Outsourcing

Spug: Over the past few weeks I have been managing an outsourced Notes development.

All: Hey what was it like?

Spug: Well, they were a bit dodgy to be honest, deadlines were promised and missed; agents with no option declare; still using navigators; no authors fields and all editors in ACL; some BIG assumptions about the clients setup that kind of exposed their lack of knowledge.

All: That doesn't sound good, were they cheap?

Spug: Well they did the whole job for 200 Benson and Hedges so I guess so.

All: How did you communicate?

Spug: It was all done with Skype and sametime for demos. Sametime is a bit dodgey IMHO.

All: Were there any language problems?

Spug: No, because the contact was an expat englishman. He sounded a like he'd been up all night on the marching powder most times, and all the developers were called lulu or la-la. I am assuming they were all Ladyboys.

All: So would you recommend them?

Spug: No. Not because I think outsourcing is evil, it is just that they were unprofessional and their code did not blow my hair back. I wanted it all to work, honest, as it would have been handy to have the option if my company needed it; trouble was they were shite and I didn't trust them. I think you have to be on the top of your game to be an outsourcer.

All: So do you still think we are all tomorrow's TV repairmen?

Spug: You bet I do you. We are all doomed and will wallow in the cess pool of out own making.

Workplace Client Technology architecture

This might help ...

IBM Workplace Client Technology architecture

Looks like we got a reader

I was reading about this fella who got fired from Google for blogging. The first line of this entry made me laugh out loud. Reminds me of that Bill Hicks routine.

Roller Weblogger Part I

In which the Spugster tries to get mail working in his install of Roller Weblogger.

Scene I: A small office in Gloucestershire.

I'd followed all the instructions to the lettter and copied the mail.jar and activation.jar to the tomcat/common/lib directory and I was still gettting the JNDI error about "Cannot create resource instance".

I fannied around for ages, googling this googling that and finally in bowles of some obscure tech forum:

Are you using Tomcat 5.0.25? If so, you may want to consider upgrading or just stealing common/lib/naming-factory.jar from a 5.0.24 version of Tomcat. org.apache.naming.factory.MailSessionFactory is missing from tomcat
5.0.25.

That was the daddy. About fours hours that took me, great.

As the man said; "Open source software is just fab if your time is worthless"