Vschrader's Weblog

That seems to be a pattern!

vschrader — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 17:31:23 +0000

I recently was asked by a consultant to assess a game plan to roll out a an alternate web based data collection system, one of those 3 letter acronym systems. The existing system was in use by only 15% of the staff for the past 2 years. Management has determined that they should move away from this system as they are tired of paying a couple grand per month for the per user SAAS rental fees. The proposed system has roughly 25% of the features of the existing provider, although it does have 1 key feature the original provider lacks. The new system cost half as much as the current system per month. The customer is willing to do anything to get away from their existing vendor, including exporting and importing the data twice, once to get on to the new semi-lame system and secondly to a system they can grow with over time.

The problem is the new system is doomed to fail, just as the implementation of the previous system did. Why? Because of lack of management commitment to the system, management falsely believed that merely signing up for the system was enough for them to do, and that their staff would simply use it because it was available.

Alaska has gogo wifi LAX to SEATAC

vschrader — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 06:16:13 +0000

Pretty sweet, beef jerky, WordPress and your favorite JavaWorld reading at 30K feet, flight 245 one hour in! Too bad they don’t have some #LostAbbey AngelShare, I would be closer to heaven.

Musings on market changes

vschrader — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 04:42:57 +0000

In the past, client/server was de rigure, everyone owned their own applications/data/servers, now it seems vendors are willing to pay you or discount your expense so they can hold your data and applications. I wonder how many hosted application providers have the integrity to not cannabalize your data/leads? And what repercussion could that have, and how would you even know that it occurred, after you lost the deal?

Mysterys of Maven integration with Eclipse

vschrader — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:46:22 +0000

For sometime, I’ve been working to use Eclipse with various ASF projects. In lieu of any obvious standout plugins, I tried them all: mevenide, m2eclipse, and q4e. After some number of months, I’m finally pretty happy with the use of q4e from googlecode. There is some secret sauce to the concoction, but the essence of what I have discovered is that the 0.7.0 code seems to work well on the classic version of eclipse version r 3.3.2.x on either Linux or Windows. The version working for me is available at:

http://q4e.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/updatesite-dev

It is installed via the Help–>Add new features–>Find and install method of altering the eclipse configuration. It appears this may work with the WTP version of eclipse as well, but I have not tested that configuration.