The fifth day we had a really late start due to the three ladies in the apartment over sleeping.  However, no-one wants to ski with tired and thus potentially volatile women, so I left them to there slumber. They finally managed to stir around eleven o’clock to yet more brilliant sunshine.  Have to say that we were all hoping for some fresh snow, but alas we were not in luck.  Anyway the rest of the day was pretty uneventful with Katy and Cara going off to do their own thing and Mrs F and I enjoying some runs on our own.

The final day, and we awoke to a misty outlook. Katy and I had decided that we would go for a couple of early morning runs, whilst Mrs F and Cara were still trying to rouse themselves from the land of slumber. Whilst traveling up the first of two gondolas to our start point, we slowly watched as the mist draw closer and closer in. We both hoped that we would rise above this mist, but were greeted at the top by only more mist and a light snow shower.

Having travelled all this way we decided to make the best of the current situation and headed down the other side of the mountain, to see if it was better the other side. The weather didn’t clear much, but the fresh snow was as Katy put it “awesome” to ski on. We took the chair lift back up and even though the visibility hadn’t improved a great deal decided to make another couple of runs before heading off to meet up with Mrs F and Cara.

We just had time to hit the green run we did earlier in the week and managed to complete the whole run in 15 minutes flat. I think this was due to the fact that Katy had the bit between her teeth and managed to get some good run ups to the flat parts. Anyway, after finishing that run we were just in time to meet up with Mrs F and Cara. As the snow fall was getting heavier we decided that we would call it a day and instead release the inner child and headed over to the an empty field to try out the new bum boards.

As you can see the inner child in each of us came out to play, and much fun was had by all. In addition to simply sliding down on these boards, we made a train linking legs around the person in front, and also made snow angels in the fresh powder. However, once you get these boards going there is much control on them, and several times we all ended up in a heap, but it was great fun.

We decided to start the day with a speedy run down a particular green run in the resort.  Last year at the end of the week here in Saint Gervais (before Katy hurt her knee), we managed to complete the run in about eighteen minutes.  We thought we would be able to match this time, but not beat it considering Katy still was not back up to full speed on her board.  However we managed to set a new speed for our run of around fifteen minutes.  Though at the bottom I have to admit my legs were burning.  I wasn’t sure how much the lack of exercise would really affect me, but now I know.  It has been nearly ten months since I have done any form of karate training, or indeed any other regular sports, and boy was I feeling it in my legs.  After that run we just explored a number of runs at a more gentle speed and ended up skiing to the very last minute of the day.

Yesterday was pretty gentle day.  Mrs F and I flew down a run and then sat peacefully in the baking sun whilst we waited for Katy and Cara to catch up.  It’s another one of those surprising things about ski/snowboarding holidays.  Even when the slopes are busy, they are still pretty quiet and you can easily sit there and just enjoy the peace and quiet.  That is unless you find yourself next to a French man who has decided to scream his head off to talk to his family who are just behind him.  Anyway, after a late lunch, we all decided that we were still pretty tired and ended up heading back to the apartment.

I’ll post some pictures later from these two days.

Well we arrived safely at the hotel after driving through the night. There was a small mess up with the room that we booked, however, the room we have is ok for us, as the real reason we are here is not to spend hours in the hotel, but to spend hours playing in the snow half way up the mountain.

The first day of skiing was a pretty relaxed affair, morning coffee and croissants (pan-au-chocolate for Mrs F). Finally rolled out of the apartment around eleven and headed up the hill to the ski hire shop where a nice surprise was waiting for us. Instead of the normal nightmare of having to tell everyone your shoe size and weight again, plus the endless queue of screaming kids and harassed parents, we were told that all our equipment had been sorted, adjusted and put into a locker for us. All we had to do was sign some papers, pick up the key and leave. Ten minutes flat from entering to exiting the store instead of the normal half hour of wishing you had got there before those damn kids had. After that it was pack lunch on the side of the piste in the baking sun (Mrs F, especially happy about the baking sun part). I think it’s one of those misunderstanding about ski holidays. Unless you’ve been you think of them as cold holidays. Whilst it can get cold like any normal holiday, the majority of the time the sun is blazing away and it’s actually very hot.

Second day the morning started pretty much the same. Up early for stroll in town for an emergency pair of salopettes for Katy. Only problem was that the only ski shops that were open at 0830, didn’t sell clothes. Anyway, the day’s skiing went pretty well, with the odd fall by everyone.

Having said this the system can perform all the basic operations, which include the following:

1. Allow users to add and edit time records
2. Allow users to generate reports for any particular month of a year from the current year back to 2006
3. Manage and create new system users, projects, clients and activities

I would not call this an alpha release or even pre-alpha as it’s very sketchy in some areas. For example some of the forms controls are not in a human readable format, although all the people that are using know what these magic values mean which is why it has been left for later. Plus I’m still not sure about FormAlchemy, it seems it does the basic stuff really nicely, but when you want to do something more complex then it goes a little mad on the coding front. I think using the old method was better, but as this is my first pass at using it, I will give it another go and see what happens.

Hopefully in a month or so I’ll be able to spend some time with this project and develop it further. Ideally, I need to re-style the layout, which whilst completely functional and user friendly, it wouldn’t wow anyone (also why there are no screen shots of it here )

Children, they are so great, and this one obviously though that the face should have a really large smile

http://www.tomscott.com/weather/starwars/

At the moment Canterbury is currently being described as “It’s like Hoth out there…. cold, ice, freezing desolation”. Oh and don’t forget the little comment in the bottom corner “You may have to climb inside a tauntaun for warmth.”

How great!

The next big things for us, is that we don’t use Windows for our day to day work. This is not to say that we don’t use Windows at all, in fact in our line of work we need to test to see how they perform under Windows. However, in general we use Apple macs and linux boxes to perform most of our work. So ideally we need an application that runs on Apple mac and/or Linux. The problem with this is that majority of tools created are aimed at Windows, and of those there are very few that are cross platform or have had a version created for another platform. This is not to say that we couldn’t gotten around it using some clever machine virtualization, but that is just something extra that in all reality we don’t want to do.

This didn’t really leave many options left. So from what I was left with, I sat down and evaluated the possibilities with the rest of our requirements in mind. I felt that none of what was left really fitted what we wanted to get from the time tracking applciation. For example, very few of them would allow me to store information about clients, projects and types of contracts in a manner that I could then easily query and get information from.

Based on this I’ve decided the route we need to go is to create our own personalized time tracking project which meets our needs. This of course means we can customize it to meet our full requirements and depending on the result possibly even offer it to other. So the next stage is to develop the structure of the database that will be used to record all this information.

Database Structure

Just for those of you that aren’t family with database diagrams, each of the blocks with a name inside it relates to the tables that I’m suggesting for our database. So we have one table to hold all the employees of the company, a table for all our clients, a table for each project and so on. Then each of the lines between these tables displays the relationship between the tables. So as an example the table clients is related to the table projects in that one client can have none, one or many different projects. The many element is denoted by the “crows foot” symbol on the end of the line.

So now it’s the big part, implemented the application. So the next question I have to face is how.

Firstly, we should be able to quote more accurately for future work. The issue here is being able to judge the pace someone works at. This obviously differs, depending on their experience with not only the language, but also the project itself. The modification might only be a small one, but if you don’t know the project it’s going to take you longer to make the modifications required than someone that knows the project inside out. Also some people just seem to work faster on some things than other. I know back when I joined the company, that Ed was constantly over estimating how long it would take to complete parts of a project. Now you could be thinking “what’s the problem you get some down time”, but in all reality it actually means we are losing money. For example, it could be that we have several parts to a particular project that need to be done with a short space of time. If we have over estimated how long it will take to complete a particular part, then it might lead us to pay someone else to complete the other part, which is more expensive than one of us working on it. Not only in monetary terms, but also checking it against our QA standards. So having data on how quickly people work both; full time employees and freelancers that we use, will allow us to better judge costs, which also means we can be even more competitive when quoting for work.

Secondly, and this is actually something Damian pointed out. It’s nice for a customer to be able to see where the money is being split when they receive an invoice. Damian recently engaged a lawyer to help with drawing up some particular contracts. Attached to the invoice was a break down of not only what work was done, but also a brief outline of the number of hours that were spent doing different activities. Our company has clients that pay a maintenance contract, where they pay us to monitor their system, apply small updates, and fix any bugs that pop up from time to time. So this would be very helpful for these clients. However, and this is more important for us, we can more accurately monitor the amount of time we spend on these maintenance contracts, and then modify the service agreement for them. For example, if we aren’t spending as much time that our agreement covers, then we can re-visit this agreement and decrease the cost. Alternatively, if we are spending way over the amount of time that our service agreement covers, then we can again sit down with the client and discuss the possible need to increase the service agreement so that it covers the man hours that we are spending on their system.

So now we have determined the need, I’ve been given the job of finding a solution. As I see it I have two options, take some pre-existing time tracking software which nearly matches our specific needs, or write my own.