Week 39, 1999 ,Svenson
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Week 39, 1999 ,Svenson
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1999-09-27 |
MondayIt's cool (12C) and windy, Autumn is knocking on the door here. Still dark when I leave but I get a full hour to enjoy the sunrise while driving to work. I did set off the automatic mail forwarding from Mailbank. I do that each Friday to get at my mail in the weekend, on Monday I set forwarding back on, to my company account because I cannot reach Mailbank trough the firewall. Well I did set it off and in the history log from Mailbank that is acknowledged but the mail did forward during the weekend. So I didn't get my mail and now I have a lot of catching up to do. A hiccup I hope and not an indication of pending problems. At work. I picked up where I left off last Thursday. And I left off at the same point. To get the sound working correctly on Cindy, I had tried to install a SoundBlaster 64V card yesterday. This resulted in totally muting the system. So I removed the SB64 card, and I un-installed the SoundBlaster programs. To no avail. So today I went spelunking into the registry and, even though I had un installed everything there were still Creative and Ensoniq keys pointing to the SoundBlaster card. I removed all these. Again without result. I reinstalled Windows98 (without removing the previous installation). Afterwards everything looked normal, all the previously installed programs were still there, only the dual booting from PowerQuest was disrupted. And the sound problem was still there as well. I think only a format and reinstall may help but it is my brothers machine so I must ask before I can reformat. I am wondering if I am the only person having problems with Windows98. I have two PC where the install program won't even run. One is a 3year old Cyrix 6x86 P166 box and the other is a 2year old AMD K6 200 box. And now on an Intel Celeron 400 with i810 chip set it will not run correctly either. I don't use unsupported hardware in any of the boxes and I haven't done anything out of the ordinary with them (yet). All in all the Win98 installation has succeeded on only 2 machines. 2 out of 5 is not a good business record I think. This either proves I am indeed an amateur or that Microsoft is in trouble. Or both.
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1999-09-28 |
TuesdayOvercast and windy but not cold (15C) and staying so all day . Well it did get warmer. Yesterday Autumn was knocking on the door and today some fool opened. I finally solved the Delivery route problem. I took the easiest option so maybe it will return but I am quite confident it won't. It took about six years before the problem was reported and I guess it will take another six years before the fault in the solution gets reported. By then every body should be using TeleSales (or one of its decedents). The problem that I expect (in six years time) is that I now prevent overwriting the Delivery route if this comes from a contract, so if the rout isn't filled in in the contract a line will not get a delivery route. The header still has the correct delivery rout in that case. To do it right I should check, at every instance where the Delivery route can be changed, manually or by consequence of another action, if the change is acceptable considering all the previous changes. We found a performance problem in TeleSales. On an exact read the server does two database accesses in stead of only one. Solving this conclusively would mean changing all the single record accesses to the database. This is clearly not an option at this moment. The Americans are taking TeleSales into production so the test stage is finished I did some more reshuffling on the links index page, but that was all. No hardware today.
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1999-09-29 |
WednesdayAutumn is here all right. It is dark when I leave home and it is again dark when I return. I did enjoy a glowing red sunrise just before I arrived in Venlo and a crimson sunset just before I arrived back in Hasselt. Beautiful. With lots of rain and wind in between :-( Well, the Americans are going life in the weekend so now they report a problem, with invoicing at that. The problem is that OMSI-3 (material-sales) and TeleSales are designed to interface with OLI, the logistics. In America the OLI module is not used, they use a local system for that. The flow is that an operator enters an order, this is processed and then passed on to logistics. There it is handled and shipped. For shipping an order can be split in different suborders depending on available stocks and warehouse positions. Each suborder is passed back to OMSI-3 when it is shipped for calculation and invoicing. Now the Americans have to build an interface between their own logistics system and our OMSI-3 calculation and invoicing module. They did put in a few errors there, not due to incompetence but rather due to inadequate communications. As far as I see it this should have surfaced months ago if they had tested their programs. Apart from that problem I have been hopping between different small issues so I did not start on a new problem. Home activity is very restricted again. Day notes and a bit of administration is all did. And reading Day notes from the others. There are slowly becoming so many Daynoters that reading all becomes a rather large scale job ;-)
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1999-09-30 |
ThursdayDark, windy and raining in the morning (14C). Raining, windy and dark in the evening. There were a few dry spells somewhere in between. The advise I passed on yesterday was good enough to put the Americans back on track. Well I think so because there were no new calls for help on that account. To fill in the gap the Germans came up with two problems. While checking I did find two other minor problems and I solved them immediately. Not all that time was wasted then. The Day Notes Hub page is up thanks to Tom. Well he did most of the (virtual) footwork and all the page creation slavery for it. He definitively is the driving force for the day notes Gang. Why, he is almost driving us crazy with his energy. I start to understand how it comes that Landon is already crawling, it is called inheritance. I again left the jobs at home untouched so I have nothing to report from that front. I have a few ideas but they will have to ripen a bit before I jump in. Bring holiday request from the 24th and the log home
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1999-10-01 |
FridayThe rain did pour down tonight. Cool (12C) rainy and windy again in the morning but mainly dry throughout the rest of the day. I solved the problems for Germany and sent them out. One complication they had in Germany yesterday was that they archive the orders but not the invoices or the statistics file. As a result not all the invoices were updated. We found that out after dredging trough their invoices. When we reported our suspicion they replied, an hour later that they indeed did that but had forgotten it. Today they were going to reinstall the archived orders and run the new programs. And I picked up another invoicing problem for the Americans. Remember they are installing onto a production environment this weekend and they reported the invoicing problem today! Credit and debit notes don't have to pass trough the Logistics system but the Trigger file, used to 'trigger' the invoicing is generated by the logistics module. So we didn't get the Credit and debet notes (they are just special case invoices). A quick solve, test end ship cycle later they were satisfied. I am feeling like a jo-jo this evening. But tomorrow is another day. I hope. |
1999-10-02 |
SaturdayThe temperature rose today from about 11C in the morning (6h00) to a top of 17C at noon. There has been a constant brisk wind and it started raining just after the 14h00 and it hasn't stopped yet. No doubt about it Summer is over. I went shopping but I didn't buy a thing. Which is a good thing, I can let my budget recover from the buying frenzy I have indulged in the last few months. I did bring two blades of plywood, cut to measure, home for my brother. Suzan intended to take the lawn mower to Diest so I brought it down (she cannot reach it) an I quickly did the grass here. It has not been growing well of late. Mowing it did clean off the catkins that have been falling of the cedar tree so it was not a wasted effort. I didn't feel altogether well so I laid down after lunch. When I opened my eye again it was half past five. Now that is a black hole!! And I was not really feeling better for all of it. I had a problem with the mail at Mailbank. I succeeded in posting my daynotes, only the mail server was refusing me. Then I made a mistake. In stead of turning off the light I turned off the PC. Without the proper shutdown routine. This morning Miona did a disk scan and started up but all my Netscape settings were gone. And of course I had not noted them down somewhere so I had to guess at the server name and my user-account name at Mailbank. After about an hour I finally had my mail working again. I fired off a mail to the Postmaster at Mailbank and got an answer a few hours later. They had moved some accounts, including mine, to a new server but there should not be any problem. Well changing the forwarding last week probably worked still on the old server but not yet on the new one, now it was working so that definitively was an isolated incidence. And the 60 messages were, I think, caused by setting Netscape to leave the messages on the server. Moving my mailbox to another server had reset the flags so I got all that mail again. Oeps. I changed the settings so now I remove the mail as I download it.
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1999-10-03 |
SundayA cloudless sky (8°C) makes for good running weather. Which is spoiled by a rather chill wind. The whole day was typified by clouds that came racing by so we had short dark spells alternating with short bright spells Throughout the morning I have been trying to connect to the internet but I continuously got a busy tone. The connection program will then wait 15 seconds and try again. Only to get a 'modem is not responding' message. The only thing that works then is to reset the modem, try again and cancel the dialling before the next 15 seconds are over. Another problem I often get is that the connection program dials, gets a tone but then disconnects halfway trough the negotiation. The modem then shows the light as if it is ready to dial but it also simply keeps whistling the last tone it sent. Again the only solution is to reset. I wonder what people with internal modems do. I think I had to reset about twenty times this morning. There has been a problem with Cindy. She has a Gigabyte mainboard with an Intel i810 chip set. There exist two version of that board, one with a Yamaha sound chip and one without and of course I have the version without the sound chip. The i810 has some sound capability but this doesn't work. The actual problem is that the BIOS allows to enable or disable the sound but this seems only to take the Yamaha chip into account. Disabling disables all the sound, enabling enables the Yamaha chip or something like this. When I installed Windows98 this saw the i810 chip set and enabled the game port and prepared the sound system and the drivers from the mobo CD installed without complaining. But the sound was crippled, only the windows sounds would get out but sound from the CD didn't reach the output and Midi was not generated. Both seemed to require the Yamaha chip. I tried to solve the situation by using a SoundBlaster 64PCI card but that didn't work at first. Reinstalling Win98 over itself is no solution because the new installation inherits the old (corrupt) registry. The solution that worked was first disabling all sound in the BIOS, then format the C: drive and then installing Windows 98 fresh. All the data and games were installed on the D: drive (extended partition) so I only had to reinstall a few apps. The dual booting worked again after reinstalling BootMagic. Without having to reneter all the settings. One nice program here but that is exactly what you can expect from the Powerquest people. I lost a lot of time here but I learned one thing. If it are Microsoft programs your only option in case of problems is to reinstall from scratch. I have been looking out for a new hosting place for my site. I am running up to 4.5MB and I have only 5MB available. At Mailbank they are saying that they will, maybe, provide an option to extend that. But they have been saying that since I started my site there so I cannot take them very serious on that score. I also asked them to get statistics but they claim it is impossible to do that and when I asked to send the server log files they didn't want to do that. Now I can understand that they are not willing to send out the whole log file as it contains data about their other clients as well but at least they could send the log that pertains to the domain I rent. So now I am looking for another hosting server. I checked out iTool (where the daynote.com pages are) and they look quite interesting. Another hosting company is Masset. Which happens to be the shop I visit almost weekly. He is reasonable in price, around 200$ per year for 15MB, the main advantage is that I can walk right in there. He uses a couple of Cobalt servers, currently located somewhere in Texas but he intends to move them over to Hasselt. All in all he is about twice as expensive (now) as iTool, but he is close and I can negociate in person. What is a good choice? I must make a decision fairly soon but I am not sure yet.
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