So here’s the deal. I’m a developer at an insurance company. We are two full time developers, one full time report writer and then our manager develops whenever he has the time. Now we trying to get a new policy in place whereby users are not just allowed to call us directly. They have to make use of a system called SysAid. Now for those of you that don’t what sysAid is, basically its a small app on which users can log help requests that then gets sent to us. Now that we starting to enforce the use of SysAid a lot of the users are no longer happy.

Whereas they used to phone and whatever was done over the phone, they now need to “pick a number and wait” so that we go through the requests in the order in which we get them. A lot of the users are now complaining that we aren’t working. Which naturally is a load of crap, but we have to now “improve the image of IT in the company”. How the hell do you improve the “image” of a department? out of our approx 250 users in the company, maybe 5 understand what does into effecting a change on a system. Besides maintaining various system we need to develop and maintain more systems!

Here’s typical query: We have two buttons on a form, one says Calculate A and the other says Calculate B. People call us and get all upset because they trying to calculate B and they are in fact clicking Calculate A! Any developer here would laugh at it the first time it happens. but when you deal with problems such as this all day is begins to take its toll! So not only has your train of thought been interrupted by an irate user BUT you now have to spend 5minutes helping them. The second problem we have is people randomly walking into our office for help. Again, 5 - 10 minutes helping them and your train of thought is gone. Now that we enforcing the rule of making use of SysAid, which rocks just BTW, everyone is getting really upset.

How would you improve the “image” of the IT department? Do we throw little parties after work and show them that “we are just like them”? How would you “portray” the amount of work done to different sets of users? We’ve come up blank on this!

REDMOND, Wash. — July 5, 2007 —Microsoft Corp. today announced that it will expand its global Xbox 360™ warranty coverage. Any Xbox 360 customer who experiences a general hardware failure indicated by three flashing red lights will now be covered by a three year warranty from date of purchase.  All other existing Xbox 360 warranty policies remain in place.

This is such great news!!!!! Read the full story at: http://www.xbox.com/en-US/support/systemsetup/xbox360/resources/warrantyupdate.htm

Thats right! After looking at the eNaTIS website trying to figure out why someone would want to deface already ugly looking sight, I looked at the source of the page and what do I see?

meta content=”Joomla! - Copyright (C) 2005 - 2006 Open Source Matters. All rights reserved.” name=”Generator”

So our new Traffic Website is powered by a *FREE* *OPEN SOURCE* Content Management System?! Thats right folks! This *FREE* *OPEN SOURCE* implementation of Joomla! for the traffic department cost us, the taxpayers R408-million! (http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=308153&area=/insight/insight__national/) Now how the heck is this possible? I realize there is some extra functionality that has been incorporated into the site and that the Database backend might have required some brainpower but R408 Million worth? I just can’t understand it!

Lets have a look at Tasima (the company who “developed” eNaTIS) homepage. Go to http://www.tasima.co.za/. Now, if I was looking at hiring a company to do a web based application for me that would be accessible to the public, I would see what their website looks like. Even their webpage looks terrible! Now according to http://validator.w3.org/ their Website is not even Valid for HTML 4.01 Transitional! Now I ask you, with tears in my little developer eyes, HOW THE HELL CAN THE GOVERNMENT SELECT THEM TO DO SUCH A PROJECT?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

The general image of IT in this country is that we do not have the skills to pull off projects such as this. That is because the government keeps selecting idiots like these to develop country critical systems! I can promise you right now, had they have selected a decent company such as Dariel Solutions (http://www.dariel.co.za) or Barone, Budge & Dominick (http://www.bbd.co.za/) or even a smaller company such as Signify Software (http://www.signify.co.za/) they would have had a much safer and better constructed system!

All the above mentioned companies are masters of carefully planning a system, giving the client feedback about progress and TESTING THEIR APPLICATIONS! The government needs to do some research into companies before awarding them a contract such as this. But then again, it is the South African Government we are talking about and they aren’t always too fond of actually doing work. Especially tedious work such as inspecting companies previous projects. I think the worst thing to arise from the eNaTIS saga is that developers in the country are being given a bad name by one single company. Joe Soap from the general public will never see the true talent we have in this country because all the best developers write and maintain internal systems for local companies and international ones.

There are hundreds of firms in this country that have international clients! The websites are not hosted locally due to excessive broadband prices, but they are developed by South Africans.

Thats right! I just got engaged to the most amazing woman I’ve ever met. I mean DUH! Thats why I’m planning on marrying her.

Lately I’ve been using http://www.musicovery.com/ every single night. It is just so interesting. Simply select the timeframe of music you want, genres of music and your mood and it gives you an amazing selection of music.

I have no idea how it works but it would be very interesting to know! Thanks to Ernest for pointing this one out. You can read his original post here : http://dotnet.org.za/ernst/archive/2007/07/02/music-that-suits-your-mood.aspx

well once again time has eluded me. <insert general excuse about too much work here>. So I’ve now decided to get Certified so now I just need to get hold of all the books that I need for studying and then of course the time to study.

I’m also using a Trial version of an application called “Ecto” to write this post. It is a windows application from which you can manage multiple blogs. So far it seems really good and I think I’ll be buying this. Still have 14 days trial left.

Over the next few weeks I want to start having a look at Microsoft’s Silverlight and possibly start delving into some CSS. Funny thing, I’ve been a web developer for almost 2 years and I still don’t understand CSS. I realize saying something like this doesn’t reflect very well but we don’t all know everything we should now do we?