User Experience

Oh Today has been fun. I shall recall my ‘user experience’, just in-case anyone else needs a little help or that on the very rare chance someone who can make a difference(if decided that one really needs to be made) ever decides to check what the end users are experiencing.

Now today I am using: Unicenter Application Performance Monitor 3.5.1 (now)patched upto 02-06-06 from Computer Associates.
Ok here goes:

I started off trolling the CA web site (Which I must admit, actually proved to be quite straight forward) looking for a reason why APM is blue screening every time I install the agent. So after finding the new patches and figuring out that I also need the new version of the patch installer and getting that all done and in place I figured I was away laughing. Well, in effect I was(I guess).

Well that was until I looked at the documentation. But lets not get into that just right now. Ok so the default path for the Transaction Server (which is a feature you can have on your agent machine that does a set of user-programmed tasks and reports to the agent and then onto your manager) is c:\caapmts. Now this is I think the fourth different path that has come from this package, but were not getting hung up on this at the moment. So, what I decided to do, and not unjustly in my own opinion, was to change the path a little, for example say, we could put it inside a structured CA folder?. This is not crasy is it? Not too much of a reach? What’s that you say? The developer’s will kill kittens if I do? Well then my friend, I guess I might just opt to make the name a little more readable, I suppose then they can just get off with a little maiming. So. As it stands, I changed the folder name during the install to C:\CA_APM_TS.

Ah yes, now that is a little better. We have a little a semi readable but yet still badly placed folder name. But alas that will do for now.

Right so there I was thinking I had made the world that little bit better, so I load the Transaction Server and what? What is this? Where are all my Transactions? To the documentation I go! (Oh what a mistake that was). Now somewhere in this vague list of hints about the product I find a little paragraph stating that all transactions need to be placed in the transactions folder. What? There is no transaction folder! So I’m a little bit unsure here since there is no folder with that name. So I’m lead to assume that they want us to create this ourselves. How nice I guess. The developers are trying to get us involved, leaving some work for us to do ourselves. Ah ha, so I make the folder…. and put my transactions inside… and yes, I guess I do feel a little more involved. How thought-full. But now what? nothing happens? Hrm… So after too long looking and experimenting and after going just a little bit crasy, I decided, hey!, ‘I’m crasy already, now i can think like whoever wrote this code’. So I create an empty folder called caapmts in the c drive root, and make a transactions folder in that with all my things, and yes, you guessed it. Everything is happy again. All is found.

So my conclusions are lead to the following: They want us to use badly named randomly placed folders. Free thought and the idea of following conventions are taboo.

Now I’m not sure if I like this philosophy and I’m not sure if this is really is the kind of image CA wants to project. What do you think about this? Is this kinda thing a really big deal? Or just a commonly overlooked by-product produced from the sheer size and geographical displacement of these larger software umm.. ‘developers’?

problem of the day: usort

PHP:

OK, I need to sort a multi dimensional array by an element in the inner array. At the moment I’m doing a dirty double for loop, but i have something like(below) this in mind. Only trouble is that uSort needs to call the function as a parameter. _But I need this in a class. So something like this just doesn’t seem to work. Any ideas?

usort($this->rows, ‘cmpi’);

function cmpi($a, $b){

global $sort_field;
return strcmp($a[$sort_field], $b[$sort_field]);

}

UPDATE: OK so here we go. Soultion:

usort( $this->rows, array( $this, ‘cmpi’ )  );

Now I can make the ‘cmpi’ function inside my class and then call it using the above.

Problem for the day: Solved.

ok ok its not that bad

OK so I guess I was focusing on the more negative aspects yesterday, and yes i do understand ‘modular’ development and that all these little parts are most likely out sourced to an extent. Well at least separately developed, although going as far as too justify the lack of a simple COBP? I’m not sure i can do that. Do we get any response to this? Us, the end users. Or do we have to call India again? (not that ‘we’ have called India about this, or that ‘we’ are even looking for a reply, I guess you can just take that as another dig)

what could be worse?

I have been tasked to learn Unicenter APM( Application Performance Manager ) from CA (Computer Associates) and all its little thingys so we can add this application to the team KB. Since it is becoming more and more desired in the industry, at least locally. It is, as it is so justly named, a performance tool, which nicely ties into application etc calls. There is quite a few steps in the process, which I wont bore you with, (unless of course you leave a comment indicating interest ) (EDIT: there was a ‘winky’ or smiley face here, but i dislike them so.)
After spending far longer than i should of trying to get this damn thing working and getting to know NSM, in which the agent resides, I have found that I hate non-compliant 10+ year old software!(Honestly, I have found parts of the UI that are credited from 1991!) Trying to use a feature called worldview or something similarly obscure, you are presented with a completely unique interface with special buttons and hidden meanings. This is on a Windows system as-well!. My productivity is seriously hindered as I find myself just getting angry when it seems they have gone especially out of their way to make all things as counter intuitive as humanly, or not so in this case, possible. Gah!

Another example of CA hell, the CD or iso or whatever be it you have, there is a group of all the components. Now, there is an agent and a manager etc. So I pick three of these and install them. The following is a list of the three folders i get:

C:\CA_APPSW

C:\CAAPMTS

C:\WRS

How wonderful/. Someone must of forgot to setup the sign for the monkeys on the type writers, that or they didnt want to wait for a copy with the same naming conventions to be produced. GAH ITS BEEN ALMOST 15 YEARS>!

Well, I guess I should really prod on, although after venting I feel a little better.