AR System 7.5 is out in the open

I guess you already know that 7.5 of BMC Remedy AR System has been released. I have nothing really to report about 7.5 yet. I had the beta installed to do some testing. But I never really got the time. Boywing have written some info about 7.5 in his blog.

Now I need to spend time to see what is changed in the API. Have to update all software I develop to handle 7.5. I guess the first thing, and probably the thing needing the least update, will be php-arapi. It is basicly only data which most of the time never change in the upgrade. php-arapi also need some cleaning of the project to make it build out of the box on as many systems as possible. And also the web/documentation of php-arapi need to be updated.

I can also mention that my previous blog about the difference of two W2K3 installations makeing AR System behave different actually turned to be some extra software installed by the customer that I was not aware of. So anoying. It has cost me a lot of time.

Whats the difference between this W2K3 and that W2K3?

I have not really had time to do any tests on AR System 7.1 patch 6 yet. But I did an installation on a Windows 2003 server system. And what I noted was that it installed AR System Portmapper. On the systems I have at a customer where there is a problem at boot up AR System Portmapper is not installed. I wonder what on those systems choose not to install AR System Portmapper but it is done on my test system. I have to get some time to install patch 6 at the customer. And look at the installation logs.

What else, I have seen problems both in e-mail engine and consuming web services regarding UTF-8 encoding. The data from the database is unicode and everything should be configured and handled as UTF-8. But when I use HTML or XML templates in e-mail engine or when I send data in a web service the data is encoded two times. I still have not verified this on any other setup then at the customer. I need time to write something to prove it to BMC.

Jusandan 2009

This years Jusandan tournament was little bit different. Only 5 games in 2 days compared to what I am used to, 6 games in 3 days. But it was OK. Same time for the games and everything. It was 2 years since I last played in a tournament. And actually like 2 years since I played in real life. Jusandan results can be found here.

I am still ranked to low. So I always end up in the strange low end pairing. So even if I win 3 out of 5 games it will probably not change my ranking at European Go Database since 2 of the wins was against to 'easy' players.

But anyway it felt nice to get to play for real again. To really concentrate and think about the game. I did not record any of the games. I guess now I have to get one or two games at KGS in the next couple of months to keep the feeling up.

Reimbursement update

Before Christmas I received the money for the travel. No problem. Only annoying thing was I had to pay the fee for the transfer. So I lost some money.

But still no money for the conference. I have seen a copy of the transfer where the account number was wrong. And they say they will transfer again and I should have the money around new year. But, no, no money, yet. :)

But actually maybe there is something good about the delay. Have to ask my auditor if the credit will be put in the book keeping for 2008 or 2009. I would be better with 2009. The money is needed this year, not last year.

Patch 6 for AR System 7.1 released

It include patches for Admin tool, User tool, Server, Mid-Tier, E-mail engine, Migrator, etc. So many fixes it looks like.

Many issues 'solved' on the server. First one on the list is supposed to be the remote DB problems we have at one customer. Have to test the coming week.

Also some fixes for web services. I might have a problem with web services since moving to 7.1 from 6.3. Having more then two levels of sequence does not seem to work. I have not 100% confirmed that yet. Need to recreated it from scratch in 7.1 to see if it still is a problem. All records get created in all the sequences, but there is no relation created but for the first level. If I can confirm it, have to have sure prof latest tomorrow, I will report it to BMC. Little bit to late for the project.

The user tool patch does not seem to have any fix for the problem reported about selection fields. That is really bad. Have to ask the one who report it what feed back he have gotten.