Norm In Norman
9/15/2006, 11:10 PM
Here is my long happy story for today. You'll be bored to tears by the end of it.
Let me start my story out with this: at work we have a consultant. Somehow this consultant has become more than a consultant. He is somehow in charge of our databases. Like head DBA or something. Nothing happens to a database unless it goes through him. He doesn't give advice (aka consult), he gives orders. As you can imagine, the guy is a real dickhead. I've had a run in with him before where he refused to help me with something because I was supporting a PHP app and evidently PHP is the debil to him.
So anyway, at work we were posed with a problem. We have this system where customers can call because they haven't received their money yet and someone (CSR) can look at their forms and tell the customer what is wrong with their form. The problem is the forms are all scanned in as tiffs. Tiffs are a standard thing, but they do NOT show up inline in web pages like (for instance) web pages do. So right now the CSR has to click on each individual image that is in a form to view it and that takes some time, especially since some of the forms are 200 pages.
Well, my group heard about this and we posed a solution I came up with. This solution made it's way to the director. Since we said it would be easy to do and it's really a good solution she decided to let us see if it would work like we thought it would. Evidently Mr. Consultant was working on his own uber solution for this that supposed to blow us all away, but they decided to let us do a proof of concept anyway so we could have a backup in case Mr. Consultant's idea didn't work.
My solution? To have the web app send some data to an (evil) PHP script and based on that data pull out the approprate tiff files from the database, parse through the tiffs, then insert them into a pdf. I got this done in about a day and a half (including learning how to parse through a tiff). Mr. Consultant spent months on his idea and it's wasn't working good because the software they had to buy has to convert the image to a jpg before it spits out the images, which takes longer than it's supposed to. He sent a trouble report to the people who wrote the software they bought though. The patch they sent back to him nearly broke our development server so they had install it on another server just to get it to work.
So after postponing our meeting for 8 days, today we finally got to demo our solutions to the director and some other bigwigs. We walked in, they logged on to the web system, clicked on a link to my solution, and BOOM the pdf pops up in acrobat reader with the 10 or so images it was supposed to show. The consultant wasn't looking happy. So we try another one and ... well, it went pretty slow. The consultant timed it at 48 seconds (yes, he was timing it). He had a little smirk on his face while it was loading - until we discover the form had 500 images associated with it. The pdf file was probably 100 megs, so of course it was going to go slow.
So then it was time for Mr. Consultant to demo his solution. "Do you have firefox installed on this machine" they asked? Nope. "Well, uhm, we have to recompile it in order for it to work in IE. And it's taking at least 30 seconds for every single form we pull up anyway. So I guess the other solution is better right now."
So now I'm like a hero at work or something. Everyone kept telling me afterwards congrats on an awesome solution. I think the best part is people are tired of the consultant's crap and are happy that my "free" solution was way better than his "spend a lot of money" solution.
In your face, stupid consultant!
Let me start my story out with this: at work we have a consultant. Somehow this consultant has become more than a consultant. He is somehow in charge of our databases. Like head DBA or something. Nothing happens to a database unless it goes through him. He doesn't give advice (aka consult), he gives orders. As you can imagine, the guy is a real dickhead. I've had a run in with him before where he refused to help me with something because I was supporting a PHP app and evidently PHP is the debil to him.
So anyway, at work we were posed with a problem. We have this system where customers can call because they haven't received their money yet and someone (CSR) can look at their forms and tell the customer what is wrong with their form. The problem is the forms are all scanned in as tiffs. Tiffs are a standard thing, but they do NOT show up inline in web pages like (for instance) web pages do. So right now the CSR has to click on each individual image that is in a form to view it and that takes some time, especially since some of the forms are 200 pages.
Well, my group heard about this and we posed a solution I came up with. This solution made it's way to the director. Since we said it would be easy to do and it's really a good solution she decided to let us see if it would work like we thought it would. Evidently Mr. Consultant was working on his own uber solution for this that supposed to blow us all away, but they decided to let us do a proof of concept anyway so we could have a backup in case Mr. Consultant's idea didn't work.
My solution? To have the web app send some data to an (evil) PHP script and based on that data pull out the approprate tiff files from the database, parse through the tiffs, then insert them into a pdf. I got this done in about a day and a half (including learning how to parse through a tiff). Mr. Consultant spent months on his idea and it's wasn't working good because the software they had to buy has to convert the image to a jpg before it spits out the images, which takes longer than it's supposed to. He sent a trouble report to the people who wrote the software they bought though. The patch they sent back to him nearly broke our development server so they had install it on another server just to get it to work.
So after postponing our meeting for 8 days, today we finally got to demo our solutions to the director and some other bigwigs. We walked in, they logged on to the web system, clicked on a link to my solution, and BOOM the pdf pops up in acrobat reader with the 10 or so images it was supposed to show. The consultant wasn't looking happy. So we try another one and ... well, it went pretty slow. The consultant timed it at 48 seconds (yes, he was timing it). He had a little smirk on his face while it was loading - until we discover the form had 500 images associated with it. The pdf file was probably 100 megs, so of course it was going to go slow.
So then it was time for Mr. Consultant to demo his solution. "Do you have firefox installed on this machine" they asked? Nope. "Well, uhm, we have to recompile it in order for it to work in IE. And it's taking at least 30 seconds for every single form we pull up anyway. So I guess the other solution is better right now."
So now I'm like a hero at work or something. Everyone kept telling me afterwards congrats on an awesome solution. I think the best part is people are tired of the consultant's crap and are happy that my "free" solution was way better than his "spend a lot of money" solution.
In your face, stupid consultant!