Week 32, 1999 ,Svenson
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Week 32, 1999 ,Svenson
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1999-08-09 |
MondayWhen I arrived the development AS/400 was not available. I checked the production machines and they were running smoothly. I don't have a key card that lets me enter the computer room so I couldn't get at the main console to check out stuff and upon ringing nobody came. There is always someone present but he may be occupied so it is not uncommon that you have to wait. I returned a few times to no avail. By then Tom had arrived and he has a key so he solved the problem. Later I reported to him about the management affairs I had to solve as temporal replacement for Wilbert. I worked on the data recovery program for Germany but it turned out not to be a productive day for me. We also are struggling with a problem in the Progress tools. The compilation always cancels due to an 'activity segment overflow'. It seems that Progress cannot handle triggers and other event handles it the declarations of them exceed 64K. The Intel segments seem to persist after all these years! And of course there is a new problem in America. They swapped their AS/400 for a new model in the weekend. without warning Guy. He came in this morning (afternoon for us) and found that TeleSales doesn't work anymore. What they did was simply save all the libraries to tape and then restore everything on the new machine. We use however some objects that have no persistent storage, they are not objects on disk but only objects in memory. Of course they were not recreated on the new machine. Likewise some communications setting have changed so now the NT server and the clients can send request to the AS/400 but they cannot get answers back. Nice. I swapped CD drives in and out of Pat this evening but none would go one step further than the 'Please wait while loading files for Setup' message. Typically that message appears and the CD drive starts reading but just a few seconds later all disk activity stops. Pat seems determined to reject Windows. Which I understand well enough. |
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1999-08-10 |
TuesdayThe weather I Saskatchewan turns towards autumn. And in Sweden Autumn is practising to. So Belgium follows. Since Sunday we have had generally overcast and rainy weather and Hasselt itself got its fair share of water today. At last. I think we got the American problem hammered down. They installed a new AS/400 and then restored all the data and settings from the old system to it. Everything was the same and yet the communication from the AS/400 to the clients didn't work. After spending a full day on it we found that leading zeros are truncated on the TeleSales side resulting in a wrong key value. On the AS/400 every job get a unique sequential six digit number. This is often used, in combination with the date-time stamp as a unique key for temporal records. On a normal system this number is higher then 100000 so there are no leading zeros. On the American system the current number was 003990 this morning (that is around 16h00 here in Venlo). On the AS/400 leading zeros are handled intelligently, on the PC side they are truncated by default. The result was that the PC never found the entries on the dataqueue sent by the AS/400. Solving it is more of a problem. Well the solution is simple but getting that to the US is not. If we simply produce a new patch there are a lot of changes going along and all those have to be tested locally before the patch can actually be applied. They don't have time to test all the new changes now, they want to take the system in production on the 28th. Thz Win98 saga continues. I pulled the disk out of Pat and inserted in Hinja, temporally disconnecting her disk. Now the installation runs normally so the problem is somewhere in Pat. It is not in the CD drive because I tried with 3 different ones. It is not something with the pre installed OS because I tried several DOS versions from Digital Research and from Microsoft. It is also not a problem on the IDE chain because I tried the CDs as master and as slave on the second IDE. There is nothing basically wrong with the PC itself because I could install OS/2 without problems. Later. But not today.
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1999-08-11 |
WednesdayThe last Solar eclips of the millenium in Belgium (and some other less important countries :] ) It's been a rainy overcast day except around noon and late in the afternoon and evening. I finished off the remaining program fixes for the Americans and send them over. I got no mail requests or complains so I assume they arrived and worked. The problem is that I could not test them here because they fix a problem that we cannot reproduce, this was a patch directly applied to a working set. Luckily not a production system. That honour will be reserved to the German database fix which I hope to have ready tomorrow. Just before the Solar Eclipse started the clouds thinned out enough to get a clear view of the sun. Here in Venlo we only had about 95% coverage so there was never a chance to see the corona. In most places where the coverage was full the amount of clouds made the corona rather difficult to observe. With 95% coverage it doesn't become 95% dark, the light dimmed a bit, I guess about 30%, even less than the effect of heavy clouds. Although the effect was peculiar because the shadows remained sharp. All in all it was nice to have witnessed but not at all spectacular. Even with 95% covered the sun is to bright to view with the naked eye (unless there is a good cloud coverage). I didn't buy a special darkened pair of glasses which were sold extensively for, imo exorbitant prices (up to and over 10$ for a piece of black plastic and cardboard). In stead I used two (overlaid) CD-R disks. When the clouds became just a bit to thick I removed one of the CDs. I effectively got me an adjustable strength eye protection for free!!! The next full eclipse that traverses Europe is expected in 2081. I don't expect to be around by then so this was probably the last eclipse I saw. The installation that ran trough on the disk from Pat is somewhere flawed. In Hinja where I did the installation I had a boot problem. Now I transferred the disk back and the boot problem migrated along. Hinja is back to normal and Pat still is death.
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1999-08-12 |
ThursdayEvery body likes stability so the weather has decided to be stable. Only now it is too cold and overcast. I finished of the correction program for Germany. Tested and changed it a bit. I checked off the problem report everything is no set for shipment. I (or Peter) just have to make some sort of documentation note so the German operator knows what to do. I wanted to pull the second disk out from Yaku. The disks in Yaky are mounted on rails and can be removed by pressing two tabs while pulling the drive. The tabs are verry hard sprung however so you need a firm grip on them. After disconnecting I noticed that I didn't get that disk out without removing the drive cage, which is not possible without removing all the cards and the motherboard to get at the right screws. Talk about a good case design here! I simply reconnected and left the disk inside. While I was hacking and prodding I connected up the network cable. That is something I should not have done. The box only comes up functionally once every five or six tries. It always gets to the password screen but ether it doesn't find the network or it starts to run the Netware logon script. It never comes up with my normal desktop but it either hangs at some (but not always the same) point in the logon script, or it gives an odd message (never twice the same) or it comes up without icons and a death mouse. If I cancel on the password screen I get (mostly) a normal start up. Functional but without network. I'll try to reinstall the network tomorrow (take along the Win95 CD).
At home the installation saga on Pat continues.
I know it wouldn't solve my problem but I feal ready to shoot some one at Microsoft. Oeps, hope that Bob doesn't read this.
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1999-08-13 |
FridayFriday the 13th. And jet nothing crashed, exploded or otherwise turned into a spectacular failure. Remarkable. I had a discussion with Sven, from the OLI team, about the fix I prepared for the German database. I'll have to re-evaluate the whole fix. My intention was to put the files back in the stage before the problem manifested itself but with corrected data so that re executing / continuing the processing would pick the problem records and handle them the normal way. This won't work with the OLI files so I am not allowed to it that way. This complicates the whole matter tremendously. I think I am going to give up on Pat. I tried everything I can think off but Windows just will not load. Not Win95 nor Win98. Both react exactly the same, each time so this is at least something that Windows consistently. I have heard people cry about the difficulty of installing OS/2 or, especially, Linux while they claim Windows installs easily. Frog ! I installed OS/2 without a problem and I installed Linux without problem. I even had X-windows running after a few tries with the screen and card settings. My brother does wants Windows so as things stand I cannot return Pat to him. All the other boxes are in use except Hinja but this only has 16MB so it is not really acceptable as a permanent replacement. We are going to redecorate a room so there will probably no postings till Monday. I'll do what I can but I am not going to try more. Every time I try to do more than I can I run into problems. Strange isn't it :-/
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1999-08-14 |
SaturdayShopping, but quick. I picked up a 6.5GB Western Digital drive and a 64MB DIMM 100. The motherboard I returned was not yet tested (vacations?) and because the new one produced the same symptoms I told Steven that the original was probably normal. If it returns from testing with an error I know the second board also has a problem. As the old Toshiba is failing my brother will need a new portable machine. I have got Mita laying around unused so I can give him that. The only problem is that Mita is an old sub-notebook without CD. And since I replaced the harddisk I haven't got the PC Card slot drivers working. Didn't try to hard then. And I don't have time now. The rest of the day was lost in scrubbing and scratching to get the old wallpaper removed and to get the walls and ceiling cleaned. First with ammonia, later with a special type of soap (Solarine) and then rinsing with water. My brother is doing most of the work while I am running errands. The room is too narrow to work with two at a time unless we move all the furniture. which we don't do because that take more time and effort than we have. everything must be finished before Monday evening because than my father comes back and he doesn't stand most paint smells (he has got asthma).
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1999-08-15 |
SundayI didn't go running but I compensated by running stairs up and down the attic the best part of the afternoon while the paint was drying. We washed the walls a last time and got two layers of paint down. It was well past 21h00 when I fired up the barbecue with the last of the charcoal. And I noticed that all the small pieces of charcoal had gathered at the bottom of the sack. Small pieces mean low airflow and thus badly burning coal. It needed constant blowing just to keep it glowing. I got the meat done but only just.
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