
Here’s the code:

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
var mylabel='<MyDefaultLabel>';
var key='label';
var regex = new RegExp("[\?&]"+key+"=([^&#]*)");
var qs = regex.exec(window.location.href);
if(qs != null)
   mylabel = qs[1];
var cssStr = ".rss-title {visibility: hidden; margin: 0em; border: 0px; font-size: 1;} .rss-box {margin: 0em; border: 0px;}";
var style = document.createElement("style");
style.setAttribute("type", "text/css");
if(style.styleSheet){// IE
style.styleSheet.cssText = cssStr;
} else {// w3c
var cssText = document.createTextNode(cssStr);
style.appendChild(cssText);
}
document.write ('<h2>All Posts For Label: ', mylabel, '</h2>');
document.write('<script src="https://feed2js.org/feed2js.php?src=http%3A%2F%2F<BLOGURL>%2Ffeeds%2Fposts%2Fdefault%2F-%2F', mylabel, '&amp;desc=100&amp;date=y&amp;utf=y" type="text/javascript"></script>');
// -->
</script></div>
Thanks to <a href="https://feed2js.org/">feed2js.org</a>

Copy and paste the code (as text without formatting) into a new Page in your blog (not a Post!, a Page).  Call the new Page all-blog-posts.html
In the code (in “HTML” mode when editing the page) change the line containing “<MyDefaultLabel>” to be your default label name (case sensitive).
You should also change the text “<BLOGURL>” to be your blog’s URL without the “https://” bit.
By default the code is set to display 100 characters of each entry under it’s title.  You change the number 100 to be 0 for none or a larger/smaller number.
You can also choose to remove the “Thanks” line, but it’s nice to give recognition for hard work.

Now you can call the all-blog-posts.html page from anywhere in your blog (or outside your blog) and just append the label name (case sensitive) after the page URL plus a question mark and the text “label”.
E.g. https://yourblog.blogspot.com/p/all-blog-posts.html?label=MyLabel