CNN Uses Hologram People on Election Night 2008

This is absolutely amazing. I know it's not the real thing like from Star Wars or something, but the fact that CNN used hologram people in its election night coverage is very cool.

For more info, click here.

It was already being parodied Wednesday in an online mash-up, substituting CNN correspondent Jessica Yellin's voice with Princess Leia of "Star Wars."

Yellin stepped into a booth set up in a tent at Grant Park in Chicago, surrounded by 25 high-definition cameras that duplicated her moving image in much the same way as a flight simulator would.

On screen, it appeared she was standing and talking to Wolf Blitzer on CNN's New York set, an eerie white halo around her.

...it certainly did not appear to be a distraction, as CNN's audience Tuesday was nearly double what it was for Election Night in 2004.

COBOL Survives Every Claim that it Will Fail

Nobody is programming in COBOL these days, right? Wrong. It is one of the most mature languages out there, and while Pascal and others fall by the wayside, COBOL is still mainstream in many development shops.

PeopleSoft talked about moving to Fusion, which at the time sounded like a move away from COBOL. They now talk about Applications Unlimited, a healthy realization that one cannot simply snap one's fingers and completely rework an application development environment. PeopleSoft still delivers tens of thousands of lines of COBOL programs.

As this article says, COBOL is about as sexy as a rock, but it still works very well for what it does. I'm glad they still taught COBOL when I was in college.

PeopleSoft: Which Project is My App Engine In?

One of my favorite "tools" in PeopleSoft App Designer is Edit -> Find Definition References. If I'm not sure, for example, whether a page I'm working on has been included in the appropriate project, Find Definition References will help me quickly find out whether it is or not.

That doesn't work so well when I want to find which project an Application Engine program is in.

When I select Edit -> Find Definition References for an App Engine, I see something like the following.












Well, I pretty much already knew that!

There is a way that I can find which project an App Engine is included in, but it requires a database query. I can use a query similar to the following:

select * from sysadm.psprojectitem
where objectvalue1 = 'MY_APP_ENGINE';

Using the above query, if your App Engine is included in any projects, the value in the OBJECTVALUE1 column will be your App Engine name. App Engine objects have the following object types:

• 33 - App Engine Program
• 34 - App Engine Section
• 43 - App Engine Step

Occasionally, references to App Engines are stored differently in PSPROJECTITEM (if anyone knows why, please clue me in!). If the above query doesn't work, use a query similar to the following:

select * from sysadm.psprojectitem
where objectvalue1 = 'Application Engine'
and OBJECTVALUE2 = 'MY_APP_ENGINE';

Using this query, if your App Engine is included in any projects, the value in the OBJECTVALUE2 column will be your App Engine name.

With one of those two queries, you should be able to find whether your App Engine is included in the appropriate project.

PSDBOWNER and Why I Can't Login to my New Database

We copied our upgrade database to our development backup database this morning. I had to apply about 13 bundles to the upgrade database to get it current on maintenance.

The next step is to copy the customizations from our dev database into our dev backup database. But this morning after the dev backup database was created, I couldn't login to it using App Designer, even though I could login using the same userid and password to the upgrade database (from which dev backup was a copy).

Does anyone know where this is going? Well, I'm sort of new to PeopleSoft, so I was bordering on the verge of panic, but I found someone else on our staff who has been doing PeopleSoft for a long time.

He said, "Did you update the DBOWNER table?"

And that's all it was. The PS.PSDBOWNER.DBNAME still had the name of the upgrade database in it. Once I updated that, I was able to login and do a compare between the dev and dev backup databases.

To perform a full database compare

1. In App Designer, select Tools->Compare and Report->To Database
   
2. Specify the database in the login dialog and wait for all the permission lists, etc. to load.
   
3. When the Compare and Report Dialog comes up, click the Options button.
   
4. When the Upgrade Options dialog comes up, click on the Compare Options tab.
   
5. In the Compare Type area of the Compare Options tab, click the Database radio button.

A full database compare takes a long time.

Now I'm just waiting for my compare report to run...

Where is My Menu Item?

When you're learning about a PeopleSoft page, and especially if you are providing backup support for a customized pages, it is not very intuitive how to actually navigate to that page.

It's pretty easy, using App Designer, to figure out which menu a page is located on.

1. Bring up the page in App Designer.
2. Click Edit -> Find Definition References on the menu to find out which component it belongs to.
3. Bring up the component in App Designer
4. Click Edit -> Find Definition References to find out which menu it belongs to.

But if you're trying to find out how to navigate to that page, you've hit a dead end.

However, once you know what the component name is, navigate to PeopleTools -> Portal -> View Menu Item Detail. Type in the name of the component as the "Portal Object Name" to find out not only how to navigate to it (Menu Path), but what permissions are required to access it, and who actually has access to it.

That was easy.

Free Wireless in Red Rock Country

We just arrived in gorgeous Moab, Utah. Tomorrow we're heading over to Mesa Verde National Park near Cortez, Colorado, and then Saturday, we'll take in Arches NP just outside the north end of Moab.


I was excited to find that our hotel has high-speed wireless internet access. What I was surprised to find out was that it has no security.

So if you happen to be in Moab and need to check your e-mail, pull your car into the parking lot of the Moab Valley Inn, and as long as you have a wireless card, you're "in like Flynn"!

Peoplesoft Financial Aid: BYU Institutional Application

For about the past 4 months I've been working on BYU customizations to the PeopleSoft-delivered financial aid module. Most of the time has been spent on what we call the Institutional Application. I'm not sure why Peoplesoft doesn't already have something like this!

Students will be able to apply online for various forms of Financial Aid. The Institutional App displays different options based on whether the student is an undergraduate, law student, etc. Based on the various options the student selects on the page, various To-Do List items are created.

Many To-Do list items contain a message that says something like 'Please take a copy of your 2006 Federal tax forms to the Financial Aid Office.' However, in certain cases, the information can be provided online; therefore, some of the To-Do list items are custom pages as well. A custom cross-reference table identifies the custom pages and, with the help of about 10 lines of code, which checklist item codes will transfer to the appropriate custom page. Some of the information a student can provide online include other schools attended, other sources of financial aid, or whether the student served an LDS mission.

The greatest complication to the Institutional Application is the fact that a student can make an additional request for financial aid if any of the loans or grants for his or her initial request has already been originated.

I spent most of the day working on this functionality, and I think it's ready to go--but what do I know? We'll see what the users think.