Week 42, 1999 ,Svenson
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Week 42, 1999 ,Svenson
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1999-10-18 |
MondayThere was almost no frost on my car, probably due to the dry eastern wind, the thermometer displayed 2C just like yesterday. Huge drama at work. We had no internet access from about 8h30 till 99h99. We are still counting causalities :-) For me the problem is that my mail from Mailbank doesn't get redirected. Ronny was back today so I pointed out the problem we had Friday. The remaining bit of the problem was that the conditions were deleted every time the user opened the offer. They were than recreated fresh by the calculation on the AS/400 but the customisation was obviously lost. The solution I worked out for the margin test was correct so I cleaned up the code a bit. Yekes! Now I have got to get rid of all these lose bytes sticking to my desk. While I got myself dirty I solved another nasty problem. The configuration program consists consisted of two independent screens that I now joined. And I dumped another load of worn out bytes from that program. After washing the dishes this evening I went to my brothers to shift some cupboards and I was back just in time to view the "Walking with Dinosaurs" program on the BBC. A bit controversial but well made and quite probable. Another big hit for the BBC. Now I am going to post this and see what mail I got. Jeez, I haven't had mail all day and I haven't been on the WEB for say a whole day. And I stumbled on a new acronym : ACL = "Acronym Creation Language" used as an alternative to XML |
1999-10-19 |
Tuesday't Was again 2C but with more frost on the car. And again lots of sunshine and eastern wind. Well the internet connection was restored at about 20h00 yesterday. That is when the first messages came in any way. I wonder what the problem was, the connection to the other opcos was not blocked so none of the leased lines was down. The Helpdesk had a message up stating the KNP (Dutch telecom) was working on it. I am not sure where the day went. I was busy for sure, well I didn't even read the e-newspaper, but at the end of the day there is nothing to show for it. I did send a few silly remarks to Tom but, when I wanted to send a mail to iTool, not silly this time, I reached some server inside iTool but that one could not deliver the mail. I tried support@itool.com and someone specific at support (Jeff Harmon). I even tried Matt. I always got an Undeliverable-mail message back from the Postmaster@itool.com. I told this to Tom and he seemed to have no problem with reaching Matt. To get a mail to Tom I tried his syroidmanor.com mail account which is hosted with iTool and I could not reach him there, again the same reply from that mysterious Postmaster@itool.com, I could via his at Home account. Strange, I will try again from home. What I wanted to send to the iTool support team was a question concerning my site there. I signed on for a trial account a few days (that is weeks Jan, WEEKS!) ago and today I passed my credit card data to make it a regular account. I registered a new domain via them as well. Now I got an e-invoice from Network Solutions (for 70$). I had expected that the payment would be handled by iTool so I wanted to ask them. I got it from Tom that I should pay Network Solutions directly, which is OK by me, as long as I don't pay double. A bigger problem, for which I need iTool is that the invoice did not contain my address. In the text they state that a hard copy is sent to 'the above address' and that I should use that for payment with a check. However the address they print comprises only the name of the city I live in. No street name, no house number, no person name, no country. I'll be screwed if the postal service delivers that here! Oops, I cannot connect to iTool from homet to upload. Something is amis here. Hello Matt, can you see a problem from your side? |
1999-10-20 |
WednesdayWe are keeping the good weather: 2C for a change, no ice, cold wind and lots of sun. I lost the day again but this time I know where it went. Peter was on a SAP course so I got involved in the McKinsey tests. Not that this involved an enormous amount of work, just making a bunch of orders and invoices. But it kept me busy trough the morning. And in the afternoon I trawled the system for programs that use a certain set of VAT fields that must be removed. Just for an estimate on the time needed to do the job. A rough guess would be three days. The mail problem I hit yesterday is sorted out. Not solved jet. Matt did send me a message with his iTool return address and an alternative return address. I first mailed his iTool box. This was returned by that pesky Postmaster. Then I mailed the returned stuff, with full header to the alternative address. An hour later I got a reply from Matt informing that he had received the second mail and that he had found a problem with aliases somewhere on the mail server. That should be solved by tomorrow. This is the sort of problem that with normal users can give a bad impression. They send mails get them back, send a complaint and cannot get that trough either. They become inpatient and start looking for another service. You need good employees and a few patient customers to get on top of this sort of problem. I am used to this sort of problem, though I am mostly on the other side of the fence. Ho, my brother just hopped in to get one of the separating walls up on the attic. This took about an hour so I am finished for the day. |
1999-10-21 |
ThursdayThe clouds are back which means the temperature is higher again (7C) and there is less sun. It even rained a bit in Hasselt. Tom and Wilbert are on a SAP course, so I take over the system administration. A few problem reports needed handling and a few files had to be transferred from the test environment to the System environment. Standard stuff. The OSI team had made a change ready for the next release but have now decided to do it in the current release. So programs and files have to be hauled back down. This is not a standard action, promotion is handled by the normal procedures, degrading can not be done. So we did it :-) .
The changes to the financial period handling I did a few weeks ago were not entirely satisfactory. That is, I did what the Germans asked and up to now they have not seen a problem. Only now they notice that the shipment date for an order line as stored in the statistics file (S3) is not the same as the shipment date in the General ledger (GE).
And then the Americans stumbled on a problem with the Credit Card validation programs. The problem is that we pass parameters to the AS/400 as separate strings. A string is always delimited by quotes. When the cardholder name contains a quote the program crashes. Names with quotes in them are very rare down here, which is why we didn't notice the problem. But in America you've got lots of them, O'Brian, O'Niell, O'Dear :-) The solution is simple, don't pass the arguments via parameters but via a data queue. Simple as that may be, it means a lot of work for us. We had a visitor at home so dinner was late and after washing up the dishes there was just enough time to post this note. |
1999-10-22 |
FridayAgain a good cloud cover, (9C) but more persistent. Well so persistent that we didn't see any sun. And there were a few heavy showers to brighten up the day :( The SAP course continues so I keep doing the system management. The whole morning all the objects sent over to the System test environment aren't installed on the other AS/400. By the time I notice this is due to a subsystem not being started Kristel noticed that too and started it. I keep looking for the reason behind the mishap. In the end it turns out that the tape for the backup was write protected causing the backup to fail. And starting the subsystems is triggered by the completion of the backup. There is only one extra problem and that is the promotion of a trigger program to the S environment. Promoting is not special but the connection between the program and the file must be recreated and I don't know the regular method for this.. When I ask Tom in the evening it turns out to be simple and, in this instance unnecessary because the regular trigger was already in the S environment. I started the programming on the parameter passing problem but I don't get far due to frequent interruptions. That is life if you do the administration. The Americans are getting more and more 'socket errors'. These are highly disruptive but totally out of our control. The problem seems to be related to the latest PTF (program temporal fix) from IBM. The other opcos don't have the problem and another company suddenly developed them in an application that was running stable prior to the installation of the PTF. We passed the Progress and IBM contact persons on to the Americans. This is one of these frustrating problems where we cannot provide help and yet the project suffers from it. If IBM had its TCP/IP drivers for the AS/400 in open-source format we could at least help them searching. Ronny is slowly getting fed up with the administration of our car leasing company and with our own management. After his accident he ordered a new car and he got the go ahead three weeks ago. The car is sitting with the dealer who wants to get rid of it but the papers for it stay at the leasing company. The normal turn around is about one week. His birthday is the 4th of September. Normally we get a meeting with our local manager on or close to our birthday, which typically results in a raise. He has requested that meeting a few times but still hasn't got a date. The raise cannot be given for months that have passed so he is about to lose the amount for two months. It is possible to get the lost amount later but then it is added to the wage of the current month which almost inevitable falls into a higher tax range. The result is that he is virtually losing money just because the manager doesn't think it important to get a meeting. If this goes on much longer I am afraid I will have to do the TeleSales project alone. Now that would be a problem. I came round to check my site statistics. As some may remember I asked for the data from Mailbank but I couldn't get it from them. Mainly it seemed because they did not know how to work with log files. Now with iTool I can request the statistics directly from my account. I checked a few days ago, when I went to pay but all figures were zero. Maybe because I had not paid up, who knows. Now I noticed that I had 2 hits on Tuesday, 4 hits on Wednesday and a whooping 30 hits on Thursday. Nice low figures. Which is normal because I haven't yet put a link anywhere to the new site. At the moment the site is exactly the same as the one at Mailbank. So the hits I see must be myself, checking after uploading or someone who accidentally dropped in, by miss typing an URL most likely. During a mail exchange session with Brian I passed him the reference to a Release page but I accidentally gave the new reference iso the old. He posted that in his Thursday Daynote. Basically I am not interested in a hit count. Even if I get no visitors at all I will continue. I am interested however in what type of OS and Browser is being used to get at my site. Once I make it public I will keep an eye on the statistics. (I will make iTool my default site when I get my payment to internic sorted out.) |
1999-10-23 |
SaturdayThere are more holes in the clouds today with just enough sun to pull the temperature from 9C all the way up to 16C. With only one short shower it turned out a rather peasant day. I went shopping in the morning but I didn't enter a computer store. In the afternoon I went to the cemetery to clean up my mothers grave in preparation for All Souls day. Personally I think a gravestone should be lightly covered with lichen and moss because that gives it some eerie, personal character but I don't care enough to make an argument about it. The rest of the day was spent .... in full laziness. Sneezing and sniffing were about all I did, which is of course not surprising at this time of year. I didn't even touch a computer before 21h00 and then only for composing these notes. I signed up for a new ISP yesterday evening. As I have mentioned several times the Euronet phones are busy most of the time. I signed up with Euronet on the recommendation from Steven. He found Euronet the best with fast and reliable access, few drop outs and almost never a busy signal. And for the first three months that was all true. But they seem to have been hit by their own sucess and now I hardly ever got a connection established before 23h00, mostly getting a busy signal, and even when connected then they often drop the line. I had a CD from FreeGates laying around for a free internet account. This is Free for life so no reminders for renewing the subscription. Free in the sense that there is no subscription fee, only the telephone charge. They get their income from advertisements and from a payment that Belgacom (telco) passes on to service providers. The advertisements are sent in by e-mail but you can set a limited filter on categories so you don't get holiday adds in winter or so that you never get adds for household products. You cannot filter out everything, 75% is the maximum, but then you can view that as a kind of payment. One interesting rule they have is that your account gets cancel if you don't use it for three months or more. Because I was having a problem with connecting trough Euronet again I connected to FreeGates and signed on. There was no problem. No busy signal, fast responses, no dropped connections. Great. I uploaded my daynotes without problem. So now I have got yet another mail box and another site hosting space (15MB no less). I don't intend to use that mailbox so if I check it and clear out the advertisements regularly I'll be settled. Maybe Euronet will upgrade their capacity to cope with the increased number of customers or maybe enough customers deflect so that their service becomes acceptable again. My subscription runs trough September 2000 so I will try them regularly but if they keep returning a busy signal I will not renew. They are warned (but will they care?). Oeps, did any one notice? |
1999-10-24 |
SundayIt's totally overcast but dry and at 11C a bit warm for running but there is a sharp south western wind that provides enough cooling. Autumn is the season I love most, even if I suffer a stuffed head and a runny nose for it. The rest of the day was rather typical with a brisk wind and some bouts of driving rain and a few sunny periods thrown in for variety. In the afternoon I resumed the autumn garden cleanup that started last Saturday. There is no death line for it so I do it leisurely. I thought Aria was ready and attempted to install Win98 on it. The plan was to have the hardware tested to see if everything is prepared to work together. Three hours an five tries into the process I throw in the towel. By by plan . I have 2 older systems where Win98 refuses to install but Aria is brand new. The Free Gates ISP is as fast as Euronet but, unlike Euronet, it works without dropping the line and without busy signal. The only problem I have is that I cannot receive mail. I tried to setup Outlook Express to handle the mail and I got it right insofar that I can send messages. I don't receive the test message I sent to myself. This means I will not be able to receive the advertisements. |
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