Week 33, 1999 ,Svenson
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Week 33, 1999 ,Svenson
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1999-08-16 |
MondayMonday already. My brother is going to lay down a last third layer of paint and then start putting furniture and clutter back. I did a thorough check-up on the normal order splitting routines and my conclusion is that we cannot resurrect the lost data. The best we can do is replace them with something that at least resembles what should have been created. This still will be a hell of a program. And I got some program adaptations back from the Americans. They look all right so I will build them in into the programs we ship them. After putting back a large cupboard I tested the new phone line. Until now I had to run the cable from the attic to the basement to bypass the phone switch, letting it dangle over the stairs and trough the hall, before I could connect to the Web. And when finished I had to reel it in again lest someone stumble over it in the dark. Now we pulled the wire alongside the phone lines and trough a new hole in the staircase. Much easier and no running around anymore, just switch on the modem and I can connect. That is I can try, I got a busy tone and succeeded only after about 10 tries, after reading my mail I disconnected and couldn't get on again. What I dislike about the whole affair is not that I got the busy tone, that can happen, but each time the connection driver wouldn't relinquish the modem. It just stopped dialling and started counting to 20. Then it would try to connect to the modem again but notice that the modem was not responding. Switching the modem off and on only cleared the lock about half the time. I don't know what the normal procedure is but the only sure way to disengage the modem if off/on didn't do it was rebooting. I wonder what people with internal modems do. They don't have modem light to indicate the kind of activity the thing is performing (or why it is not) and they cannot switch it off and on again. |
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1999-08-17 |
TuesdayYet another autumn day weather wise. I am having troubles with the database recovery program for Germany. Every time I think I closed up a hole I stumbled into another. After a whole day dragging trough a muddy problem like this my reasoning capacity has diminished to Pentium levels. I decided to cast a lot of concrete to fill up the holes after drying over night I should see some results. I added the latest hardware struggles to the Aria page . The story is not finished yet. And I updated my list of hard disks (not yet webbed) with a series of disks. I noticed that I am almost half a year behind with my logs. Mainly due to keeping up these day notes. Why oh why cannot be there more than 24h a day ?
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1999-08-18 |
WednesdayIt is much warmer this morning (15C) and there is no dew but the rest of the day is the same as yesterday. I finished the recovery program but while preparing a data set for testing we noticed that the logistics system here produced exactly the reverse situation. In Germany the cancelled lines become orphaned, here in Venlo the cancelled lines are processed normally but the released and shipped lines become orphaned. I made my recovery program intelligent enough to cope with any kind of orphaned records so that doesn't spoil the testing. It is spooky however. We are breeding programs that don't act as they should. My father needed some photographs urgently so, together with Suzan he went to the coast. When I got home at 20h00, they were still out so I made lunch for myself. And I ate to much of it of course. But then It was one of my favourites, rice mix with bacon, that can be eaten warm or cold so now I ate half of it warm and I packed the rest for lunch tomorrow.
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1999-08-19 |
ThursdayThe same 15C today with spells of rain in the late afternoon. Oucha. I broke the recovery program by assuming that the OLI archive files would be the same as the active files. This is not the case so I will have to come up with a workaround. We got the Americans by the neck now. They have a problem with the LDA. The 300 first positions of this is normally filled with system wide parameters, with program to program parameters following from position 300 onwards. The first 300 pos are filled when a job starts and should never be altered. When the order calculation has run these positions are cleared, causing problems and lockups afterwards. In Venlo this doesn't happen yet they claimed that their programs did not clear the LDA. We searched but we don't clear it either so we requested them to search their programs as well. Next day they still claim it is our fault So we add dump to our programs and run the stuff. After a call to the VAT programs the LDA is cleared. The VAT programs are adapted by, guess ... Someone in America is not going to be happy tonight. And maybe they listen to us next time. I spent the evening cleaning up files. I found backups of web pages all over the place. On floppies, Zips, Jas disks and various hard disks. Backing up is of course a good thing but I think I need to implement a systematic approach. As it is now I have at least 5 backups of everything but all scattered around and from different dates. If I lose a file now I don't think I can trust my backups. Once I got everything up on the attic I must install some sort of tape system. |
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1999-08-20 |
Friday11C and windy this morning, staying windy all day and some serious showers at around 5 o'clock. Here in Venlo quite some coleges come to work on bicycle and they definitively don't like rain between five and six :). I finally got a confirmation from America that my programs are correct and that the problems were on their side. At least they yield to facts.
Ronny, the colleague that I currently work with, had an accident today. This morning he made a tailspin on the highway, got off road, hit a ditch and somersaulted back on the road. All at about 130Km/h. Miraculously he only bruised his elbow. The car, a Citroen Xara, is totally destroyed of course but it did save him. Another colleague, passing the same route picked him up. He didn't have a productive day of course but I think being at work made it easier to cope with the situation. He had been checked, physically, on the spot by the people from an ambulance that had been called by the police and they had not found anything serious and by the afternoon he looked as normal as usual with only the onset of some stiffness in his neck and shoulders. He will get a check up tomorrow in hospital (500m from his home) but I expect him to be back Monday, with a new lease car. He just was lucky. I didn't have a productive day either and yet was tired this evening so I didn't do much more than post this page and answer some mails.
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1999-08-21 |
SaturdayNice, almost summer weather in the morning, starting off at 12C. Rain at noon and dry but overcast in the afternoon. Not nice. Shopping day again. I picked up a network card and a SCSI card for Aria, the mainboard hasn't returned yet so she remains open and death. Sigh. Busy chores and rest day so there is not much to report.
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1999-08-22 |
SundayCool morning at 7C, clear sky, and sunny until ... Real good weather for running. I am not getting Pat back to working order. That is not without a serious investment in time. My brother cannot wait for that and he is currently without PC so I picked up a cheap box, installed his programs for him and set up the hard disk with dual boot option to start either DOS of Win98. That way he can play his old DOS games without risk to his Windows setup. At 750$ it is just a minimal system and the only thing I added was 64MB of memory. Even though it is unlikely to ever connect to a network I named it, out of habit probably. So when he arrives back he can pick Cindy up. The benefit for me is that he already has a screen so the 17inch monitor is staying here. Yesterday evening, when I wanted to post my daybook I had a problem with my modem. Whatever I did I never could connect, either the called number was reported busy, or the modem was not responding or there was no dial tone or ... I got about a dozen different messages and nothing I tried would produce anything. I started doubting Miona but I didn't want to swap her out and try with another computer. After about two hours of fiddling and fusing I was about to give up. I wanted to call my father in the kitchen. When I picked up the phone I heard the radio playing (commentary on a football match) faintly on the background. I wasn't sitting in a bath but it was an Eureka experience none the less. I installed a phone switch after my father had an asthma stroke landing him in hospital. The intention was that he could call a doctor from practically anywhere in the house. I used rather cheap phones for it and, after a drop, the one in the kitchen doesn't always disconnect when you hang up. I ran down, picked it up and slammed it back, ran up again and connected. Presto, success on first try. It did cost me 2 hours. And a lot of curses. I spent most of the day porting info into HTML format. It is noway near finished but at least the computer section is slowly building up.
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