Colon trouble :-S

So, I have had an interesting few weeks. I have had the opportunity to experiment with technology, out of my reach in my previous incarnation, from virtualising operating systems, developing in the brave new world of EC2 Cloud Computing all the way through to deploying (locally) a PRPC solution.

The latter gave me some trouble I am not embarrassed to say!

What I am embarrassed to say is that with a little less impetuosity, I could've done it without a single hitch 50% quicker and without troubling people who have more important things on their hands.

It is a complex thing to fully deploy PRPC, that is undisputable (I've met many experienced PRPC folks who have all hit hurdles)... first, you gotta deploy Oracle (fine) create a new DB and implement a schema (fine), one has to then deploy and configure the application server (again... fine). After a few other little bits and pieces, you just have to deploy the application through the app server and finally get the two things (the app and the DB) to talk to one another.

NOT FINE. I spent a good few hours slowly going out of my mind trying to get the application to launch... but it just wouldn't!! I trawled through the log files and identified the error (it said that the database connection setting was incorrect).

However I read the xml configuration settings through line by line and character by character (or at least *convinced myself that I had*), but to no avail.

I started chasing my tail and delving deeper than I ever should in things that had nothing to do with Database connectivity, I started pulling things to pieces (and not just my own hair follicles), and in the end I had to concede and went cap in hand to Tim.

The time between reaching out to Tim and getting an answer that resolved the problem was sub 3 minutes.

What was my nemesis? A COLON... yes... one simple ":" in the connection detail was missing.

What did I learn? Well it is this simple lesson... I must stop brushing over the mundane in pursuit of the elaborate; not every problem involves a complex eureka-esque solution whereby I need to couple the RDB to the flux-capacitor using transmorphic bio-arrays, unilaterally synced via VPN over a Satellite protocol to jumpstart the JDBC (I don't work for CTU, as much as it is fun to pretend and use the same ring-tone).

This same lesson can be applied through business... look hard enough, and you will find in business complex, over-engineered processes in place purely because some bright-spark implemented a work-around for a short-term solution, which then ultimately gets tied down as "BAU" because everyone got used to it being there.

We side-step process efficiency to offer 'above and beyond' or 'bells-and-whistles' service for that one customer, resulting in the loss of streamlining opportunities, and before we know it all the customers want that same manual process applied to them, when significantly more customers would benefit from better service delivered via a scaled-down efficient simple solution, in half the time.

What is the moral of the story for me? Well; it is this - it is entirely plausible that, when the error says simply "the connection settings are not quite right, are you sure you typed them correctly?”; sometimes the answer can just be "no... I forgot a colon". After all.... you can't make a smiley without one

:)