Week 38, 1999 ,Svenson
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Week 38, 1999 ,Svenson
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1999-09-2 |
MondayMuch too warm again, 17C, with light rain troughout the night. Overcast almost the whole day with a few spells of rain trown in for good measure. I have been checking, searching and testing today but I didn't solve anything. That is the dificulty with an old project. Development has finished and the original developers moved on to other projects. All the easy bugs and solvable problems are out of the code. On top of that it is release-4 code that interacts with other projects that are still under development. To solve the remaining bugs you must practically reverse engineer the code. This requires time and concentration, both of which are in short supply. Halfway trough you get the request for a quick fix or change on one of the other projects you are doing. After finishing that you of course lost the tread of the original problem and you can start again. Result the problem lingers on and doesn't get solved in the expected time. I had a bit of ping-pong mail with Tom which inspired me in writing down some observation about releases. Mail exchanges with Tom are often inspiring and while I not always grab my keyboard I get alway some kind of satisfying kick out of it. This release stuff is of course a view from the trenches.
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1999-09-21 |
TuesdayGood temperature (12C in the morning) but only a few sunny breaks in an otherwise overcast and windy day. I almost found the origin of the disappearing NE problem. But then the Austrians called. They still have orders that are not generating invoices. I checked and all the files are filled as they should so I requested a list of problem orders, which they faxed promptly (in 3 copies). I checked these orders but they are correct. I checked our programs and I could not find some strange or uncommon combination of settings that could cause the symptoms. I spent the whole afternoon breaking my head on it but all to no avail. In the end I consulted Sandri to see if he could put me on the right track again (he is the OSI achitect and Consumables is part of OSI). These are Consumable orders and invoices for them must be requested from the Consumables menu. This apparently is too complicated for the Austrians. I didn't have authorisation to that menu, and I didn't even know that there was a separate menu item. The actual invoicing program is an OMSI-3 one and that I know and (don't) love. Well fresh mountain air apparently is not good for one's health. I will let Jos send a new mail to Austria. I have been moving pages around and, with most of the balls in the air, I somehow tripped over one that had fallen. The result is that I have a stack of floppies and a bunch of directories all filled with web pages. Most pages have been updated with different content in different places. For example I use a WordPro file, 199904.lwp for April, to edit and spell check my day notes. I found tree different versions of 199909.lwp, one on a floppy, one on the regular Zip disk in Harper and one on Hinja. Well I tripped and now all my balls are on the ground. So I have got some picking up to do
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1999-09-22 |
WednesdayFloyd has crossed the ocean and is landing here. We expect just a bit more rain and wind but nothing out of the ordinary. It did rain this night, well it drizzled, with an overcast sky (15°C). And you could see the leaves moving. Not nice of the Americans, stealing all our rain ;-) I finally worked my way trough the Order confirmation problem. It should have gone faster, and without distractions it would have. I also solved a TeleSales problem. Well sort of problem. It is now possible to return a negative VAT value from the calculation module. I don't know how the treasury sees this but here it happens. Something to do with conditions on returned items. Or something. I picked up the documentation project again. There are still lots of loose ends and the Order confirmation problem did just fit in perfectly. As did the Austrian 'problem'. This was more a case of the user not reading the fine manuals or paying attention to user training than anything but if there had been documentation available here I would probably got to the bottom of it faster. We had mussels, traditional recipe, with white wine. I ate too much and drank too much. I prepared all the next weeks pages till the end of the year. All empty of course but ready to be filled. So now you can click the Next week link till the 31th of December. Don't go further because the daynotes aren't Millenium compatible yet. I will have to come up with a new layout and system for next year. I am quite tired, so I will just update the day note and go to bed. In time for the first time in weeks. |
1999-09-23 |
ThursdayThe remnants of Floyd passed by this night, at around 4h00, just an average rain and thunder storm. When I got up and checked a 6h00 the rain had slackened off to a bare drizzle. The temperature was still high at around 17C. Considering the distance Floyd has already travelled and seeing that he flooded the better part of North Carolina and the rest of the USA where he passed it is rather amazing the he can still get us wet here. I wonder just how much water has been displaced and then I wonder what kind of resources we would need to do the same thing. Distil it from an ocean somewhere, carry it around and distribute it more or less evenly over countless square kilometres. I had a slow day at the office and not because of interruptions but rather trough lack of concentration. And remember that this is release-4 code. I have taken a day off tomorrow to get my car serviced and do some other chores around the house. And maybe I can plug in some web work in between. Time to send out some mails, do an update and then go to bed. I had planned to go to bed early yesterday. Guess where that plan went.
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1999-09-24 |
FridayFloyd is gone so the clouds passed causing a clear cool night (14C) without rain. The rest of the day is fair. Sunny but not too hot. I had a day off to get my card serviced. In stead of doing the chores I built me a new computer. Because Aria has been delayed by problems I was lacking a computer to get the network going on the attic. Networking with one computer is rather pointless and I keep my main machine rooted in my own room. So I ended up building Oswal. Due to all the problems this took longer than expected. We had a delicious sea-trout, baked with almond and mushrooms and a bottle of South African white wine. As usual I ate and drank too much. |
1999-09-25 |
SaturdayGood weather, 12C with almost no clouds. Sunny all day without becoming hot. Gone shopping as usual. Mainly for replenishing my stocks. I finally got Aria working. Niels Bohr: I think I am becoming an expert in computer assembly :~) I am gettig lost in my own site. While editing the computer notes I noticed that the directory structure of my site is reasonably good. I see directly where stuff has to go. But not everything is where it should be. So while editing I try to get order back out of the chaos. Once I have got all the stuff sorted out I will start posting it. I have one layout question that is nagging me a bit. On my main pages (Lair, pc/index, ) I have the navigation links in the left border of the page. On the computer pages (cyndy, timareen, ...) I have the navigation links still on the left but framed in a table. On my day notes I have a set of links at the top and daily links on the left. I am going to change the layout in several places but I am not sure what is best. I am going to experiment a bit. So if you see things that are not acceptable or that make things more difficult that it should be just mail me. And expect to find quite some broken links.
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1999-09-26 |
SundayIdeal running weather, cool (13C) and rainy but dry. I did run too fast however. There is a problem with Cindy. I installed Windows98 and DR DOS in a dual boot configuration and tested it at home. Later I packed it and installed it at my brothers. I did not test the sound capacity because I didn't have spare speakers but upon installation the Windows sounds came trough so all looked well. But is was not. Music CDs didn't play and some sounds in games didn't play either. Basically only the system sounds and other generated sounds came out. Last week I checked the cable running from the CD drive to the socket on the mainboard, this board has integrated sound. Everything looked normal and testing showed that the cable was good and that the CD drive was good. Now I have got the computer here at home. I checked the board and I noticed that this does not have the Yamaha sound chip installed (the manual describes this as an option) so it is, at first sight normal that I don't get sounds. But the problem is that I do get sounds. Probably this is a function from the i810 chip set. Only, the manual is not clear to make the distinction between the chip set sound and the Yamaha chip. I assumed that, because the Yamaha is missing I taught it was a good idea to plug in a SoundBlaster as a replacement. Only after doing so I lost all sounds and even after removing the SoundBlaster and hacking away at the system I don't get it back. I think a YAWI is in order here but I am not sure how to do this correctly with the dual boot installation based on the PowerBoot utility from PowerQuest. I don't want to disrupt the currently installed programs. Interesting times. You bet!
Oh and I did some planning and work on the garage doors in between. And I did some testing on Oswal. All is well there, even with integrated sound. But then Oswal has no wretched integrated Intel (i810) chip set but a decent, classic ALi one.
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