html question

[MikeH]

What if I need some big empty spots in the middle of the page for charts?

before you ask - no, I'm not reimplementing Excel in Tomcat (I'm not retarded), I'm using j-integra which appears to be ****ing awesome.

Do what Asher said, lay the entire page out using absolutely positioned divs. The big empty spots for charts are just big blank divs in the middle where you can load your charts.

[MikeH]

j-integra is Java and .NET? OMG. Hell.

The twin satans of the web.

[Kuciwalker]

thanks

btw this is, indeed, a mission-critical 'app'

[Kuciwalker]

j-integra is Java and .NET? OMG. Hell.

The twin satans of the web.

Java and COM. I'm directly accessing Excel through javafied VBA.

[rah]

I've worked an many financial/insurance institutions. In IT, to do a simple change like changing an input dataset name would require a couple of days as it was pushed through all the different quality and checking processes. But then some moron in accounting was making multi million dollar decisions based on a spreadsheet that a fellow worker had made a change in that screwed up all the projections. No one noticed the problem for almost 5 years.

[Asher]

Java and COM. I'm directly accessing Excel through javafied VBA.

gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggah

I hope it handles the COM references properly for you. Could have memory leaks if you don't.

[MikeH]

That has always astounded me. The audit and change controls that they have in place for production software but then use spreadsheets with absolutely no control at all.

Because they can do it quickly and bypass the change control and auditing!

Have I ever related the story of a guy, a low level user in recruitment being trained on our system?

He said something like "can we have a button to do this on this page?"

What we thought: er, no, sorry there are all kinds of good technical and process reasons why that's a horrible idea and your bosses in the room understand that but...

What we said: no, sorry there are technical reasons, and it's not good for the process...

What he said: My brother in law made some websites, we could get him to put it on for you it's quite easy.

[rah]

While I usually spend considerable time poking fun at change control and auditing, it does have it's place. I have no problem with AD hoc reporting as long as people realize what they're getting and have another process for at least looking at it for reasonability before using that info to make important decisions. Historically, accounting departments are the ones that use the "it's quick and easy" excuse then get blasted when there's quality issues or it gets deleted with no backups. It's even worse in companies where some nimrod has placed IT under the Finance people. Then the finance weenies can force the IT department to provide the domini domini on their crappy spreadsheet applications. Which is really silly since the hardest thing in development is getting a good spec. Spreadsheets can be used as a spec for a properly maintained application.
Some may argue that you can put heavy layers of control on spreadsheets to eliminate the risk, but I've never seen anyone stick to it.

[MikeH]

Exactly. You can, but it's hard to enforce when anyone can create a new spreadsheet whenever they want.

And document management is dull.

[Asher]

One of our web designers (not developers) got in trouble last week for doing his work quickly.

Management sent him an email asking him for an estimate for how long it'd take to "rebrand" (change logo files only) a website. He just did it, an hour later he said "It took me an hour...done".

He got this email in response (names redacted):

Hold your horse…..

No mater how small the task, you must follow company process.
1. Provide the estimate
2. Obtain the approval to start work (normally thru (redacted))
3. Make the changes in TEST
4. UAT
5. Obtain user sign-off
6. Obtain OCC approval
7. Move codes to Production

Please provide your estimate to me, we will work with (redacted) thru the process

Please follow the above instructions.

[rah]

Mike, Especially hard when the enforcers report to the rule breakers.

[rah]

And yes, Asher, I can share the frustration there. For me the question would have been how many people rely on the site. If it's a handful of people, I'd make the change in an hour and let the user community know a change had been made and let me know if anything looked suspicious. But If it going out to thousands of users that are critical to your business, FOLLOW PROPER CHANGE MANAGEMENT.

And I'm usually that Cowboy development guy breaking the rules. (or more likely the guy that authorized it)

[Asher]

He literally just changed image files from the old logo to the new one. No code or functionality was changed.

I'm normally about proper change management, but ****ing discretion is to be provided. The overhead for following the proper paper trail would take many days and use up many hours of time from many people. For trivial changes.

These sites also get virtually no traffic from humans. They exist only for search engine optimization purposes. The logos were supposed to be changed in March but no one even noticed til now.

To make matters worse, there are no test versions of these sites. He would have to bug me to copy the production code and set up the test infrastructure for it. It's retarded.

[rah]

If the sites were as unimportant as you stated, I would have authorized it and defended any complaints. But I can remember one site where an image was changed and we got in big trouble with the client because the developer had not used the exact shade of blue in our clients logo. It was so close that most people wouldn't have noticed it, but clients can be quite picky about things like that.

[MikeH]

To be fair "how long would this take" is very different to "can you do this". And you can circumvent the process for some things, but you need to still get the go ahead to make the change.

Working for a small company is great, and we can shortcut that process for trivial stuff, but even we'd have an exchange like

"how long to change this logo?"
"just have to swap the files over and deploy, a few minutes"
"ok great, can you do it on friday morning?"
"yep"

And we'd record it as a task record. We'll record even the simplest stuff for when someone asks "why has this changed?"

The key thing for me there is that he was never asked to make the change, based on your account. And saying it takes an hour to change an image is **** too, give an honest estimate or I think you are spending 55mins watching the world cup.

(can't wait to get my new minion!)