Week 29, 1999 ,Svenson
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Week 29, 1999 ,Svenson
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1999-07-19 |
Monday
The barbecue yesterday was better than that on Saturday, I ate only a little bit to much, didn't drink to much and ate early enough so I was feeling as good as any Monday morning. Another sweltering day but this time I am in an air-conditioned office :) for work :( In Venlo we had a short but very heavy shower at about 17h00. In Hasselt it remained dry. I solved the American problem but I am not satisfied. I know what went wrong where and how it could be solved, I do not know why it did work in our production environment an not in out test environment. It should never have worked (or always). I am 100% sure it worked before we sent out the code to America and from the report I know that it worked there. Something went wrong somewhere and I don't know what or why. Bob Thompson has a good article about a digital camera on his site, but then he often has good well founded discussions and articles. Worth a visit. I am quite interested because I am looking for a good digital camera myself. Although I probably must wait for my budget to catch up. I can get a cheap one now or a good one later. I noticed I had mail from Saturday but on Sunday I checked my mailbox from home and it showed up empty. There probably is something wrong with the forwarding method used at Mailbank. I did send myself a messaged and logged off immediately. This message should be on my inbox when I check from home, if it isn't I will have to contact Mailbank and ask them if this is normal. . |
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1999-07-20 |
TuesdayThe temperature is dropping to normal Belgian levels with rain predicted in the evening. Probably in preparation for the National Rain tomorrow. I hardly got the American problem packed and shipped, when the Australians shot up on the priority list with a bunch of issues. I wonder how it feels to have time between problems? Yep two problems solved and one started. Not bad. I had ordered version 2.2 of Caldera's Linux. I had arranged it to be delivered on Thursday, making sure somebody would be home then. In stead they delivered the packet today. Luckily my father was home. I had Caldera Linux Base 1.2 which was installed on Miona. The 1.2 version however didn't support AGP graphics and I never got the network card installed. This was for me a first take and it looked good enough but I needed Miona for some tests with Win98 so I dumped Linux. Only temporal. I expect the new case on Saturday and I have got a bunch of components ready. Everything is ready, I only need some extra time, I will have to do some shopping for that, it is definitively not available online :-/ I noticed that quite some Americans don't agree about the Kennedy family being described as the closest thing America has to royalty. They accuse the Kennedy's for always having tried to use the sate for their own purposes and for always circumventing the law and such things. As if other politicians are clean. I'll never understand the Americans. I just think it is a pity that they never had Kings. They are moving from a republic to an empire but they never had a king, the poor fellows. Ts ts ts.
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1999-07-21 |
WednesdayI uploaded yesterday at around 23h00 but I didn't see the changes this morning, at 7h50 when I logged on from Venlo with Opera. About half an hour later I tried again with Netscape. Et voila, the changes are there, I went back to Opera did a refresh and got the changes as well. Either Opera picks pages from its cache when it opens or there is something going on at the Mailbank Server. today. I think there are to many broken strings in this web, that spider needs to wake up to repair its web if it wants to catch flies. An interesting but trying day at the office. That is right, it is our national holiday but I work for a Dutch company and they don't have a holiday today. Most of my direct colleagues are also from Belgium and most stayed home but someone must keep the support line open. Guess who :-/ The two problems I finished yesterday were of course not finished. That is they were changes to existing programs and the requested change worked. But the same programs can also be called from other placed and then the must react as if nothing was changed.
I tried to pay for the CuteFTP program no that the trial period is over and I very much like the program but from the office there was no way to get a secure connection. I already started to enter an e-Mail when it dawned that maybe the firewall was tripping me over again. I did download the new version (v3.0) to my Zip disk. At home the secure server was reachable. This is not the first time I hit that firewall and the more I use the web the more it proves to be an obstacle. I know that that is exactly the function of a firewall but it is damned inconvenient. So I paid from home. Because the downloaded version was just a few bytes to big for a floppy and I don't have the a Zip drive handy on the attic (and the network is totally disconnected during the reallocations) I could not install the new version on Hinja. I tried to download but CuteFTP itself always complained that it couldn't get at the file even though it showed up on the server panel. Downloading from Netscape succeeded but I cancelled after 10 minutes while the 'time remaining' indication was creeping up to over an hour.
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1999-07-22 |
ThursdayA grey wet day with just a few breaks to remind us that summer hasn't gone away totally. The temperature has dropped below 20 C. I did not have a productive day. Most of the time was spent on searching and prodding around in the conditions programs. In the end Peter came by and decided to change the rules, all the conditions related to an order address must be displayed. Simple as that. Only nothing is ever simple. And I had to dig rather deep to find out a method to get the time and date into a batch file generated log. The biggest problem was that the method that finally worked on my PC did not run on Ronny's PC nor if the .BAT file was run off a network drive. The second solution, putting the first output line of the date and time commands (DOS) did work but had to be tweaked for NT Workstation (on NT Server it ran correct ). The method we used was redirecting the output from DATE to a tempory batch file, append a find statement to that file and then execute that file, redirecting its output to the log file. Not simple, not elegant but it worked. I registered CuteFTP and got a mail back with the registration information but this works only for version 3 and downloading that did not go ( see yesterday ). So I brought my Zip drive from the office over and hooked it on Miona. At first I intended to move the Zip from Harper but that one is playing pass trough for my printer so moving it would require some major cable shuffling. as I don't have free manoeuvring space where Harper sits I decided against it. And he is my main workstation so I didn't want to disrupt anything there. I like to fiddle around with bits and pieces but I make always sure I have my main work station in active condition. Eventually Miona (or Enya) will become my main box and then Harper will get some hardware attention.The Win95 drivers work nicely with Win98 (probably by accident). The only inconvenient result is that my CD drive got shifted out of the way and dropped from H to I. This has no consequences for other programs (yet) so I won't change it. While I was at it I screwed the cover back on, Miona had been open all the time since I Installed Win98 because I did some swapping of cards. She is stable now so she can be closed and covered up. I re-routed some cables to hang everything off one power outlet to make switching on and off easier. I do switch of when I am not home. I installed CuteFTP from the Zip drive. Again with an exemplary installation. It seems only the big boys (and Microsoft) make problematic installation procedures. Uploading is not faster but now CuteFTP can initiate the modem connection. In the previous version that didn't work so I had first to open the connection and then start CuteFTP. Now I just start CuteFTP and the rest is automatic. Nice. Boring evening after all. Nothing went wrong.
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1999-07-23 |
FridayThe weather for today was copied from yesterday. The conditions got solved. To make sure I wouldn't get bored Peter passed me a problem with the price maintenance module. My brother is off for a few days so I'll have to feed the cat. And the potatoes must be digged out at his lot as well. The spray I used last Sunday didn't do any good, it was against leaf blight and that is what the symptoms looked like. Normally the plants should stay green till almost the end of next month and then should start wilting at the tops, now all the leaves, starting from the ground upward dried out, leaving just the green stems. They must be harvested as soon as possible because if they stay in the ground and it gets wet they will shoot out (=sprout). I watched the local bat feeding this evening. I don't know what species it is because I only see it seldom and then only at dusk, with fading light while the beast is flying around. I don't know anyone who will recognise a low flying feeding bat at dusk. I just love to see it zooming by. I never hear it calling but sometimes I hear the wings flapping just before I see it. However hard Robert may say he hates nature, I just love it. (But I don't have a dog that makes me feel inadequate.)
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1999-07-24 |
SaturdayYesterday was copied from the day before, today the weather is a copy from last Saturday. Hot and dry The case I ordered last week didn't arrive. Or maybe it did but I couldn't get it. The shop was closed due to the shopkeeper being on holiday. Now I don't mind him going on holiday, he probably deserves/needs it. What I don't like is that last weekend he assured me the box would be available today while he undoubtedly knew at the time he wouldn't be here. It probably slipped from his mind as we were discussing some unrelated things while he entered the order. It doesn't really matter because I probably wil not have time to play with computers this weekend. The Americans are debating about tax reductions, as if they have much taxes to begin with. I'd swap any day for their low rates. And here in Belgium we are still below the Scandinavian or Israelian rates. I pay about 40% on my income but that is after my boss has already paid twice that so the actual rate is closer to 60%. And I pay on everything I buy (9% on basics like food, 21% on luxuries like books and computer stuff) and the money I saved, so for which I already paid income tax, gets taxed a second time (even if it is sitting idle in the bank) as extra income. We had sardines, just like the 10th but this time I made the sauce. Just a little bit different be we ate to much. This time I take the heads along as present for my brothers cat. See if he likes them. If he doesn't there are other cats around as well. I am death. Or at least my back feels that way. BTW Odysseus doesn't like fish heads.
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1999-07-25 |
SundayNo running problems, I extended to the full distance again. I died yesterday but apparently I did not die hard enough so I could try again. I succeeded better this time. About half the potatoes are out and at the end of the day I couldn't reach the attic any more. :) I'll post tomorrow, after the reincarnation.
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