Staff scheduling for Agencies

As finalists: members of the Ava team are off to Stockholm next week to take part in the Ericsson application awards for in their words "Apps for City Life" to promote innovations towards the Networked Society by connecting people, things and places to empower individuals and society.

Our application: Map4Map allows one or more "parent" phones to remotely monitor the position of other linked "child" phones and raise an alarm when the "child" phone strays from previously permitted routes.

Links you might find useful

Ericsson application awards  I deeply appologise for the photo...

Map4Map

We have updated the article helping you design and impliment your own web site without unnecessary costs.

• Its here...

Backups: what we recommend.

Your database should (nay must) be backed up. Ideally off site.

When I started this blog, over five years ago, I recommended a nice little product called SQLBackupandFTP. If you are in a large organisation with your own IT department then you will not need it. They will have all this organised.

If you are in a medium or fledgling company then this product is even better today that it was years ago. These days it will backup databases and logs, eamil you it has done it and even (paid version) ftp them of to your inexpensive Amazon S3 account.

The story

I recently experienced the solidity of SQLBackupAndFTP.  It will email you if there is an error. In  this case, there was a strange error saying the backup had completed successfully (it restored OK on another machine so no argument there) but there was still an error.

It reported (non techies can skip the description):

DETAILED LOG:
03/18/2013 11:45:15     Creating backup of "server database" to C:\Windows\TEMP\Pranas.NET\SQLBackupAndFTP\lcgxus5n (full)
03/18/2013 11:45:52     ERROR: Attempt to fetch logical page (1:376) in database 4 failed. It belongs to allocation unit 562949959843840 not to 72057594045005824.
Could not insert a backup or restore history/detail record in the msdb database. This may indicate a problem with the msdb database. The backup/restore operation was still successful.
Processed 48992 pages for database 'Server database', file 'AVAPADat' on file 1.
Processed 2000 pages for database 'Server database', file 'AVAPAObject' on file 1.
Processed 4 pages for database 'Server database', file 'AVAPALog' on file 1.
BACKUP DATABASE successfully processed 50996 pages in 36.274 seconds (10.983 MB/sec).
The statement has been terminated.
SQL Server: ".\AVA2008R2EXPRESS".
03/18/2013 11:45:52     ERROR: Job finished (With Errors)

The important thing was it reported the error and in sufficient detail that we were able to determine for our customer that whist their data itself was good, there was a problem with the MSSQL Database Engine. MSSQL is about as solid a piece of software as it is possible to get, so this is very unusual. In this case probably cause by a recent machine freeze and restart.

The solution (non techies can skip this):

We ran DBCC CHECKDB on the customer database: all passed.
We ran DBCC CHECKDB msdb and it reported a crossed allocation in the backup log table and otherwise ok. I was happy with that, if we lost a backup record so be it.
II used the following script to repair msdb:
ALTER DATABASE AdventureWorks2008R2 SET SINGLE_USER WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE;
BEGIN TRANSACTION;
DBCC CHECKDB ('AdventureWorks2008R2', REPAIR_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS);
COMMIT TRANSACTION;
ALTER DATABASE AdventureWorks2008R2 SET MULTI_USER;

The outcome

No customer data was lost, it took under an hour to fully resolve and everything was fine.

Useful links

SqlBackupandFtp

SQL Server - Repairing the database using DBCC CHECKDB

This is an increase over the current allotment of up to 13 weeks.

Parental leave applies to both men and women where the employee has a minimum of one year's continuous service and has Parental responsibility. For each child receiving a disability allowance, the allocation of unpaid parental leave will increase to 18 weeks up until their 18th birthday.

In the case of multiple children, the employee has the right to take unpaid parental leave in respect of each child.
During the unpaid parental leave, the employee's rights will be protected against holiday entitlement or notice of termination.

Links which may be helpful

Parental responsibility is defined here:

Children Act 1989:

In Scotland:

Children (Scotland) Act 1995

Adoptive parents here:

Adoption and Children Act 2002

In line with the growing trend of over 80% of UK adults having smart phones, we have started developing apps for these devices. The first of these apps is called Map4Map.

Map4Map allows one or more "parent" phones to track one or more "child" phones and the parent phone automatically receives an alarm if the child phone strays from previously designated routes or areas. The routes are easily set via your account on the map4map.com web site. If a phone is lost, simply download the free app and link it to your previous account. Map4Map does not require you to both use the same mobile operator. Map4Map was developed following the need to track a family member suffering from Alzheimer's who become lost in progressively smaller areas.  Map4Map only sends alarms when the "child" phone strays from mapped routes on their personal map (or re-joins that route).

We felt it would be better to gain expertise with a distinct app that was separate to Ava's main product range. It should however incorporate many of the functional aspects we would want to provide in a temp staffing relevant apps.  We have added additional development resources and personnel specifically for developing mobile apps.

You can find out more about Map4Map here...

Merry Christmas and happy New Year.

This season's greetings to all our customers, friends and associates past, present and future. We wish you an enjoyable festive period. To those of you fed up with the current TV fair, at the end there is a link at the end that I hope amuses. It concerns birds that have forgotten how to fly and a bird that done this so well, it has forgetten it has forgotten how to fly... Oh before you just randomly click through the link at the end: a bit how I found it.

As some of you know, I've moved home. Still in Henley. The "new" place suffers from somewhat ancient wiring. Still that is a project for the New Year. There are very few new houses in Henley. Also, Henley (in general) has quite poor Freeview reception.

However the Sky (fibre) broadband is super. The quality of installation and support is excellent: I'm happy to recommend it.  I'm quite a positive fan of O2 broadband as well.  

Chalk and cheese to BT. Any company that thinks so highly of customer support that is bases it nearly as close to the other side of the earth or to put it another way: about as far away as it can whist retaining it on planet earth, speaks for its-self.

So a laptop has been doing service in place of the restricted broadcast service.  Not that I watch much live TV anyway. I've been quite impressed by the range of stuff on YouTube. So when YouTube popped up with a suggestion about a Douglas Adams lecture I clicked on. For those of you who do not know, Steven Fry, zoologist Mark Carwardine and Douglas Adams have (or had in Douglas Adams case) a common interest in threatened species. This resulted in a nicely off the wall series called "A last chance to See"  Wiki entry is here. The YouTube suggestion is an original presentation by the late Douglas Adams. Curiously this is not referenced by the wiki article or the BBC page, so I bring them together here.

Learn about recent advances in twig technology and progressively less excellent forms of transport...Enjoy:

Douglas Adams: Parrots the Universe and Everything, UCtelevision

Midnight run life imitates art: and you thought the bounty hunters were portrayed as stupid…

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the film Midnight run it is a very fast and enjoyable chase movie where two smart guys: Jack Walsh (a bounty hunter) played by Robert de Nero and Jonathan Marducas (a mafia accountant) played by Charles Grodin are on the run from the FBI, the Mafia and another bounty hunter whilst the de Niro character is trying to deliver the Grodin one from Chicago to LA to be a witness in a trial against the Mafia.

Each actor consistantly strives to out gruff the other.

In one scene Grodin has been captured by a rival bounty hunter who sends a picture of Grodin holding the Day's newspaper as proof for ransom. The picture also includes the monogrammed hotel towel in the background.

And so it was that John McAfee of anti-virus software fame had his location disclosed by the modern day equivalent when a geo tagged iPhone photo was posted on a blog by a "Vice" magazine reporter.

More on the McAffee story and iPhone geo tagging here:  

If you haven't seen it then you could do worse than watch midnight run over Christmas. It goes well with a good glass of wine, biscuits and some stilton cheese.

About the Midnight run film here: 

A trailer for the film is on our facebook page:

If someone has been familiar with web technology for years, then they would probably refer to all web things (services and sites) as web based. Its simply something they have done for years, from soon after the inception of the web. (Originally called the World Wide Web, hence WWW as a prefix to web addresses.) I certainly refer to "the web" rather than the "the cloud". I occasionally use "Interweb" in the right circumstances.If you want to learn more then:

this Wiki Article is as good as any.

In the early days, if you accessed a web page or service then that page or service would be hosted on a specific physical server at a specific location.

The last decade has seen the rapid rise of "Web" services. These store their data spread across multiple servers or locations to span the world. These servers have become "virtualised" so from one day to the next a page or service may move from one physical host to another. An example would be Google: they have at least 17 data centres spread around the world, each of which has hundreds of computers. (There is a good case for there being thousand of computers at each centre.)

When you go to to Google.com you do not know (and it does not matter) which of their 17+ data centres provides you with your query web page. You just want it fast. Make one query and you will be answered by one machine at that centre. Make another and your query will probably be answered by a completely different machine. Google has so many computers that they are replacing computers and hard drives that store their data many times every hour. A computer has a life of around 5 years or 5*356*24 hours, Google have at least 17 data centres with an estimated 1000 computers in each centre.   These computers exist in what is known or has become referred to as "the cloud".

What does it mean to Ava customers?

If you opt for the lowest cost web or cloud version of Ava you will have a reliable database hosting machine, which is backed up on a daily basis. A bit more expensive is the cloud version where the database hosting machine is effectively duplicated so that if (and when) there is a machine failure, the duplicate machine replaces the original automatically within a minute or so. Rackspace.co.uk managed hosting solutions is a reference which explains the (now sometimes bewildering) range of options.

These are typical figuers from our web site monitoring software:

We would like to congratulate Rohith on gaining his Master's Degree at the University of Reading. To top it off he also gained a distinction. His MSc is in Business Information Management. Judging by his work for Ava, he well deserves the plaudit of a Distinction. Well done Rohith.

University of Reading is in the top 1% of achedemic institutions as rated by Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings 2012 published recently

For information about his post gradute degree then here.

Oh dear, my University is down in 6th...

We have updated the article on how Ava active web pages can link to your current static web site. This will improve your Google ranking and at very low cost provide a portal for employees and customers to self check personal details, availability, bookings and requests.

Here...