Week 34, 1999 ,Svenson
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Week 34, 1999 ,Svenson
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1999-08-23 |
MondayFantastic morning (10C) with a series of high thin clouds coloured dark to bright red with a light pastel blue background. The rst of the day was likewise beautifull with temperatures in the mid twenties lots of sun and a smatering of high clouds. I finished the German recovery and ran it on our test situation. Nothing happened. Which, after some curses and a lot of searching, turned out to be perfect because the test setup did not present the German problem. So the program wil not corrupt good data. Keeping the acid for tomorrow. I setup Partion Magic on Cindy and installed DR DOS v6 with dual booting. Now Peter can play all the games he wants under DOS without killing Windows. I noticed that I took on too much last weekend. I posted the Computers page with all links enabled but not all the pages linked to it are ready. If you are interested you can go there but be warned it is infested with broken links, duplicate pages and unedited HTML. You enter at your own risk. Some, like Aria (computer not finished so page intentionally not finished) and Cindy are as I intended but most aren't.
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1999-08-24 |
TuesdayAgain a beautiful day, starting off with black clouds on an indigo sky, turning into crimson streaks on a royal blue background. Morning temperature was 11C climbing to 23 in the afternoon. The acid test only revealed a few minor issues. Only packing and sending remains. And Peter has to tell them how to handle things. Also das Deutshe probleem ist beseitigt. The OSI (consumables) module has been causing intermittent problems. Sometimes an order would not generate an invoice. Nobody complains on missing invoices but of course the credit notes follow the same routines and they generate complains. Strange isn't it. Intermittent problems are the most difficult but now we found the problem. We use a trigger file to track the progress of an invoice trough the system. If all the flags in that file are up for an order the record is deleted. The creation program for these records handles Consumable orders different and raises all but the calculation flag. The invoicing checks the calculation flag, if this is low (order is not calculated yet) or not found then no invoice is made. So if the trigger handler runs before the invoicing but after the calculation no invoice will be made for consumables. Ever. I think the easiest solution is to leave the invoiced flag low on initialisation and adapt the invoice checking program (ivc024??) to pull that flag high without touching the statistics. I'll have to discuss this with Peter first. He has the better overview. I see only bits and bytes, he sees files and folders. I finished off the installations on Cindy so Peter can take it along or I bring it to his place, a mini tower is not easily transported on bicycle. Now I can concentrate again on Aria. I polished up some of the computer pages but not all. So be patient. I got a remark from someone that it is astonishingly cold in Belgium. He of course referred to the temperature I report daily. This is not the average temperature it is the temperature in the morning. Just before I leave at 6h15 I read that temperature off a thermometer in the garden. This is about the lowest temperature of the day. If, like today, I mention an afternoon temperature it is typically the temperature on a large digital meter alongside the highway at around 18h00. Past the hottest part of the day. So you should not compare the temperatures here with what you get on the news or weather bulletins. It is just an indication of what it is like here. And an easy opener for my day note.
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1999-08-25 |
WednesdayThe weather holds more or less although the clouds are closing up a bit. 't Was a warm night (14C) compared to the last few days. With the German problem out of the way I can pick up the adaptations for America. They must be ready by, let's see, yesterday. Maybe we get it ready in time. If I hit the keyboard faster than light it should be no problem. Ronny is suffering a very light case of whip-lash from his accident last week. His neck tires fast and then starts hurting. This condition can last a few weeks so we will have to accommodate for it. He is taking the strain well so with a little support everything will be OK. TeleSales will progress a bit slower but we keep it going. I couldn't upload to the Mailbank servers yesterday. So you didn't see anything new here. If you did, warn me! Reading was no problem, it was just CuteFTP that couldn't make the connection. I tried to upload to the server at the ISP I use, I got 5MB free with my account and I haven't used it yet, and I had no problem uploading everything. I never used them before but I noticed that they are faster than Mailbank. By a factor of 5 at least. I checked today and everything worked fine. Maybe I hit them during a backup procdure.
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1999-08-26 |
ThursdayIt is too damn hot and humid for normal life. It was 21C this morning (6h00) and it did rise to about 28C at noon. The problem is that the air is abnormally humid, we had sun all day and almost no clouds and yet the light was diffuse. There was no horizon thanks to a misty haze. I finished off the adaptations for the Americans and I started a new program for them. Sandri, the OSI architect, inquired about the invoice problem and remarked that there must be a correction program to get the lost invoices back. This is quite simple because the invoices are no actually lost. They never finished the last step and to get them there is just a mater of patching up the trigger file. But. Things never are simple. If they are simple that is only because you don't have all the information you need. So what am I missing here? I have been having a discussion with Bob Thompson lately about economics and politics. I dare say we amicably disagree. I am inclined to the political left while he is leaning to the right. Now I may be left of centre but I sure am not inclined to become a communist. The ideas on which communism is based are sound starting points for discussion and reflection but they don't apply to real life. What I see as problem with his point of view is that he seems to blame everything on the government. Well that is the tone of his remarks, I don't realy doubt that he sees the wider picture. While I try to press that it is not only nor even mainly the government that is to blame for everything. Now he has a far better knowledge of economics and politics than I have so the discussion is a bit lopsided. A bit like our discussion about guns a few weeks ago. He is in favour of freedom to carry and use guns. While I am not. But guess what, I like to disagree with him. Unlike most people with strong convictions he doesn't turn to lose rhetoric or insults. He explains and elaborates his points without dismissing his opponent lightly. He likes to win fairly. He probably won't convince me hut he certainly teaches me some discussion methods. I have been playing around with Linux a few times, and when Aria is finished I will go for it seriously. What I find funny is that many of the so called Linux supporters claim Linux is so much better than Windows because Windows crashes several times a day while Linux is extremely stable. They say Windows needs huge amounts of resources while Linux runs stable and fast on minimal resources. Am I missing something or what. I have got Open Base Linux 1.3 (Caldera) running on Pat (Cyrix 6x86 P200+ with 64MB and 2GB disk). When I compare that with Win95 running on Yaku (Cyrix 6x86 P166+, 64MB, 2GB+2.5GB disk) I don't notice a speed difference. What I noticed was that when I pull one of the SIMs from Pat Linux starts trashing about on the disk, when I do that on Yaku nothing happens. The good news is that while trashing the disk Linux doesn't slow down. My Win95 box at work, used almost 10h a day, only crashes about once a month. I know that is once to much but nowhere near the 'at least once a day' so often stated. Linux has crashed several times on me but only when I fiddled with settings and parameters. Once running it keeps running (until the next hardware or settings experiment). I cannot compare with NT and I don't run server jobs (yet) so my experiences are as desktop system only. My conclusion: for the same (desktop) job Linux needs about the same resources that Win9x needs and provides an unnoticeable performance advantage. And it is stable. Question to the Linux kids : What is the difference between a Stable OS and an Extremely Stable OS ? |
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1999-08-27 |
FridayHumidity is down, temperature is down (16C) and the morning sky is back to blue and red. I got the program halfway done. We lost a lot of time on the Progress programs. There is a problem with the write triggers. They only go off when a field on a form changes. You can write to the file as much as you like, as long as the displayed and enabled fields remain unchanged the trigger doesn't run. Also, when you create a record the trigger doesn't run. We tried a lot of different scenarios but we didn't find a way to activate the write trigger. The saga will continue on Monday. I copied the last of the data from Pat to Cindy. That was about 20MB, using floppies. Because Pat will only boot with a DOS diskette in it. It then only reports the D: partition as C: and the actual C: partition is invisible. When I boot without a DOS diskette I get "Press a key to reboot" immediately after the BIOS procedure. Pat behaves as if we are 1985 all over again. The Pre-Windows age. I ran WP-5 and Lotus Symphony to check out which files needed to be copied. And guess what, NO CRASHES. The hardware is flaky but DOS itself is rock steady. And incredibly fast. If you want a fast, stable box just take a Pentium 200 and run it under DOS. It may not be pretty but who cares. A racing car needs no prettiness.
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1999-08-28 |
SaturdayWe got normal weather for late August. Cool morning (16C) warm by noon (26C) and generally sunny. Shopping. The 'defect' motherboard was returned and sold to another customer who obviously got it working. I received a replacement (same mark and model) And I picked up some fresh memory (2x 64MB 100MHz). I asked what brands of memory were available. The look Steven (sales person at Masset) gave me was something like : "Brand memory, who wants brand memory. You must be kidding. Aren't you?" . I made clear that the problem I have might be related to memory. To cut things short, they don't supply brand memory because it is expensive, and nobody wants to spend a cent more for it. And no they don't want to order it for me because when they order they must do so in bulk, then sell me 2 or 4 modules and have the rest sitting idle as too expensive, unsellable stock. Basically the same story I got when I asked for a QWERTY keyboard (in Belgium the standard layout is AZERTY, French layout). They have to order a full pallet (50 or 60 pieces), then sell one (or two) to me and are left with an unsellable stock. This is one of the problems with free market. There is nothing you cannot get but if you want something that is not common it wil cost you dearly. In money (I could buy a full load to get one) or effort (checking other vendors, going abroad). Or both. I am not against free market. It is the best we have, it is just not perfect. Of course before the collapse of communism it was impossible to get something there that was uncommon. Heck even common things were a problem. In the afternoon I went shopping, with my brother, for new doors for the garage and some more wooden panels for the attic. He had ordered the doors and they had arrived in the shop. On inspection the hole where the lock should go was on the wrong side of the door, we need it on the right side (and ordered it that way) but it was drilled out on the left. So we came home without door but with lost time. A new door is ordered and should arrive in a fortnights time. I spent the evening testing games. Pat broke down while playing some old DOS game from Windows and Peter thinks it was one of these games that killed Windows. So now I am testing all the games he has. They are almost all on 720KB diskettes which I am now jockeying. I picked out 3 which had a virus on them. Norton Anti virus can disinfect Tequila-2 but not Tequila-1. the only options for that strain deletion or keep it. For me that last is a no go, I remove the diskette an Peter may decide but I keep them well away from my computers. It is now about 22h30 here and I see a cool red moon rising slowly above the trees. It is incredibley large and, with a few black lines from clouds, it looks impressive. And beautifull.
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1999-08-29 |
SundayFine running weather in the morning (8C) turning enjoyably hot in the afternoon. Gardening took the morning. If it is nice weather for gardening around here you can see the weeds growing. So most of the gardening is made up of weeding. Which is of course the least attractive part of the whole business. And you can see the lawn growing right behind the mower. I installed Cindy at my brothers place. I hit only one problem. On Pat the power supply had an output for the monitor. Cindy is a modern ATX design and thus lacks such an output. And of course the lead from the monitor ended in an American plug which doesn't fit our Belgian sockets. I have a bunch of spares at home so one round trip and half an hour later we had things running. Then I gave a bit of a user course for Windows98. My brother is used to DOS and has just a few months experience with Windows95 but on a quirky box.
I tested his floppies yesterday and today. For me that indicated that NAV is not reliable. IBM AV did find all the viruses and could disinfect all the files. On top of this it works faster. I ran it on Harper, a Cyrix 6x86 P166 box with 32MB, and it finished faster than NAV on Miona, an AMD K6-2 333MHz with 64MB. It may have an old fashioned interface but it is fast, reliable and runs on DOS, Win3.x, Win9.x, Netware and OS/2. It has one big disadvantage and that is that ... IBM sold it to Symantec. They wil probably only continue the Windows version and leave DOS and OS/2 high and dry. But then who writes viruses for those 'odd ball' systems. Yesterdays moon is back, but veiled with mist it has an even more eerie effect.
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