April 10, 2019 - Wed

Logs
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As I mentioned changes to the ITSM system I administer were made live mostly yesterday and im kinda cleaning up and making appropriate folks it impacts aware this morning.

How we move things from dev, to test, to prod is kinda wierd. And I feel like explaining a bunch of stuff about our ITSM system. So here we go:

The underlying philosophy under the hood of this software is a kinda object oriented database. All objects are bundles of metadata and fields. These objects have a series of possible states they can be in. With logical rules, and automated workflows assigned to these states. Often with additional rules to make them fire only if certain conditions durring that state are true. At a very fundamental level that is all this software is; it just has been preconfigured to do ITSM stuff very well out of the box. (Incident, Change Management, etc.) By building those kinds of objects in the system. Each object and each instance of an object also has a unique recID it uses to find things. (unique randomly generated string).

The system keeps a running log of changes to the object structure/rules/workflows/etc in XML. But not the data, or instances of the objects per se. When you build a datastructure in dev. You collect all the XML transactions into a package. (Kinda a big zipped XML diff patch), and promote it to test, or staging.

While OFTEN it makes sense to ignore data (instances of objects) when moving between instances. Occasionally workflows or rules have to refrence or have depdencies on data.

So for example in what we just promoted into Production, included a new kind of object. In this case a new role for a new type of user. But I still had to go into production this morning and assign that role to users. The role could be packaged, but who gets that role couldn’t be. Also some of the workflows and rules around incidents have been tweaked to refrence a new service this department offers. And now that these workflows and rules are in production they need to realligned slightly. As the service is data, and wasn’t packaged so it’s unique recID doesn’t exactly match the same one we had been using in staging or test.

Thats the kind of stuff im doing this morning.

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I’m going to the capitol today to voice my opposition at an assembly bill hearing.

https://aedn.assembly.ca.gov/hearings

Then stopping by IKEA to finally get a desk for my office! Then home and feverish assembly.

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I’m working on my retro gaming collection, and recently bought a Wizardry game for PS2. Wizardry is a well-known PC game series, but it got super popular in Japan and they made several console ports, spin-offs and whatnot of the series. One of those, called Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land, was ported to the PS2. It was translated and released in the West. That’s the one I got.

There was also one called Wizardry: Lost Labyrinth I think, that was for PS3. It was only ever released digitally in the West for the PS3.

In any case, Wizardry is a cool series that influenced the likes Yuji Horii, who developed Dragon Quest/Warrior, Ultima’s Lord British and many other game designers throughout the years.

Would I say to give the Wizardry series a shot? I dunno, because unless you have a guide, it’s really difficult. But the combat is a lot of fun and figuring out your way through the mazes gives you a sense of accomplishment. Overall, if you’re into tough(er) games, I say try it.

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When they were first translating them to Japanese there were references that most gamers would not get unless they were also into specific sub-cultures, and yet were required to move forward in the game. It happened so much, it eventually became part of Wizardry culture to make arbitrarily difficult in-game clues. :slight_smile:

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@tim wields so much power. We have a citizen within driving distance of California’s capitol. Keep in mind folks. The Life Raft

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