Wide water

We took the dog to the river side beach again today. It was nice and sunny again and we collected some more grapes and had a nice dog walk. Today's panorama is a view over the River Rance, with an inlet to the left of shot which goes to an old tidal mill and some salt flats, with the main channel running from the rear on the right to the right behind me where I took the picture from. So if you look south down the channel you are looking inland and upstream of the river. If you were to turn around and look north you would follow the river first to the barrage and then out into the Channel.

Best viewed full screen.



Back blip.


At the time I took this, we were working weekends to get the project into production for the start of October - which we always felt was absurd. So this weekend I was busting a gut to make changes before my long ago planned holiday in October. I think it was around now that the business started to realise that an October go-live was insane and though the decision to delay hadn't been made yet it was looming.

I'm back blipping this from the end of January and we actually went live at the start of January. The first element was synchronising the customers between the two systems which worked as I previously mentioned, and this week we've started to create customer invoices and send them out to customers so they can pay their bills.

We found some esoteric bugs with the customer interface which I've fixed. So far they've not surfaced in the production system, but are possible and we went looking for them in the test system, found them and fixed them, so those changes go in as well as some improvements next week. For the process of creating invoices we've so far found some unexpected behaviours from the staff and there are faults with the other system corrupting data, but the system I work with has so far worked correctly and without error. Again we'll add more checks for human behaviour, more logging, and some optimisations, but so far so good.

For those living in the UK, you may be very aware of the Horizon Scandal with Fujitsu and The Post Office. For anyone who works with complex business software, I can't believe that any court would ever take a complex IT system's word for anything. I work with SAP which is over 50 years old and is super robust and reliable, but it does have bugs and superusers can always change things without leaving a trace, for the British Courts to believe that the Horizon system was correct and thousands of people were wrong is laughable... Making sure our system is as bug free as possible has very much been in the forefront of our minds this week as we go-live - and the system issues invoices for millions of pounds.... So far we've been correct to the penny...