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My car was lightly frosted over. The day turned out to be quite cold but sunny with a little rain in the afternoon.

The stock update problem we ran into last Friday was indeed, as Tom assumed, a decimal data error. All the parameters passed by TeleSales to the AS/400 are alpha numeric. I am not sure if that is by choice or a tool limit.

The first parameter passed to the INV160CL program contains the 'location from'. This is a 4-alpha field that is filled from a 6-alpha field. In the INV160CL this is converted to 4-numeric. The first two position of the 6-alpha field are blank, the four last position contain numeric data. Of course the wrong part (four first position) was passed.

Because the submit is not strait forward but gets passed trough the OLI-dataqueue the error was masked very well. The job log and dumps are produced at the wrong level and indicate a commitment control problem!

I checked the Conditions situation in Italy. Conditions with absolute amount are indeed passed to the last delivery; They are connected to order line zero and that gets split to partial order 999. It is not really a bug because the condition is applied to the order and although it seems logical to apply such conditions to the first partial order that is not necessary the best way to go.

I helped Peter with storing the glass house panels, they are way too large to move alone and light enough to fall over with a light breeze. I only hope that the whole construction doesn’t fly away once it is finished, but I am afraid he’ll need a boat anchor, at least.

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The front of the car was frosted over heavily, the rear was just wet. Strange. The rest of the day was cool and sunny, as spring should be with a light drizzle in the evening.

Not much mail or view to catch up with.

We got a long update with Peter. He wasn’t in the office yesterday because of the SAP course so we reported on our normal activities and he explained some things about SAP. This took quite some time. About the whole morning. Later we discussed what we should do about the Phased out items problem and the Absolute conditions question from Italy. Later Jan came in and joined the discussion, according to him the Absolute conditions apply to the header only and will be handled by a change in OLI that should make sure that header conditions, mostly surcharges, are applied to the first shipment. I don’t think the changes OLI build in are affecting the Absolute conditions but maybe the OLI team hasn’t finished yet. I’ll give them a chance.

I assisted Ronny with setting up the Word Link interface. This is intended to allow TeleSales people to send information to MS Word in order to produce reports. Progress doesn’t handle printers directly it seems. The assistance was mainly moral, whit just a few tips, Ronny knows everything () about the progress side and he knows at least as much about MS Word. The only thing he lacks is a bit of patiens, when things don’t work he get irritable, so that is where I help.

Later I had an insightful discussion about the OLI sourcing with Frank. I now know, more or less what I can expect from the routine so I can start adapting the Order entry module accordingly. It remains impossible to make it fully water tight as the sourcing and ordering systems, like the rest of OCS, aren’t real-time systems.

I paid a visit to Bart, my brothers neighbour, he is on vacation so I just checked the house. Everything is OK there.

I packed the Win98 CD for the key for Frans, he needs to reinstall and without the key that's rather difficult.

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Nice weather, windy with a bit of sunshine alternating with clouds, rain, thunderstorm, etc. but no snow. Spring clearly hasn’t yet decided what to do this year.

Peter wasn’t in the office today.
Ronny fixed up the Word Link program, this took about half the day. The other half was spent on the Phased-out item problem. The bug is solved and the solution is taking the OLI sourcing module into account fully.

The evening was spent on a document for Suzan. For the school she needs a worksheet that the peoples must fill in. My father had made a copy of a map the I scanned in. The problems started when he wanted to import that into a WordPerfect document (he is still using WP 6.1 for compatibility reasons). I first saved the scan in JPG format which I use as default in my scanning software. WP had a good, long look at it for about 5 minutes and then crashed with a 16-bit message box (looks like a Win3.1 crash). I rescanned at lower resolution and saved as TIF file. This went well. Next I scanned in two slides with the Nicon Coolscan, saved them as TIFs and tried to get these into WP. Scanning with the Nicon goes rather slow and produces huge files. Timareen has only (!) 32MB and runs it Cyrix chip at only 166 MHz (P200+) so rotating the scans takes very long time indeed. And the WP crashed on them again. I then imported everything into Lotus Word Pro 97, which went well, It only crashed once while trying to import the original WP document. Later I exported to WP 6.x and this could be imported by WordPerfect. Then My father fiddled with it, trying various layouts without success. This whole struggle took so much time that I didn’t even add my daybook.

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Almost no change in the weather, we only missed the thunderstorm.

The Phased out item problem got rounded off today and transferred to the System test environment. I don’t expect to see it back.

The Germans reported a problem they found in the GE file. Different invoice lines, belonging to the same shipment (partial order) are placed in GE with a different shipment date. This is wrong of course, but using our programs it is also impossible. We know they have a local version of the IVC025R but we don’t have the source (which probably resides on their test machine). When an order cannot be delivered in a single shipment the order is split up in two (or more) partial orders, each with a copy of the Order Header. Every partial order corresponds to a single shipment, the shipment date is stored in the order header, not in the lines. So all the lines in a shipment point to the same header record. When GE is composed, based on the invoice lines, the Order header of the order that lead to the invoice is retrieved (once) and the shipping date from this header is put in the GE shipping date.
The only problem I can see is with collective invoicing where invoice lines coming from more than one (partial) order get put into a single invoice. Here the shipping date from the first order will be used because the Order header is read only once, just before the loop that handles the invoice lines. According to Peter this is no problem. (Maybe.)

From the US there comes a request for a ‘local exit’ in the TeleSales order entry program. They apparently have local program to check for, among others, the creditability of a customer. We use a flag among the customer data especially for creditability. This flag is used in the program to block the release of the order, with a method to bypass the test of course. They probably use different criteria and maybe they work with a special warning message. The request is certainly reasonable and we will definitively consider it but before we start adding something like it we need more information about their actual needs (and wishes). Peter should discuss it with Jan first and probably with someone from America (? Guy Voortmans ?).

Just before I wanted to go home Sandri got stuck on a file he wants to process. It is a file that is passed from another AS/400 by CS (our Communications System, an IDE packet that I inherited from Koen). In CS the file is created if it doesn’t exist (it typically doesn’t) and then filled. After making a backup control is passed to a client program (CSDxxx) and when that has finished the file is deleted. Normally the CSDxxx program is just a CL program that copies the data from the unstructured CS file into a normal database file, sometimes kicking off another program that does the actual data processing. Sandri wants to pick up the file directly in the data processing program, to save on a large copy hanging around I guess. The problem with this is that there is no external file description so the program, using an override, runs into a level check almost every time. The solution is to use an internally described file (and old RPG II technique) though that is not obvious these days He showed the “Of course, how could I forget” symptom when I told him how to do it. (BTW I had to look it up myself because I had forgotten it also, but I never told him that :~) )

At around 16h00 someone from networking came around. I have a (private) ZIP drive attached to my computer and he wanted to copy some files (mainly MP3 files downloaded from the net) from a Novell server to a ZIP disk. He simply copied by dragging the full sub directory from the network drive to an empty ZIP disk. There were about 30 files for a total of about 55MB so I expected it to take about a quarter of an hour. After about 40 minutes the copying was still going! What actually seemed to happen was a very slow network connection, the drive light on the ZIP would blink a few times and then stay off for about half a minute. This was very regular, not copying in bursts, as happens when Windows tries to multitask, but as if each packet took about half a minute to arrive. I had only a few connections open to the AS/400 but none were in the foreground so that couldn’t be the problem. After said 40 minutes, about 35MB had been copied, I got tired of the whole thing and started suggesting possible problems. We tried a few things but nothing helped until he opened the virus scanner. Once that was in the foreground things went fast, with the last 20MB being copied in 5 minutes. We didn’t stop the scanner, we merely brought it to the foreground. The scanner is set to scan downloads and you definitively want it to do that, even if you are almost sure the downloaded files are safe. Almost is not good enough.. Presumably when the scanner runs in the background it has such a low priority that it cannot scan fast enough, needing almost half a minute to scan a single block sent over the network. We use Network Associates Virus Shield (formerky McAffee) on all the PCs here. When I later tried the same thing at home copying went almost unhindered. I copied from another Win95 machine set up on a peer network. At home I use IBM Anti Virus (with a signature file that should have been update almost 2 years ago) and the icon in the system tray did blink a few times so I think traffic was indeed scanned but I am not sure as there is no specific setting for network or download files.

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Cool, wet and windy. That is the weather here but the forecast is for an improvement.

The NT server was down due to a crashed program. That is the server was not actually down but the program that crashed had taken al the memory and then put up a message box. On NT no memory apparently means no services. We could still log on , probably trough another domain server, but the mapped drives were not available.

The Germans are tired of reapplying their local adaptations each time we ship a new version/modification, they want to get rid off all local adaptations. To do so they are now asking that we build their local adaptations in in the common programs. Nice try.
So now I am checking their local versions to find the differences and asses the feasibility of adding the changes to the common programs. The problem is that adding Germany-specific things must not disturb non-German functions. First I must check their program.

While checking on the US request (yesterday) we noticed a problem with the validation program. On the PC side in TeleSales there is the possibility to add five localised test (41 to 45). On the AS/400 only for test 41 a local exit was build in. Checking further (=reading the source) there is no problem, all tests higher than 41 are redirected to another program OLE095R. This allows local opcos to add tests. The only advantage I see however is that we only have to provide a single ‘local exit point’ in the program. When more test are needed the entry parameter for the main validation program must be expanded, which opcos cannot do because they cannot add these parameters on the progress side.

Suzan isn’t home this evening. We had trout with burned almond flakes, one of my favourite fish dishes, washed down with a bottle of good white whine (Tatchili, from Down Under). After all that wine I didn’t do much of anything.

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We got stable weather now. That is it remains the same, the forecast slipped but then they are probably using a Microsoft Windows box to compose the forecast.

Because Suzan is not here I bring my father to the hospital for his kidney dialysis. Suzan will pick hum up at noon.

Gone shopping afterwards. I brought back 3 new sherry glasses. The LG flat panel monitor, which has been advertised for more than a month now, finally has arrived at Exell. I picked it up immediately. It costs about twice as much as a good 17 inch monitor but the picture is almost as big and razor sharp. At the price (40.000BEF) I consider this a bargain. I installed it immediately, replacing the Yakumo screen on Harper. It is just a joy to work with.

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I didn’t have a problem last week so I doubled the distance this week. Without problem.

Today is the birthday of my brother. Congratulations, old man!

That document for Suzan (see 21st) gave trouble again. It is impossible to print from WordPerfect and the WP file won’t load in Word Pro. In the end we got it printed on my HP DeskJet 500. The first page is good but the photographs o the second page come out slightly banded. On the Lexmark the first page will not print but if you reverse the print direction the third and second come out OK. Now we have a document printed in two parts. By the time we got it out it was already Monday.