work currently

all i can think of. all that runs through my head. quit quit quit quit. as soon as i turn to this thing that i have been assigned to do. quit. there is no motivation. no desire. i dont really understand it. and have been left alone to work on it. why. it is fair i dont like it so much. that i dont want to do it so badly. does everyone just do stuff they dont like? hell no. that is not me. i refuse. the remaining issue is how to deal with this situation appropriately then. do i press through and get this last thing done then break clean? that is what im assuming is going to be my current action plan. and by assuming i mean that is what im going to do unless confronted with a radical opposing soultion.

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’?