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I took a day off to get my car to the control. Every car over 4 years old gets controlled yearly for its road worthiness. Mine will get four years old on the 24 so ... . I don’t expect problems but you can never tell.

Oeps. I got a red card because my lights weren’t adjusted equally. A bigger problem is that someone else picked up my cards so now I don’t have a conformity document any more. And the other guy has the wrong document. This is not a problem, unless you get an accident. They will try to find and contact the other person and then they’ll call me.

I went to the garage to have my lights fixed. For free. I asked them last time (see week 17) to check it, I didn’t find it on the bill but then their billing is always a bit chaotic. I asked it, they didn’t do it then so now they have to do it free. It actually costs me because I have to return to the control so I pay a second fee there. While at the control the manager told me they had located the other driver and he would bring back the paper today end get his own. He drives in a BMW, which cannot be confused with a FIAT; his name however sounds like mine and at the they call out names to hand out the papers (although I noticed this afternoon that they verified the make and model of the car as well ). The moment my paper comes in they will mail it to me so I should have it by Wednesday or Thursday at least.

Between the two visits I went shopping for wood with my brother. We also searched for a rainwater barrel but the size we wanted was sold out everywhere. He had counted on doing the cleanup of the attic but, as I had already done it, he got an unexpected free day in his planning. That is not a problem because free time is eaten even faster than free disk space :)

Later I started on a personal web site layout. I can start it now and keep it locally to see how things work out but because I am doing everything by hand (Wordpad!) I expect to learn the management side of a web site the hard way.

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Tom’s new kid was born (Sunday). Good luck to Landon. (and the rest of the Syroid Clan).

  ..

Pieter called from Norway with a problem in Consume Control (CCM960R, which is OSI) in 7.6 materials (type=T) were allowed while in 7.8 they are not. The problem is a test that has been removed illegally. When code must be removed from a program it is not actually deleted but converted into comments to allow later checking. In this case the line was simply deleted. ..

I did finally sent out the TAX patch to Germany. And I started on the TAX program that will be used from the TS2000 side. ..

I sorted trough the images on my site structure. Still not sure how to do things..

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I got a request for information from Peter Deleu

Time lost on an OCX thing from Rutger Nuits. This has nothing to do with our normal work. It didn’t work, with Ronny asking question about how to do things in Progress. As if I know anything about it that he doesn’t.

The Germans have called Sef about a problem they mailed to Peter just before he went on vacation. There seems to be a problem with the OFI-interface when invoicing does not run. The invoices get processed the next day but the data is not sent to OFI anymore. I didn’t get the mail from Peter so I asked more details directly from Germany (Volker). I don’t see a problem in the programs directly so I will have to look at the data itself.

Between things I checked the French problem but I still haven’t got an answer from Francis.

And I slugged on the VAT program that will be used by TeleSales

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The problem in Norway (see Tuesday) was solved common.

Germany didn’t answer my mail. Yet.

There is a serious problem with the dataqueue handling between Progress-TeleSales and the AS/400. We noticed that, in the USA, the dataqueue is not empty. This is the result of job cancellations or time-outs (or ... ). The problem with this is that when a job (TS2000) does a call (to the AS/400), then gets an error on retrieving the data-queue (not a crash but rather a negative result code) the program goes on but the data on the dataqueue remains. The next time the same job call a program (on the AS/400) and then reads the dataqueue it will read the first record (keyed on job number) which is the reply from the previous call. This can cause serious problems with orders being accepted or rejected based on the validation of prior orders!!
The solution we will apply is making sure that the dataqueue is uniquely keyed. On the TS2000 side, Ronny adds a date-stamp field to the parameter list for the called programs. In the As/400 a field is added to the parameter list as well. When the program has finished, the job number and the parameter field are concatenated and used to fill the key of the dataqueue for the posted item. On the TeleSales side the date-stamp is appended to the ‘record-ID’ of the command and this is then used as key for retrieving the dataqueue item.

It is even more work than it sounds! and after the changes everything has to be tested again.

I asked Francis if he already had some information about the French problem that I mailed him about last week. He had simply ignored my mail. He said (in other words) that I should solved it, it is not His problem!
Asking questions seems to be wrong here.

In the US the PRO024CL job crashed because in the OLI-order-detail file the location-from was not filled. This is a 6 characters long and the last 4 must contain numeric data because field is used to get the warehouse from the warehouse file and there the location field is 4 numerical! The reply from the OLI team is “the field should never be empty”. Well it is. Simply ignoring the problem will not solve it !

While testing I noticed that in Order entry (oms734r) option-6 : Display details produces a crash in the called program because the quantity passed is not numerical. On screen the qty is only 3 positions long (here in Venlo it is 10 positions (8packed+editing). The parameter expects the full length but only the 3 left most positions are filled (with the correct hex-values), the rest is hex-rubish. I checked on our system, in all the previous releases, and I didn’t find a display file where the quantity was truncated. This smells like a local adaptation!! Check with Wilbert/Tom tomorrow.
Maybe the blank location from results from another local adaptation.

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Still no news from Germany. I called Volker at about 11h00 but he didn’t pick up the phone. And I forgot to call again later.

I got the data queue key programs updated. While testing we noticed that Progress does not wait on a dataqueue. When, on the AS/400 you do a receive from a dataqueue and there are no data on it the program simply waits until a ‘record’ appears on the queue. This is intended. That way you can create a kind of daemon that just stays active and will react on request. The Progress version of the receive doesn’t wait for a record. It just has a quick look and returns. According to the manual the return value should contain the returned data length except when there is an error. When there is a database connection problem -1 should be returned, when the requested dataqueue does not exist () value -2 will be returned and -3 should be returned when “the operand (key-order) did not contain correct data” (the meaning of this is not clear). Apparently 0 is returned if everything goes normal but no records were found. The test currently used in TeleSales only compares the value with 0. If the value is greater or equal to zeros, aka there was not an error, then the program continues. If the value is zeros, no error but also no data, the program happily continues.
The problem is that, on validation programs, blanks are used to indicate that there are no errors!!

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Gone shopping.

I finally found sports shoes with Velcro closure. I had a pair but they were really used up, with the soles dropping off. An the last 2 or 3 years they have been out of fashion but I like them because they are easy to put on and off in a hurry.
I brought a barrel, with tap, for my brother but it wil stay in my car till he is back because I don’t dare leave it in attached and unsecured on his lot. It wouldn’t be the first object that changes owner in the night.
I picked up a sound card at Masset, an OEM (=no box or manual) SoundBlaster 64 PCI for Miona.
I also bought a telephone and cable and connecting stuff for the attic.
And some clothes I don’t really need but ...

I came back late and had to hurry with the food, in the rush I probably established an asparagus peeling record. I made asparagus rolls Like last week, with the same success.

The afternoon and evening was spent on cursing the phone system. Eventually it works, sort of. The phone switch I installed in the basement was Premier unit intended for six lines while most home switches support only 4 lines. It also has a special line (nr 5) for use with a modem/fax and the sixth line can be dedicated for a doorbell system Using DIP switches it is possible to enable the modem/fax capacity and to switch line 6 from doorbell to phone. There are some other nifty features, most of which I don’t think I’ll never use.
No matter what I did I couldn’t get the line 6 to work. I settled for line 5 (modem) and 4 for the attic. One of the problems installing telephones in Belgium is that the official plugs are fairly big with four pins the same size as those on power plugs (25mm long and 5mm diameter) designed for cables that have a copper ring fitted at the ends. Most cable you can buy however doesn’t have these rings and are intended for (or fitted with) American style J11 sockets. The actual wires are extremely small and stripping them for manual fitting is not easy. This is a patiens eating, time destroying, frustrating fiddle job

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Running started with some uneasiness, my calves felt warm even before starting. I ran the same length as last week and didn’t get any problems.