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It is sunny and warm today, in the twenties. With w brisk thunderstorm at about 6 o clock. Ideal weather for the garden. And for the weeds.

I got a day off to get my car maintained so I could stay in bed late but by half past six I got bored already. The whole morning was spent on gardening. All the potatoes got planted but there is still a fair stretch of garden free so Peter is going to get more potatoes to be planted next week. If the weather holds..

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Again bright weather today, without thunder.

Peter is on the SAP course again, so I can research the VAT request from Germany unhindered. Unless Ronny comes up with questions concerning the Word link that is.

One of the co-authors of the book my father is writing sent in his part. Although it was agreed that he would send it in WP format he did not do that but sent in MS Word format. He is using Word 97 and nothing we have installed at home is capable of reading it. After a lot of crashes we got all the text out of it, reformatting has to be redone but that was not according to the rules set forward so it had to be redone anyway. I think the next meeting will be an animated one.

I have Star Office 5.0 on CD but I lost the key somewhere, this is a chaotic place. The idiocy of the whole thing is that Star Office is a free product, you don’t have to pay if you use it non-commercial, you only have to register. If you don’t have the key handy you cannot install however. Unless you download it from the web and install it that way, then you get the key supplied direct. This is a 40MB download. Requesting a key by e-Mail does not work for a CD based product. Result, unless I find the key I cannot use it. This is crazy.

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For once the weather and the forecast are the same. Probably by accident.

I thought I finished the planning for the VAT build in on the order screens but I ran into a complication. It is possible to assign conditions to an order, on header level, as well as on line level. As each line may demand a special VAT percentage, in Belgium we have 4 standard levels (0%, 7%, 17% and 21.5%) with some special temporal levels (ex 12% for construction materials which normally should go at 17%), the head level condition is rather problematic. It seems that the header conditions are assigned a special line, line number 0, and the correct VAT percentage has to be retrieved based on a special set of ‘administrative items’. However, checking the database, there are header conditions (ko.oln=0) that have no item assigned. More work to be done before I can start coding.

This noon Francis came around with a problem that occurred in France. The program that handles the statistics file had hit an error and was in message waiting. This proved to be exactly the same problem that occurred in Spain . We solved it immediately by deleting records from the S3 file and updating the TH records, setting the th.stat and th.stiv flags high. Shortly before running the Trigger file processing an invoice printing program had crashed. That job was cancelled or resumed, any way that problem was ‘solved’. We now had the duplicate S3 records problem twice, with at least one confirmation of a preceding crash. This looks like a problem that must be handled smoother, we cannot have the system crashing left right and centre with only some quick and dirty manual SQL (or DFU!) solution. We may not turn into a Microsoft shadow!

I printed out a set of sheets for my brother this evening before helping out with support beam on the attic. Things are moving now.

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One of the joys of working and living in different countries is that you pass customs twice a day. Now that is normally no problem, there has been an economic ‘union’ between Belgium and the Netherlands even before the EEC existed. For as long as I remember (born in 1962) there haven’t been regular customs checks for normal cars. Only trucks need to get the correct papers signed and for most that doesn’t have to happen on the border. But to prevent fraud the customs services sporadically and unannounced pick out some trucks for controlling. They did just that this morning which resulted in a mild traffic jam. I arrived about 15 minutes later than usual.

The VAT research continues. On the invoice the header conditions are added as separate lines so they are not (only?) stored in the conditions file but in the invoice details file. This is filled by the order-calculation program IVC022R. So I must be analysing that one.
And it must be ready by tomorrow. Finished, tested and shipped!

For Telesales two new logical files had to be created (a logical file represents a keyed access path to a database table) on the order header file and the archived order header file (OH and QH). That is no problem, just a quick in between interruption.

Two new problems were reported form Austria. One points to a rounding problem that manifests itself when you compare invoices in local currency with the same invoice in Euro. The other is an occasional double printing of invoice lines. This is a serious problem because the invoice, though stating the correct total value, isn’t correct. It is also a difficult to track problem because it doesn’t occur always and the few cases we have don’t (yet) indicate a simple cause.

Tomorrow is Queens Day, a public holiday in the Netherlands. OCE is closed but, because there are a lot of Belgian programmers working here the CIM Support Centre stays open. And guess who is responsible for the management? Yhea.         Not that this is really difficult, far from it, but is something extra. So is life, you always get more than you ask for.

I have a problem with my car.
Monday I had it for maintenance in the garage, I ordered 2 new tyres for the front because the current ones had all but lost their profile. While at it they noticed that the brake shoes were on the way out so they replaced them, I always agree on that because I’d rather replace them once to often than once too late. It is my life. Yesterday and today I noticed that, while braking strongly a warning led on the dashboard lights up. It light up very shortly so that I don’t have time to actual see which one lit up, while braking hard I tend to look at the potential target. Testing today I noticed that it was the brake light. It is orange so there is no immediate danger but how far can I trust that. I suspect they either lost some brake oil while replacing the shoes or badly connected one of the sensors. I called the garage and they want the car back as soon as possible. As I cannot get away tomorrow and Saturday is a public holiday in Belgium (1st of May is Labour day so nobody works, get it?) Monday is actually the earliest possible. I’ll have a look at it on Saturday my self. I am starting to distrust that garage.
They were top class some years ago but since then they have grown in size considerably. Without increasing the amount of quality control it seems. I still like FIAT and they are a convenient 2 minutes walking distance so I will probably stay with them. But I don’t like this.

Daybook and cleanup of another pile of rubble. Peter asked for an extra portion of asparagus so I need about 3 kg of it. If the stalls are open.

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Queens day today. This is a public holiday here in the Netherlands (But not in Belgium) so the roads are clear. I got to Venlo about 15 minutes faster than usual, without braking the law. Well almost, open roads are very tempting.

I am backup CSC management today but I didn’t get any calls for assistance or problem reports or support or whatever. I didn’t have to do anything, which suits me no end because I have job enough with the TAX problem. If Tom and Wilbert had nothing more to do then this they would die of boredom :) .

While I didn’t have to do anything I did some things. Shortly after the ‘siesta’ I noticed that the system (nloce003) seemed to be slowing down so I started monitoring jobs. There was an OLI job (DHK_PART_C , started by QSCI) running in QBATCH that was consuming about 80% CPU. When this was going on for about 20 minutes I informed Sven about his runaway job. His response was that this was a part of the Daily Housekeeping and that it could well run for some time because it hadn’t run for weeks and it was simply catching up on a backlog of work. After about one and a half hour the job was still running at an average of 80% CPU. This was running in the background (qbatch) so the rest of the system had not yet come to a halt but starting new jobs, especially in the background (testb), is visibly slower than usual. A new message to Sven resulted in a quick dismissal. But about 10 minutes later there was a lively discussion in the OLI camp, with talk about debugging and server jobs. The job was cancelled. I noticed later the they were running the program interactively. Probably with the debugger :~}.

I had to cancel the Progress broker job a few times because Ronny crashed out and the job kept on running. This is not exceptional and doesn’t rank as a management.

The TAX job is all but finished. I did it in a few stages. I finally tested it with the debugger on and I noticed a few detail problem, such as not clearing the VAT inclusive amount on screen. These are now fixed but I didn’t test these last changes. That will be done on Monday.

Only one asparagus booth, btw my favourite, was open. I got 2.5kg of it, that is two serious portions for Peter and one for me. We had fish, trout, with almond chips today, the asparagus if for tomorrow.

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I went shopping but of course everything was closed.

I peeled almost an hour on the asparagus but is was worth the effort. Just delicious.

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Running without problem today so I’ll expand again next week.
Afterwards I got to Peter’s garden to plant potatoes and sow salsify. The potatoes went fast enough but for salsify you need to work the soil thoroughly because when you leave large or hard clumps of dirt or stones in it the roots will split and stay very narrow or twisted. This results in salsify roots that are almost impossible to dig out and very difficult to clean and prepare. This took more than the whole morning.

The afternoon was spent on cleaning up our side of the railroad bank. The railroad company comes once a year to cut down trees and shrubs that grow to close to the rails but they don’t clear the grass or the nettles. These are not a problem at this time of year yet but later the come into seed and then our garden get swamped with weeds. I generally have to take the sickle to it two or three times a year. I am going to do it about four or five times this year in an attempt to manage the brambles. The main problem we have is that people pass by the gravel track besides the railroad (illegally) and than cross the fence and walk trough our garden to the street. We are not allowed to heighten the fence so we try to spread the brambles all over the embankment. Brambles make very efficient fences, but they don’t want to grow where we want them while they grow very well where we don’t want them. This just requires extra effort.