December book review: The Goal

Eliyahu M. Goldratt
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement

I will finish this year by reviewing another very entertaining and thought-provoking business novel: The Goal. It tells a story of Alex Rogo, a manufacturing plant manager, whose personal and professional lives are quickly falling apart. In fact, Alex has only 90 days to save his plant and his job, and even less time to save his marriage. How is he going to do it?

The book slowly introduces Alex to the principles of the theory of constraints (TOC). The principles are common-sense and very simple to understand. Occasionally, they may even feel overly simplistic, but they are exactly what Alex needs to know at the right point of time. The TOC ideas allowed Alex to see beyond false productivity metrics accepted at his organization and start measuring and improving his plant performance in terms of throughput, inventories, and operating expenses.

The settings of the book is a manufacturing plant, but even if you are not a plant manager, the chances are you will enjoy reading this book and should have no problem applying the principles described there in your organization.

Happy reading!

FDF Toolkit 6, SSL, ASP.NET 2.0 Handler, and Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage

We run into an interesting problem today while working with FDF Toolkit 6 inside ASP.NET 2.0 HttpHandler. Internet Explorer 7 refused to open a pre-populated PDF form produced by the handler when communicating with the server over SSL.

We could see data coming to the client and AcroRd32.exe starting... however the browser continued to display "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage" message. The same code worked well in IE without SSL or in FireFox with or without SSL.

The problem was related to caching. For some reason, any of the lines below cause IE not to be able to open an FDF form:

context.Response.CacheControl = "no-cache";
context.Response.AddHeader("pragma", "no-cache");
context.Response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.NoCache);

Removing these lines fixed the problem. Happy coding!

OTUG LinkedIn Group

We have created a group on LinkedIn professional network for all past, current, and future members of OTUG. Please, join at http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1019547&trk=hb_side_g

December event at OTUG

Do not miss the OTUG meeting tomorrow night:

Who: Slava Pestov
What: The Factor Programming Language
When: Tuesday, December 16, 2008, 5:30 pm
Where: McNeely Hall Room 238, University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, MN

As usual, check http://www.otug.org for more information. See you all there!

Welcome to ModelBlog

Thank you for visiting ModelBlog. We hope the time you spend with us will be both entertaining and worth your while. Have fun!

Authors

Search

Archive

Tags