This year for the very first time, thanks to the hard work of the Chief Mentor Herder, Mark Finnern, SAP Mentors were invited to attend the Developers Kick Off Meeting (DKOM) in locations around the world. I had hopes going into the event that I would be able to meet up with people and be able to be able to get more information about the strategy and direction of SAP for this year. I can quite confidently say that this is exactly what I was able to do. I would love to be able to tell you all about the plans and details but this was an internal event and I had to sign an NDA to be permitted to come – so there will be none of those shenanigans here.

I was able to meet up with a couple of people that I had met from previous SAP events and it was great to be able to chat with them as they took me on a personal tour of … ahh – there you go I nearly spilt the beans!

I also got the chance to talk with Hasso Platter and I was able to have a deep discussion on the algorithmic alternatives to row based storage in an in-memory computing appliance … actually the mentors flash mobbed him for the photo opp and didn’t really get the chance to say much at all. I mean what would you ask Hasso if you had the chance? Would you ask him to tell you a fairy story? Hardly. A war story more like. Maybe we should have got him talking about the good old R/2 days.

SAP Mentors were more than just the guys wearing those numbered blue shirts and walking around with laptops and placards with weird sayings on them. They were helpful in more ways than you might imagine. Sergio Ferrari got to help out as a microphone stand and Gregor Wolf got to assist as a panel member in the demo jam. Awesome demos by the way I particularly liked the … gosh how did I fall into that trap again.

Repeat 3 times:

I have signed an NDA.

I have signed an NDA.

I have signed an NDA.

So what was I saying again? Something about the mentors being a bit more useful than just highly attractive shirt models.You may not have noticed us but those that did usually asked the question:

So what’s the shirt about?

To which my standard answer is:

An SAP Mentor is about being a pain in the neck in the most constructive way possible

I’d love to take the credit for that quote but it was the work of Darren Hague, fellow SAP Inside Track London organiser, who coined that phrase and I think he may have suggested the pain was in another anatomical location but lets just run with ‘neck’ for now.

Mentors like to poke their noses into things that SAP are doing, getting early access to things like River, the Certification process, Blue Ruby, #evilplans aka uPods, the Best Built Apps document, Streamwork and the list goes on. The reason we do this is to provide our real world implementation experience to improve products before they hit the streets. We also run local un-conference events called SAP Inside Tracks and from the first one* that happened in London in 2008, they have exploded around the world and here is a little secret. You don’t have to be an SAP Mentor to run one. Yes, you read that correctly. It just so happens that mentors naturally like the information and networking environment that these events encourage so they like to make them happen.

So that is what the blue shirts are about and if you have saw some at DKOM I hope you had a nice encounter with them. I hope that the powers that be that extended the invitation and allowed us in (after getting that signature on the NDA) were happy with having us around and I hope they invite us back next year.

* There’s probably is a lot of dispute about the first community day event as different events have been run in different locations but I say that the London event was the first one because it was the first one that became known as a “SAP Inside Track” event and branding is pretty much everything now isn’t it. Okay, I’ll take my tongue out of my cheek now.

Four Yorkshiremen

I am sure that you know the "Four Yorkshiremen" Monty Python sketch. If you are not familiar with it it involves four old gentlemen reminising about the times past when "times were tough". They each try to outdo each other getting more outrageous with story.

The final line is: "Don't try telling that to the kids of today, they won't believe you!" 

We of course have it easy.

I remember rummaging through an old cupboard in a disused corner of a shed that finding a whole set of 78's that may have belonged to my grandfather. These, of course, could be handily inserted in a portable 78 player and all the classics could be enjoyed as you walked around town.  To think that whole collection could now be stored on a microSD card with oodles of room to spare 60 years later is just astounding.

SDN

We could go on about the advance of technology for years. Lets look at us. SDN. Where have we come from. I am sure I have talked or written about this before but I remember stumbling across an early pre-beta SDN site in the middle of the night in 2003 and signed up to be a beta user. A month or two later I was sent my 'P code' .



That very early P account is still my main account at SDN.

I initially signed up to get hold of the new download with WebDynpro demo. I thought that was the coolest thing since nitrous. I eagerly fought to install it on my company supplied laptop with 0.75Gb of RAM. Luckily I found this process Installing the new Netweaver Preview on later versions of the downloads. 

That link, incidently, was my third blog and I got an email from Craig asking for a new photo. I didn't and I found our why a little later that week as that blog post was mentioned on a SAP mail out. Cue me getting stirred at work. I have since updated my photo. My current one is from TechEd 2007 and I am wearing my majority desk - get your wiihands on!

Along the way I have become a blogger. When Marilyn approved my application I promised here I would not be the next Thomas Jung but would just be myself and write a bit about ABAP and coding etc. I think I have stayed true to that promise. I like to put my weird abstract sence of humour into what I write and I think I owe that to my Dad who was always (and still is) making strange jokes.

One day I sent Craig an email from something I had seen in the Microsoft community. Locally run developer days. After the fun of TechEd in 2007 Darren Hague and I put our heads together and come up with a SAP London Community Day - Saturday 26 April 2008.  This year we did the SAP Inside Track London Event 2009 - Review after rebranding them 'Inside Track' and a lot of the European mentors came along, including the Dennis Howlett who brought his InsideTrack London: IBM presents sMashInsideTrack - Oliver Kohl's WordPress plug-in

It has been great to see these events taking off around the world. Organised by SAP Mentors, supported by local companies and open to all.

The official community day has now gone virtual. This year there were very many great talks and unfortuately I could only attend a couple in person but all the recordings are available.

The site itself has improved. The blogging experience has New toys for the bloggers with TinyMCE and to think that we had to do strange things in the The 1-2-3 Steps To Producing a Weblog.

"Just try telling that to the kids of today and they won't believe you."

We had a great time last year when a whole bunch of us got together and had an unconference. So much so that we thought we would bring it back bigger and better than ever.

Bigger - mostly because we have space for 72 of you to come.

Better - because this year it will be held in a central London location at IBM's South Bank building.

The important date to remember is Saturday 4 April 2009. 

There will be a charge of £10 for lunch and we are looking for sponsorship for an evening event - details to follow.

There will be an official sign up page coming soon but for now go the the wiki page and register your interest, book your train / flights / hotel if you need to and we are looking forward to seeing you there.

Just as a reminder of how great these events are here is Darren Hague giving an impromtu demo of the coolness of scala and lift. This quickly became the ESME that you know today.

These events aren't just about the things you will learn but it is also about the networking and corridor conversations aswell.

So go and and add your name to the wiki list today. 

UPDATE: Registration process now complete. Please register for the day. Make sure you read the small print and come along and have fun.

EARLY BIRD: Catch the worm by registering by the 31st  of March. If you are on the tardy side and regisiter in April the  price will be £15.

I am not sure if you have been following along with the progress meter that appears on the SDN and BPX home page for the Points for U.N. World Food Programme.

I have and when it first came out I thought, "Great I could write a little scraper to grab the number every day and track the progress". Initially the meter was an image so that wasnt possible. Now the points is in the code of the html so it is possible to scrape the current total out.

I went for a low tech solution. Yesterday I wrote (with a pen a pager) at the top of the my todo list the current total. It was 1,761,894. Today I repeated the process (it's a simple algorithm I know) Just a few short moments ago it was at 1,772,288.

So with a little maths (yes it is spelled with an S by most of the world) we have:

1772288 / 199 average of 8906 point a day so far this year.

1772288 - 1761894 = 10394 point in the last 24 hours.

If we continue at that rate for the rest of the year (166 days) we have 1725404 points which when added to the total to day is 3,497,692 a mere 2308 point shy of out goal of 3,500,000 so we as a community make a contribution of €200,000 to the worlds hungry.

I am excited about that because:

1. We are very close to our goal
2. My maths have not taken a very big sample so there is bound to be inaccuracies.
3. TechEd is going to give us a big bump with everyone submitting sessions, being involved in community day or SDN day or BPX day and writing blog posts promoting those sessions, creating new and exciting projects for DemoJam etc etc

You might not even think about this part of what we are dong very much but I am encouraging you to think about it from time to time. Think about how being involved in a such a great community such as the SAP Community Network is not just a technical or business community but it is a human community and a community that cares.

Here's to 3,500,000.

Once you have been using Windows for a while, the good ol' start bar is not a good way to start programs any more. You have to stop what you are doing, find your mouse, move it to the start button click it, navigate through several nested menus and find the program you are looking for. This is tricky to get a screen shot of but I am sure you get the idea.

Starting up

Contrast this to Launchy. Simply enter a keystroke combination of your choosing and you have an entry box to start typing the name of the program you want to launch and before you can type 'pai' and hit enter, you are looking at microsoft paint.

If this is all it did it would be worth the price of admission alone (it is free), but, as they say, there is more. Before I get on the free set of steak knives, let me tell you how else you can use it.

Adding up

Launchy has a built in calculator for all those simple arithmatical problems that you can't do in your head. It takes +/*- and () which is adequate for most little sums like 19% German VAT for example.

Of course 10% of 120 is 12. Double it is 24. Minus 1.2 (1%) 22.80 + 120 = 142.80. You can do that in your head can't you?

Anyway for more complex sums it is a readily available tool and much easier that starting calc.exe or getting out the desc calculator. 

SAP Systems

One of the best parts of Launchy is that you can add paths for it to index. When I am on a client site I like to add a folder called saplinks to my collection of toolbars. In this directory I store all my SAP shortcuts and then index this directory in Launchy. This way I have quick access to the systems I am working on without having to start the SAP Logon Pad either with my mouse or via Launchy.

I also store normal Internet Explorer bookmarks for development systems I am working on and this is much faster way to launch those sites which I have to do repeatedly during the course of my day

I actually find this faster than typing /ncrm_ic in the transaction code box which is the equivalent way to get to the same site. 

Customising with Weby

In addition to all of that you can do some simple customisation and create some real value if you are the type to be looking up SAP Notes or Shortcuts or blogs all day. 

By entering the customisation for the weby plugin to launchy you can add your own sites and can configure some search parameters.

SAP Notes

As I have noted before, the SAP notes now have a New hyperlink format for SAP Notes format which makes making bookmarklets or other search tools for them very easy.

In the weby config as you can see from above I have added the URL o:

https://weblogs.sdn.sap.com/cs/blank/edit/wlg/ with a Query of %s.

Then you can type the name press tab and enter a SAP note number - like this.

SAP Quicklinks

In just the same way you can add and entry to go to the quicklinks on http://service.sap.com/

Observant readers will have seen that the screenshot above also has a config option for the blogs here on SAP. If you can remember the numbers for the blogs here on SCN then you could use this option. If you want to try that option out then you can try this one - 6824. 

Conclusion

I have found that Launchy is an incredibly useful tool and I must send a big thank you out to Ed Herrmann for introducting it to me. I hope you find it as useful as I have.

Lastly, I was trying to work out a way to mention PHP in this blog but I don't think I can... have to save that for another day! 

Oh and there is no set of free steak knives you have to watch the shopping channel on late night TV for those.

This is not a story about how I killed a microwave by cooking a burrito for 60 minutes Important lessons involving BSP Model View Binding and a Frozen Burrito. This is just a story about how one man in his daily quest solved a nagging problem that was bothering him just a little too much.

The other day when I was Podcast Contributor Spotlight: Nigel James, I mentioned that I liked to blog about problems that I had solved so that others did not have to endure the pain.

This was such a day.

Exhibit A - The Problem

This is just want I wanted, a bug. It has caused an error, but where is it and how can I fix it?

This kind of a bug generates a error log in the ST22 transaction.

Not much help either, so I searched the font of all SAP knowledge, SDN/BPX/SNC (whatever we are branding it these days) and find nothing useful.

I then Class connection to BSP page in the forums and awaited a flood of responses. But days later I noticed that the email on my blackberry has somehow broken so I did't notice the responses.

Once I had fixed my email and decided to come back to the problem I discovered that the answers I was given weren't really making me jump over the moon with joy. So in order to not have to reinvent the wheel I called my BSP brain trust but they were working in the basement and had no mobile reception.

OK so I decided that I really should take a closer look myself. I noticed in the part of the code that was failing a class ( CL_O2_RT_SUPPORT ) with a few very meaningfully named methods. The one that really got my attention was: GET_PAGE_BY_CLASSNAME.

Breath deeply here because the O2 in that class name really does stand for oxygen.

This was exactly what I wanted and because it is a static class I could run it from SE24 and get my answer: the BSP page that was so elusive.

Fixing the error

Generating the page doesn't cut the mustard. You will get an infomration message:

and then the object will generate sucessfully.

To really find the error you have to do a syntax check (CTRL+F2) just like the ST22 error report told us we should.

So I did that, fixed the bug and my problems were over. Pimms o'clock.

In summary, if you are looking for a a way to get the BSP view name from a generated class name go to SE24 and run the static method GET_PAGE_BY_CLASSNAME in method CL_O2_RT_SUPPORT.

This has now been moved to http://scn.sap.com/community/events/teched/blog/2007/06/26/three-little-words--change-the-world