I acted as Project Manager to deploy Ivanti ITSM to a major UK law firm worth £20,000 in billable consultancy. I organised the workshops and kept track of time and change requests.

During deployment, I had to urgently manage a complaint from the client as our associate consultant had become stuck troubleshooting an issue and the clients confidence had been dented. I caught a train into London that day to meet the client and consultant onsite and, whilst looking at the problem, leaned on my own technical skills to troubleshoot the solution.

I then followed up with the vendor to confirm that it was a verified bug, and after giving a pep talk and advice to the consultant, I spoke with the client to clear up the misunderstanding and win their confidence back. I managed to convince them to keep our consultant onsite and continue the project.

The result is that I gained their confidence and they came back to us later for further implementations of ITSM modules.

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However I found a couple of annoyances when running it from CLI, one was in having to keep a terminal window open, the other was having to run it from it’s install directory – particularly when it comes to relative path names for kettle jobs.

So I created an alias that runs PDI in an interactive shell allowing you to run it from one a word command, and it occurred to me that this might be useful to share. Here you go:

alias spoon='sh -c '\''cd /opt/pentaho/data-integration; ./spoon.sh&'\'''

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As some of you know we were in Ireland recently (the reason for lack of posts) and I decided to take advantage of Stena Ferries free satellite wifi on the boat. I set a PQ for Cork and waited for it to build. When the query was ready I saved as usual to my shared Dropbox folder and then attached my Garmin 60CSx but despite loading fine onto my CacheBerry – the PQ just wouldn’y upload to the Garmin.

Puzzled, I tried an older PQ and verified that my script was working, as well as the Garmin was not having some kind of software fault. Next most obvious thing that occurred to me was perhaps the file was corrupted during download, after all it was a wireless connection via satellite on a moving ferry. I tested this theory by downloading the PQ again. Then I downloaded one I’d created earlier. The earlier one (Watford) worked, the Cork didn’t.

Then I decided to test the website PQ builder itself – maybe there was a technical problem. I checked the forums but there was nothing reported, so I posted a thread which didn’t go anywhere. I then tried creating an entirely new PQ of Leicester (never run before). I downloaded and Leicester loaded up onto my GPS no problem.

So there was something local to Cork which was borking my PQ which had to be in the file itself. I didn’t have much time left so I tried a splicing the file with my newly created Leicester PQ. I opened up the GPX file and chopped out the header:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<gpx xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" version="1.0" creator="Groundspeak Pocket Query" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.topografix.com/GPX/1/0 http://www.topografix.com/GPX/1/0/gpx.xsd http://www.groundspeak.com/cache/1/0 http://www.groundspeak.com/cache/1/0/cache.xsd" xmlns="http://www.topografix.com/GPX/1/0">

<name>Cork</name>

<desc>Geocache file generated by Groundspeak</desc>

<author>Groundspeak</author>

<email>contact@groundspeak.com</email>

<time>2010-06-16T03:12:46.2642819Z</time>

<keywords>cache, geocache, groundspeak</keywords>

<bounds minlat="51.551967" minlon="-9.37105" maxlat="52.428967" maxlon="-7.593717" />

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><gpx xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" version="1.0" creator="Groundspeak Pocket Query" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.topografix.com/GPX/1/0 http://www.topografix.com/GPX/1/0/gpx.xsd http://www.groundspeak.com/cache/1/0 http://www.groundspeak.com/cache/1/0/cache.xsd" xmlns="http://www.topografix.com/GPX/1/0">  <name>Cork</name>  <desc>Geocache file generated by Groundspeak</desc>  <author>Groundspeak</author>  <email>contact@groundspeak.com</email>  <time>2010-06-16T03:12:46.2642819Z</time>  <keywords>cache, geocache, groundspeak</keywords>  <bounds minlat="51.551967" minlon="-9.37105" maxlat="52.428967" maxlon="-7.593717" />

and footer:

</gpx>

I then copied the remaining xml and pasted it below the header in the Leicester PQ, then saved this and zipped it back up.

I ran my script and and uploaded it to my 60CSx – it worked!

I can’t see anything wrong with the header info above but this is where the error seems to lie. Maybe it’s something to do with the coordinates in the boundary tag, or perhaps some hidden character I missed. Does anyone more technical in both xml and WGS84 Datum than me have an idea?

Oddly enough, subsequent PQs for Cork after we arrived worked too.

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