Week 37, 1999 ,Svenson
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Week 37, 1999 ,Svenson
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1999-09-13 |
MondayAn incredible 18C this morning followed by a sweltering day. Late in the afternoon the sky turned dark but we didn't get more than a few, thick drops of rain. I picked up and solved an Euro conversion problem. All amounts must be convertible to Euro but in one of the database files the amount field can sometimes contain a percentage and that got converted as well. Not good, you negotiate a 40% price reduction and you get just 1%. And the Americans dumped a load of problems on my desk. to be solved before, well, now. Slow going at home. I am reordering my links page and my computer pages but I am taking my time for it. And I am catching up on my reading. The first full term telephone bill arrived. We pay once a year but we get a bill every 3 months. The internet connection is up for about four months so the first bill was not indicative but this bill is. The categories are nicely split up so you can analyse how many calls you made to where. This period there were 2 call to Holland and 3 call to Germany and 1 call to the internet and a few other separately noted items. The amount for the internet was 1.135BEF ( 30$ ) for a total of 29 hours. So I will probably clock up about 5000BEF ( 125$ ) per year. That is a figure with which I can check the cable company and the other operator and Belgacom itself for lines and rates. Of course I would love to have xDSL but ....
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1999-09-14 |
TuesdayAgain hot and humid (18C) and not clearing up throughout the day. At 18h00, when I left the office there was still a kind of hazy mist. The same you get when someone pours water in a sauna I tried to do twenty things at the same time. Now, as Tom probably can confirm, if you try to juggle twenty balls you find yourself soon with thirty balls on the ground and fifteen in the air. We had a discussion about how, what and when we are going to send out on the next TeleSales shipment. We will do a patch this week with all solved and current problems included. And we will prepare for a full figure release (CD) in about three weeks time. So all open problems must be solved by tomorrow evening. That is including the new remarks. Then, while I was working on those there came a panic call from Austria. They were running the invoice procedure and they were getting dumps on every order. In production. Dumps in a production environment are not serious, they are dramatic, the kind of drop-everything and jump situations. Of course it was not a real problem. I had left some debugging code in the program and shipped it, that coding produced a before image of each order, by way of a dump, to be checked against the eventual invoice. All the invoices were normal. I removed the debugging stuff, did a quick test and shipped the program again. Together with that bush fire we solved two of the new American problems.
We have one PC with NT 4.0 Workstation installed. There had been problems with the network and something had to be done to it but nobody knew the root password (or NT equivalent). So Wilbert decided to reinstall. (Did you hear those falling bals?) What should I be tired from when I get home you ask?
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1999-09-15 |
WednesdayIt was real misty this morning but still hot at 17C. Less hot trough the day and (finally) rain in the evening. Not a stormy rain but a soft and steady type. Ideal for the garden if it last long enough. Auch. All the old American problems and a new one got solved and tested. Tomorrow the patch can be made and sent out. It can be installed and tested in America on Friday so they can actually take TeleSales in production on Monday. They must still decide on that but it is possible. Theo is pushing to get the XML project started on the Progress side, probably without doing the OMSI-3 side. So it is slipping by for me. The positive aspect is that the AS/400 problems are slowly being solved and I can see an end to the list. After that I will have to start in Progress so maybe the XML still drops on my desk. Or part of it. Warning : My brother was home. He peeled off part of the old flooring in the front room. It came loose quite easily so we should not have problems getting everything out. Afterwards we are going to lay parquet there as a test. If things work out acceptable we will do that on all the first floor rooms. We did some planning for the upcoming tasks and noticed that there will not be enough time to do everything. How original! |
1999-09-16 |
ThursdayPerfect weather. Clear sky with starts yesterday night and this morning 't was 15C with just the slightest of mists turning in a sunny day with temperatures in the low twenties. With just enough wind to move the flags. Sorry Bob I solved only one easy problem today; some extra test were needed in the order validation program. I have been trying to solve another, trickier problem but I got interrupted just enough to get nowhere. Each time I started anew and when I got to the trickier parts I had to drop it. And start over again later. We have been looking into a problem that the Americans reported. Well they reported it now, about a week before going live and then say it has been occurring all the time now. The problem is that on some (not all) the installations the connection to the AS/400 is lost at irregular intervals. It does not happen after a certain sequence of actions or under repeatable circumstances. After checking, testing discussing and thinking we conclude that it has nothing to do with our programs on the AS/400 nor with our Progress programs but that the root of the problem must be somewhere on the network. In a way I am astound by the Americans. They are now suffering from Floyd and they are making quite a fuss about it. The whole East Coast seems to be on the brink of panic. I admit that Floyd looks a bit on the large side but the coast gets visits from tropical storms several times each year. They should by now know what storms are and they should know how to build houses and structures to withstand these conditions. For example Bob. He has got sturdy solid shutters for his windows but they are fixed to the wall and cannot be closed. That is what I think a building mistake. The person who built that either was stupid or didn't intend to live there himself. It reminds me of people that build their house right up to an airfields and afterwards complain about the noise from the aircraft. I don't really feel sorry for them, I do wish them all the luck and safety of course.
The last reports seem to indicate that Floyd is very big in size but not really as strong as his size suggests.
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1999-09-17 |
FridayNice temperature (15C) and a refreshing rain in the morning followed up by a bit of sun and more rain. At last the garden gets its share. We had a problem with the price calculation on the orders. When an order is related to an other existing order (return order) the calculation works OK. If then you change a line on the order, for example an amount, the price for that line is reset to zeroes, OK, and is not recalculated, not OK. Tracking this down resulted in the spotting of two other 'undocumented features' . One is that the conditions are calculated differently for orders and related-orders. This is a known issue in OMSI-3 as well and is not going to be solved any time soon. The others were solved by Ronny on the Progress side. Got a problem mail from Austria. After we sent them the solution for the missing invoices they still have some orders without invoice (they provide 3 order numbers as example). After searching high and low but not finding a problem I finally check the correction program. And notice that they did not run it. Maybe they thought that simply copying the program was sufficient to solve the problems. First they cause a problem by not running the programs in the documented sequence, then they request us to send an update and a correction and then they think the problems will automagicaly solve themselves. The world would be a nicer place without users. I intend to get the A-Open case back to the shop tomorrow but I am not sure I will get there because we have the great annual fair starting this weekend. Parking will be problematic to say the least and when I go on foot I am not going to lug the case around. |
1999-09-18 |
Saturday
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1999-09-19 |
SundayPerfect running weather, 12C light breeze and clear sky. I run the long route again. By noon we had quite some cloud cover and wind. By 17h00 we basked in bright sunlight. At about 20h00 some brisk rain was flushing off the dust. The thermometer definitively is tired this evening. Welcome to Belgian weather. I didn't post anything yesterday because I didn't write anything. To much time and too little to do; or something like that :-| I went shopping. At Masset we tested the Box for Aria, did some testing and found two problems. One was that I had the power an reset and other case connectors reversed. The text on the connectors, apparently, has to face outward. This is not documented anywhere. Second, my processor (AMD F6-2/300) was defective. I left the processor there, he will try to get a replacement, and I picked up a new case. The afternoon was spent shopping with my brother. The doors on the garage are in desperate need of replacement, they are beyond repair, with the posts half eaten by wood worms and the bottom of the doors rotten away. So we bought two new doors (ordered some time ago) to combine with a third door we had laying around. We also had to buy some thin wooden panels and hinges and other stuff. I went to my brother in the evening. He has a problem with Cindy. Windows sounds come out clear, some games have sound others have no sound, music CDs don't sound out at all. My first suspect is a loose cable from the CD drive to the sound card. So I open up the box. The cable is connected correctly to the CD drive and to the mobo (this has sound integrated). I switch the cable to a second connector (there are 3) which doesn't change a thing. Using the third connector causes the internal Win-modem to make sound, but that of course is not acceptable. Ever tried listening to AC-DC on a modem? But that means that the cable is OK. And the CD drive is OK. Conclusion after testing and trying, every thing works but not together. Probably there is a driver problem but I don't have the diskettes and CDs with the drivers and Win98 with me so I cannot probe further. While testing I noticed that Myst behaved strangely. The intro remains black (with full sound) and once in the game often some small rectangular part of the image turns black for no apparent reason. This could be the result of the integrated graphics. This is a Celeron 400 with an Intel 810 chip set, this has graphics included. The problem with that is that there is not much (0) display memory, all operation go to the standard system memory. This is no problem for typical business applications and internet stuff, for games however this causes a serious performance problem. But it could be some other problem. All this took longer than I had planed hence no update on my site. I intend to keep this site honest so I keep my fingers off from past days. If I post errors, I let them stand and post a correction later, if I don't post for whatever reason I will report what happened later. On to today. After running my brother came around to cut the doors we bought yesterday to the correct lengths. the next step will be cutting new posts and treating the doors to make them weather proof. I tried the connector switching that worked yesterday in the shop. Without success. I had only carried the Chaintech to the shop because that was the last I had tried and it was still fitted in the case. Now, at home the Chaintech still works but when I try either of the Soyo boards I get beeps, different from last time, but still no display. Now the next problem is why is the AGP slot not working on both the Soyo boards. I installed the Chaintech in the new mini tower case. This case is not what I should call a quality part. It weights about nothing, has breakout covers on the expansion slots, iso screwed covers or, like the A-Open box, snap on covers. The part of the drive cage that has to hold the hard disks has two screws but I had not seen the second one and when I pulled, slowly, to slide it out it simply bent open with almost no resistance. I had it bent out about two centimetre before I realised the opposite side was not moving. On the 5.25 inch drive cage one of the sharp edges is bent over in the wrong way, preventing my CD drive to go in more than 8cm. The bezel has a special moulded part that goes in from of the floppy drive. To get that floppy in the box the bezel must be screwed off but I don't get a straight grip on the screws. All by all a rubbish case and not cheaper than the A-Open one. |
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