The people you meet on Training Courses
I have delivered a large number of training courses in UK and Europe to all types of participants. The training that I have delivered is
UML modelling using either Enterprise Architect (EA) or
Borland Together 2006 R2 for Eclipse.
Participants on these courses can be
categorised into
categories and below I present a light hearted
explanation of these types
Criticize the Interface -- this participant asks questions like "Why was that icon used?" Why is that menu there?" and so on. These are always fun to have on a course as their questions always raise a smile amongst trainer and other participants.
Impress the boss -- the participant is either attending the course with their boss, or has volunteered to attend the course to gain "brownie points". They are well prepared (read the book before hand) and ask questions (even if they know the answer),
always volunteer answers to questions posed by the trainer. A joy to have on a course since you are
guaranteed interaction.
The anitmodeller -- this
participant is mentioned on another post. These challenge why do I need to model when I can just write the code. I like these participants since it is very satisfying at the end of a course to have "won them over"
The expert -- the nightmare of all trainers! The participant who knows everything and likes to show it. Often a little disruptive to the flow of the course since they are always making remarks like "I do it another way ... ", "... according to X we should do it like this ... " and so on. It usually turns out that they are not the expert they believe themselves to be ... having just memorized some facts in a book or from the product manual. Given them enough rope and they will usually hang themselves.
I can't leave work alone -- it is
understandable that on any training course that all participants have to keep
up to date with work e-mails etc. Most participants do this during breaks, but this participant always has their e-mail (usually Outlook) open throughout the course and is always reading and answering e-mails. When you walk around the room, they try to hide their activities by Alt-Tab to the Case Tool when you approach. But the periodic "Bing-Bong" sound which announces the arrival of another e-mail gives their game away. They can be a little annoying since they often ask questions like "Can you do that again since I missed it?" I just smile and answer the question.
The browser -- very similar to the above, but is browsing the
Internet rather than using e-mail.
Eureka -- a trainers dream participant (and I have had many of these). These
participants attend the course because they do not have the knowledge/experience that they expect to gain. When they do, you can see on their faces the "eureka moment" when everything clicks into place. Easily identifiable by such phrases as "This is really cool, this will really help my in my job", "I must tell my colleagues about this"
These are only some of the types of participants I have met. I must say that training is a most rewarding (if somewhat exhausting) occupation and to stay fresh you must have sufficient time to recharge your batteries. For me training gives a great deal of job
satisfaction.
If you are trainer reading this, do you
recognise these participants? What types have you met?
If you have been a participant on a training course, which type do you fall into?
Service Oriented Architecture Training on the South Coast
As mentioned in previous blogs relating to SOA, we have just launched our new training schedule which includes 3 new SOA training courses:
SOA Primer - this course provides an indepth introduction to Service Orientation and the Service Oriented Architecture
Business Process Modelling for SOA - this course provides a solid overview of applying BPM for a SOA
SOA and SOA Development for the UML/BPMN experienced - this course provides a solid overview of applying Component Based Development/Design using UML.
We are able to deliver these courses either at our training facility on the South Coast or alternatively on your site (anywhere in the world - we are well traveled).
Once again, watch this space for further developments.
DT goes to Hollywood; SOA and EA videos:
We at Dunstan Thomas have once again been playing with cutting edge technology.
Not content with the literary masterpieces being submitted regularly by our expert staff to the DT ALM Blog we have ventured into the realms of the Hollywood Director. That's right, we've moved over to video!
You can now see footage of our top consultants skilfully wielding their knowledge on various subjects such as SOA and EA. You can view these cinematic masterpieces
here.Stay tuned for the next instalment of DT goes to Hollywood.
SOA Training
From time to time a new acronym appears in the IT press, this time it was
SOA. My initial thoughts were "What does Service Oriented Architecture actually mean and how will it fit in with our
ALM Training message.
The first place I looked was
Wikipedia - the"font of all knowledge". Fourteen pages of information later, my questions were answered.
The second thing I needed to do was to decide which courses our clients would be interested in attending and who would benefit. Sometimes it can prove difficult to cater for all roles.
I have identified the groups as follows:
- IT Managers
- Architects
- Analysts
- Designers
- Software Engineers
Now the idea is to ensure that our SOA training offering matches their specific areas of interest. So far we have put together, with the help of a SOA Evangelist, the following courses:
- SOA Services Oriented Software Design - target audience: IT Managers, Architects, Analysts and Designers.
- SOA an Introduction - target audience: Architects, IT Managers and Software Engineers
- SOA for Managers - target audience: IT Managers
We are always looking at ways to enhance our training message, so watch this space for future SOA courses.
StyleVision - Not quite as stylish or visionary as I would have liked
We have been using the XSLT editor StyleVision from Altova since the start of this year. We use it to build the reports generated by our pension system, Imago Front Office, which provides a prospective or existing pension customer with an illustrative report. I have found that with using StyleVision, having the ability to easily and simply create conditional logic, to drag and drop XML tag values onto the design and to create dynamic designs, has been invaluable in the work that we do; there have been a number of weird and bizarre "quirks" of StyleVision which have resulted in an overwhelming desire on occasions to throw my laptop out of the window and into the waters of Portsmouth Harbour.
When asked to produce a blog, I thought that I would take the time to provide some solutions and work arounds for problems that I have encountered when using StyleVision.
Page breaks
When I was experiencing problems with page breaks whilst working on a project a couple of months back, I found very little information on the web about similar page break problems; so I hope that this will help.
The problem was that, on occasions, page breaks were causing the system to produce a blank page in the middle of the report. The page breaks had been in place within the style sheet for a number of years and this had not caused a problem before. Despite the fact that there was no space between the last element and the page break, when the last element before the page break encroached upon the end of the page, the page break inserted a blank page within the PDF. There did not seem to be a way to give the page break any sort of attribute to get it not to produce, what was in effect two page breaks. Having looked through the various options in the styles window, I spotted that there were a number of page break options under the "paged media" tab. However, despite having attempted to select the content and give it the attribute of avoid page break inside, it was having no effect.
By way of explanation - if you take the above paragraph as an example, with an enforced page break after it and a number of conditional pieces of text and tables above it, each containing multiple lines; the above paragraph could very easily be pushed to the bottom of the page and onto the next one. However, for certain circumstances, the text is pushed to the very end of the page, the page break would (with no logic around it) create the phantom page. It would be extremely difficult to write an XPath expression to produce validation around the page break, to incorporate the number of years that the illustrations was for, the number of funds that had been invested in or the various pieces of conditional text. In addition, any complex logic that had been written and rigorously tested would be wasted time if any of the spacing above the paragraph was changed at a later date. Through a great deal of trial and error, I eventually found the following solution.
- If the problem is not caused by a table, you will need to create a table to place the text or condition onto as well as the page break
- Highlight the table node in the design tree window
- Under the HTML tab of the properties window, set the "rules" attribute to group
- You will see that the table will have a defined line around it, this will not appear in the report
- Now select the "paged media" tab on the styles window and set the "page-break-in" attribute to avoid
This will now mean that if the newly grouped table is not able to fit onto the end of the page it will start on the beginning of the next page. This will stop the page break ever coming into contact with the bottom of the page.
In the next exciting instalment of the DT StyleVision blog, I will be sharing with you the rather bizarre work around that I found for solving an issue with the column widths of tables generated by dragging a parent node onto the design. No matter what I set the column width percentages to, they were still showing 50/50.
Labels: Dunstan Thomas, Imago, StyleVision
