Week 27, 1999 ,Svenson
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Week 27, 1999 ,Svenson
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1999-07-05 |
Monday
Did I say I finished with a barbecue yesterday? Add a shower to it as well! I use a small, sheet steel hibachi for a barbecue. To get a good heat this has to be over loaded with charcoal and started bout half an hour before you can actually grill something on it. So I filled it up, ignited it and then went upstairs to finish and upload the day notes. About ten minutes later I came down again and it rained. Heavily. The fire was out and the coals floated around in a puddle of black water. I cleaned up the mess, refilled it and ignited it again, under the veranda this time. Needless to say I didn’t do much else for the evening. But I did enjoy the food. The mail server at Mailbank is unreachable. On their status page they acknowledge the problem but point to their network provider as the culprit. The web servers are reachable so their network is not totally down and when I switched the mail account back to forwarding to my company inbox I got the mail trough. Maybe I did something wrong in switching but I didn’t have time to look deeper into it. It was a slow day at the office in the sense that time went by fast but work went by slowly. I solved two problems but both were relative simple. I noticed that Bo Leuf mentioned me as a new member to the daynote gang. I feel honoured by that, but I think it is a bit premature to call me a member of that group. Al right I put up a daybook but the content of it is rather thin and not entirely worked out as I would like. I am not a writer or a reviewer so my stile is not (yet) up to standard and I don’t have enough computer related content. And I don’t really have time to spend in expanding on the topics. Now that word is out I will have to crank up the effort to make something presentable of this. If I don’t succeed I don’t have to fear mail attacks with the servers down and all. I feel like I stepped into an ants nest here and now I must dance to keep the biting down; maybe that is what Jerry means when he “dances as fast as he can” :) .
Life starts as a game, jumping from rock to rock in a gentle pond trying to keep your feet dry. |
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1999-07-06 |
Tuesday
I uploaded the calendar, thisweek and 199927 yesterday and now I don’t see the changes. And I don’t remember seeing any errors in the CuteFTP log. I’ll have to check more careful this evening. I cannot contact the mail server directly (redirecting works) and the system status still reports the same problem. This seem sloppy to me. I admit that the price I pay is low but the maintenance of the servers and network is definitively not on a standard I expect. The problem of course is that if I chose to host my site somewhere else I lose my name. Sigh. Checking things out and consulting Sven it may be that it is not possible to get connected to an outside mailserver from the office. This is called security. I quickly browsed my own site and found a few problems. That is problems that I didn’t expect because they aren’t problems locally. I know of a lot of problems that still need to be fixed Pages to check and upload : Check Pages that look OK Did another paragraph on design and I started work on the map. .
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1999-07-07 |
Wednesday
There seems to be a problem with uploading pages to my site. In upload in the evening, around 23h00, and while uploading I read the last additions in the daybooks of some other people. In the morning I check my site so see if everything arrived in the correct places. The calendar, thisweek and weekly pages are all located in the cal directory and I uploaded them together. The actual week page (199927.html) did update but the 1999.html and thisweek.html did not. I noticed that yesterday but I taught I had made some mistake so yesterday evening I removed all the pages from the cal directory and re-uploaded the whole lot. I did not see any errors in the Cute FTP progress window. I did a lot of other uploads and I tested some. everything looked normal. Now this morning I find that 1999.html and thisweek.html are still the old ones.
The Mailbank server where I am hosted runs some version of UNIX, I edited the pages with E (the notepad equivalent of OS/2) and I tested them using Opera. There is nothing Microsoft-y that touched it and yet it doesn't work as expected! Seems that Microsoft is not the only devil in town, so they do have some competition, no doubt they will try to win and get a monopoly in that sector. I solved a few old outstanding problems. And then I had to shed some light on a mysterious behaviour of our main program for Iwan. In Norway they had not seen this before. I installed CuteHTML on Harper, my main system, and started to use in earnest. It is nice as it easily highlights the tags but it is not a holy grail. For a start I sorely miss a spell checker. I also miss a find-replace that acts on all files in a directory. It does a find-replace on all open files so that is a big plus. lI am just beginning to use it so I don't know its other weaknesses or strengths. I forgot to stop the forwarding so I cannot test the mail receiving at home. I can however try to send some things.
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1999-07-08 |
Thursday
Misty morning, turning into a blazing day. No news from Norway is good news. Ai. I said that to soon. Iwan still thinks he has got a problem. I will have to explain this in length. With code fragments and screen shots. I lost a CD some time ago. Well I did not lose it, I just cannot find it anymore, which is not unexpected because Jerry would feel directly at home here. :~/ I tried to upload but the modem didn't get a connection open, the best it would do on all my tries was a 4800 baud link to BBS. Normally I get 34K connections with occasionally a 26K as lowest. I guess I could have tried the US Robotics 28K Sportster but it was getting late. I'll post things tomorrow. If things work better by then.
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1999-07-09 |
Friday
Mail from Norway. He understands the situation. I think the code fragments were essential but then Iwan is not just a standard user. I had a lot of action and a lot of distraction but not much productivity. That is the way it goes some days. Ronny, my colleague is building a house. This is progressing nicely but now he found an article in his newspaper that a new law concerning building sites has been passed silently (it was passed the 3rd of May, going in on the first of August) which would result into an additional cost of about 4%. We had quite a time searching for the actual law. We found it on the web site of Het Staatsblad, this is the newspaper that is used to publish all the laws; decrees and other official declarations. A law can only become active if it has been published in this paper. During the search I broke their search engine 3 times, producing SQL errors, without doing anything out of the ordinary. What the law states is that when you have a building site you also need to have a (qualified) safety officer. The aim is to prevent accidents when two different firms are working on the same site. Now it happens often that, for example, one firm is placing windows (lower case W) while another contractor is installing electricity. So most people would be affected. As he is already busy, the actual brickwork is finished and he is taking two weeks off to put the roof on and finish the floors and some other internal structures, he didn't budget for the extra cost such a safety officer would incur. Luckily, for him, the law affects only people who start after the 1st of August. I didn't come close to a computer at home this evening. (this is typed on Saturday).
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1999-07-10 |
Saturday
I went to the barber. Shopping later. We had baked sardines with a special sauce. And we all ate to much :) . Later I made a good strong fish stock from the fish heads. Did some reading and brushed up my Biography. This should be about ready for the time being. Of course it will only be finished when I die but I mean that is now about current.
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1999-07-11 |
Sunday
Vlaams nationale feestdag, Gulden sporen slag 1302-07-11 (?) I didn't go running today. I tapped off the clock at 5h45, blinked and it was 6h30. Seems my body decided I had to catch up on sleep. I did some gardening at my brothers garden and later, at home, the grass needed cutting. My brother came home with a few documents that needed scanning. They were Royal Decisions (=laws) so, after he had scanned a few accompanying papers we went to the attic where I showed him how to get text from the web site of Het Staatsblad. Normally he gets a photocopy of the text but, as the publication is on A3 format it is reduced and the copier they use prints the bottom of the page very light, barely readable. When scanning we select the Dutch column (all Belgian laws are printed in both Dutch and French using a two column layout), scan it in, run it trough Textbridge and save it before going to the next page. The result is a series of small text files where typically the last paragraph is unrecognised. These are then combined into a WordPerfect (5.1) document which he downloads to his Psion. While travelling to the coast (3 hours by train) he corrects all the scanning mistakes. Now picking it from the web site no extra editing is needed. It was hot today with a light breeze blowing all the cool air out of the house. And Suzan brought back a crate of cherries for making jam. This requires cleaning and then boiling. The temperature in the kitchen ran up to about 40°C. I escaped most of it by hiding behind a computer screen. I noticed that files with a space in their name are not served up by the UNIX based servers at Mailbank. So now I am (slowly) checking and correcting references. I assume that this name_with_blanks problem also applies to other files so I will patch them also. Slowly this site will become visit able.
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