Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

So here’s how the rest of the “48 hours” went.

Friday Continue reading “48 Hours in the Life of a Business Objects Trainer Part II”

As I write this I am just getting ready to welcome my students back for day 2 of the Advanced Designer course. How did I get here? It’s an interesting story. Or maybe it’s not, you get to decide. 🙂

Continue reading “48 Hours in the Life of a Business Objects Trainer”

In the first post on designing universe prompts I talked about the idea of having a default date value present in a prompt. In case you don’t want to read the entire post, here is the executive summary:

You can’t do it, sorry.

At the end of that post I mentioned something called a “magic date” that I frequently use in my universes to get past this limitation. That’s my subject for today.

Problem Definition

I have a date prompt in my universe. I would like to be able to provide a default value of today’s date. This would allow my users to click-n-go on the report without having to update the date value each time. It is also essential for scheduled reports, which is something I didn’t really touch on last time. When I schedule a report, I have to provide values for every prompt. I have a long series of posts on how to create some dynamic date objects that can be used for scheduling, but those were not prompts.

In a nutshell: I need a way to accept a prompt value and convert it to today’s date for user convenience and for scheduling. Can I make that happen?

Continue reading “Using a “Magic Date” Value in Prompts”

I apologize for deviating from my normal content, but I had to share this. Joss Whedon (creator of Buffy, Angel, and Firefly) is going to release a new musical… online! If you are a Buffy fan and remember the musical number (from season 4, I think) then you have to see this. It looks great… they have Neil Patrick Harris as the mad scientist, and Nathon Fillion as the superhero.

The teaser goes something like this:

For every day… there is a night.
For every world… there is an underworld
And for every hero… there is…. this guy?

This should be great! 😆

I made it a personal goal when I started this blog to have at least two posts a month. Here it is, May 15th, and there are no posts yet. 😳 The main reason is that I am trying to get projects wrapped up or at least to a point where I can be gone for a week, since the SAPPHIRE conference in Berlin starts next week.

I have lots of things started. 🙂 Maybe I’ll get some finished on the plane. 😎

I have had a photography site online for many years. It was one of the first sites I built, and lately is the last site to get any loving attention. 🙂 I fixed a little bit of that a few weeks ago when I launched my new photography blog, and plugged it into that site.

So if you’re interesting in things outside of the IT world, I would love to have you stop by, read a post or two, and maybe even leave a comment. 😎

Moments of Light Photography Blog

It seems that my installation of WordPress on this blog was hacked. Yes, I was out of date. Yes, I have fixed it. Yes, I have checked my server and everything seems fine. Yes, I’m pissed that people don’t seem to have anything better to do. 🙄

In any case, one of the symptoms was that all of my “pages” were changed to posts and then hidden for some reason. So if you were missing the conference download links, they’re back now.

I had two possible titles in mind for this blog post. The other one was “It’s Alive!” but I decided to go the Grateful Dead route instead. First, because I’m grateful it’s over. Second, because I almost feel dead after working until 2:30 AM or later last weekend. What am I talking about?

I’m talking about BOB Version III.

Continue reading “What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been”

I have a “recent comments” plug-in installed here. It shows the five most recent comments in the sidebar. What I really want is a link that will display recent comments in the main body of the page. If anyone has a link (I have looked all over, and found only code for comments in the sidebar) please let me know. Thanks.

One of the original Dungeon Masters passed on when Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, died today. There have been plenty of people who have had an impact on the lives of millions, but Gary hits closer to home. He had an impact on me.

I started playing Dungeons and Dragons in 1980. I kept playing through college and beyond. I met some really great people along the way, and remain friends with many. I even have a Dungeons and Dragons themed website that has never quite received the amount of attention that it deserves. I would be willing to bet that the percentage of people that work in the information technology industry today that played D&D is quite high. Hm, maybe I need to figure out how to do polls on my blog. 🙂

Even this web site shows touches of Dungeons and Dragons. The logo in the top corner, the text that changes under the blog title, even the title itself can all be traced back to origins in some fashion or another related to D&D. I have many fond memories of playing the game into the wee hours of the morning. I have what feels like acres of shelf space dedicated to D&D books and other materials. I have created worlds. 🙂

Thank you, Gary.