Quotable Quotes

Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.  –Thomas Jefferson

Patience with others is love.  Patience with self is hope.  Patience with God is faith.  –Adel Bestavros

Often people attempt to live their lives backwards; they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want, so they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.  –Margaret Young

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.  –William James

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Quotable Quotes

Enjoy when you can, and endure when you must.  –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.  –Dwight Eisenhower

Civility costs nothing and buys everything.  –Mary Wortley Montagu

Some of the world's greatest feats were accomplished by people not smart enough to know they were impossible.  –Doug Larson

The world we have created is a product of our thinking; it cannot be changed without changing our thinking.  –Albert Einstein

A pinch of probability is worth a pound of perhaps.  –James Thurber

The only place where success comes before work is a dictionary.  –Vidal Sassoon

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.  –Plato

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Quotable Quotes

Perseverance is not a long race; it is many races one after another.  –Walter Elliot

Optimism is a revolutionary act.  –Cameron Crowe

To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. To not dare is to lose oneself.  –Soren Kierkegaard

The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.  –Socrates

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.  –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Plato is my friend—Aristotle is my friend—but my greatest friend is truth.  –Isaac Newton

The weakest living creature, by concentrating his powers on a single object, can accomplish something. The strongest, by dispensing his over many, may fail to accomplish anything. The drop, by continually falling, bores its passage through the hardest rock. The hasty torrent rushes over it with hideous uproar, and leaves no trace behind.  –Thomas Carlyle

Impatience never commanded success.  –Edwin H. Chapin

The successful person makes a habit of doing what the failing person doesn’t like to do.  –Thomas Edison

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Quotable Quotes

A good listener helps us overhear ourselves.  –Yahia Lababidi

He that would have fruit must climb the tree.  –Thomas Fuller

If you compare yourself to others, you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.  –Max Ehrmann

Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are.  –Malcolm Forbes

Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.  –Peter Drucker

Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value.  –Albert Einstein

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.  –Eleanor Roosevelt

Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he's been given.  –Anton Chekhov

How soon ‘not now’ becomes ‘never’.  –Martin Luther

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand.  Good programmers write code that humans can understand.  –Martin Fowler

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Quotable Quotes

Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.  –Oliver Wendell Holmes

We have more ability than will power, and it is often an excuse to ourselves that we imagine that things are impossible.  –François de la Rochefoucauld

Life is a grindstone. Whether it grinds you down or polishes you up depends on what you're made of.  –Jacob M. Braude

It is a trick among the dishonest to offer sacrifices that are not needed, or not possible, to avoid making those that are required.  –Ivan Goncharov

Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds that you plant.  –Robert Louis Stevenson

The only correct actions are those that demand no explanation and no apology.  –Red Auerbach

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Quotable Quotes

Choose your corner, pick away at it carefully, intensely, and to the best of your ability and that way you might change the world.  –Charles Eames

Don't fight forces; use them.  –Buckminster Fuller

A day of worry is more exhausting than a week of work.  –John Lubbock

To be prepared is half the victory.  –Miguel de Cervantes

Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.  –William Ellery Channing

All of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon—instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.  –Dale Carnegie

The 'silly question' is the first intimation of some totally new development.  –Alfred North Whitehead

Life is full of obstacle illusions.  –Grant Frazier

We need a renaissance of wonder. We need to renew, in our hearts and in our souls, the deathless dream, the eternal poetry, the perennial sense that life is miracle and magic.  –E. Merrill Root

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So you are tasked with a maintenance pack install, or worse yet, a full blown upgrade.  You follow the upgrade procedures as best you can understand them.  You are at the step where you have run the compare reports, and are waiting for the developers to look over the reports.  Sure, they cursed at the fact that you wasted five hours of the print queue and half the trees Johnny Appleseed managed to plant, but the real fact is they have to shift through 1000’s of pages of compare reports that are meaningless due to their size.

What your developers need is a simple Excel list of all objects changed, which ones were custom work, and who the last developer was who touched the object.  This last point is crucial.  The work can be divided up quickly, if only we knew who last touched the object.  This becomes paramount when the system is shared by multiple development teams (as in HRMS and Campus Solutions).  Fortunately, it’s possible to write an SQL to give the developers what they need because the majority of App Designer objects have a field called “lastupdoprid” which holds the user who last saved that object in the current environment.  The delivered compare reports utilize this field as follows: if the userid is not equal to PPLSOFT, then the object has been updated by a customer site (and the asterisk will be used to indicate the delivered object has been modified).

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Tim Jones is an IT practitioner with many years of experience, and a good friend of mine.  He puts together a monthly newsletter about trends and interesting stories surrounding software development and testing.  I finally got around to asking him if I could republish it here for the benefit of the PeopleSoft Corner community, and he graciously agreed.   I hope you find it as valuable of a resource as I do.  Please click the Read More link to see the complete newsletter.  If you would like to see more, back issues (back to 1999) are available at http://swtest.workshopmultimedia.com/.

May 2009 Newsletter

Quotable Quotes

 Most of us can read the writing on the wall; we just assume it's addressed to someone else.  –Ivern Ball

 Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.  –Jonathan Kozol

 The person who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.  –Chinese proverb

 The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.  –Nikola Tesla

 Our actions are the results of our intentions and our intelligence.  –E. Stanley Jones

 Never neglect details. When everyone's mind is dulled or distracted, the leader must be doubly vigilant.  –Colin Powell

 There is only one you... Don't you dare change just because you're outnumbered!  –Charles Swindoll

 Gratitude is the sign of noble souls.  –Aesop

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