1999-12-27     Monday

The wind has blown itself out but it left a path of death and destruction trough Europe. It was particularly Germany, Switzerland and Italy that got hit severely. A Christmas some wil never forget. We mainly got rain and while there were some localized flooding there were no big problems.
It still rained this morning but by 10/11 o clock it had stopped. Hey there was even some sunshine (streaming straight in my screen). Not that it did much for the temperature, rising from 3°C to about 5°C.

I tested and corrected the hierarchical classification code program. A lot of time crept in building the test data. There is a regular program to pull the data from the product files but the product files in the test environment produces a pathetic data set (12 records with only half of them correct, the rest is not hierarchical), totally unusable for testing. Tomorrow I build up the documentation for it and build it in into the required programs. There were no interruptions today. None, nada. Did wonders to my productivity.

I got a notice from Tom (another one) that maybe I have to be system administrator on Wednesday cause Wilbert is ill and he is free then. Means that, with four days to go before the turn of the century I will be sysadmin two days.

A problem with Mailbank caused the eMail forwarding not to work. The result is that I got all my mail at home, while I am in the office. I did send a notification to the Postmaster at Mailbank. If she sent me an answer it got lost somewhere. It didn't arrive at home nor at work.

Checking mail at home, whew! I got 35 mails, a new day record. < !-- no spam, two subscriptions, one office reply and the rest daynotes -->
While connecting I got some funny sounds from my modem. It sounded like sparks jumping over, the sort of sparks you get inside an electric engine that is failing. I did not get a connection. About half an hour later I tried again and things sounded normal again.

I finish early because I am running out of light. Literally. In the last fortnight or so I lost 16 light bulbs. And that is not the small Christmas decoration type of bulbs. That is 3 halogen bulbs, one small socket spot, 2 normal spots, one TL tube and 9 standard bulbs 40 or 60W bulbs. And no socket blew its bulb twice. I guess they were all about the same age. A bit like those on my car, typically when the right one goes the left one follows after one or two weeks. The result is that we are almost trough our reserves

1999-12-28    Tuesday

It's a bit colder again, 1°C, but misty. While I didn't see any rain the streets in Hasselt were wet, with fresh puddles everywhere, so evidently the rain keeps coming. Slowly more and more rivers are reaching top levels and a lot of smaller rivulets can no longer drain themselves. For some people around here the millennium bug is getting a whole new meaning.

A new part was added to the hierarchical classification program. The program is intended for selecting codes interactively by the user, now I added (totally against the in house standards) a batch selection routine. That was not (entirely) for fun , it will bring down the number of program calls needed for testing the codes and descriptions. And I started on the server programs for the file.

Guy, from America called to get the status of a problem. It turns out he needs the solution before Monday. The problem (prs11238) is about a special type of condition. Normal conditions are all applied on the sales or list price, so combining two conditions that give 10% reduction results in 20% reduction. This special type should be applied to the calculated price. One normal condition of 10% combined with a special one of 10% results in 19% final reduction. After dredging the code we found that the special condition was already built in since 1995, but still contained an error. All these years and nobody noticed that it didn't work!!! Yea, testing.
We solved it (just one line of code had to be altered !!!). I'll test it tomorrow and send it over.

Still no eMail forwarding from Maibank, and no reaction on my previous mail. So I send a next one, just a tad more demanding. I don't expect to get an answer. Probably everybody there is out on holiday. Much nicer to be skiing than sitting in an office, I guess
There were 22 mails in my box but retreiving them was a problem. The servers at Mailbank are slow and downloading them took almost 20 minutes. All but 3 were Daynote mails, typically just a few lines of plain text, with only one of the others a bit longer (about one A4 page).

It looks like Bob wants to change the null-meridian from Greenwich over to Winston-Salem. He thinks that GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) should become something like BTMT (Bob Thompson Mean Time). Even if the meridians get changed we can keep on using GMT, only remember to expand it to Grumpy Mean Time <G> .

And the old cat has finally taken over Bo's site. Three days to go and we are in the new millennium. We'll see how Salem takes it from there.

1999-12-29     Wednesday

Just a touch of frost, with the thermometer lying again (1°C). Lots of diffuse clouds, with a few drizzly periods make for an other gray day. I hope the new millennium starts with some steady clear weather.

The special conditions problem for America is solved, tested, packed and posted. They have three days to install and verify it .

I hit on a problem in the HCC (Hierarchical -youknowwhat- ) programs. In the current situation a user must enter four codes but he can pick any code from a list, there are no defined relations between the codes. Testing is easy: if the entered code is in the list it is OK. Repeat this test for each code.   Now entering one code puts limitations on the remaining codes. Ex if you enter the second code the first code if fixed, must be the parent, and the third code is restricted to the children of the second. When using the prompting function that is easy to capture. More problematic, and not mentioned in the specifications, is what happens if the user types the codes himself. If he types the first and third code and they are not related which must be flagged as wrong? What must happen if he changes the third code after selecting the fourth?
I think I pass this on to the architects. Knowing them well enough this will lead to some enjoyable fighting :-).
I noticed the problem only after building the standard access routines for the files. Using the standard routines is rather pointless unless I don't have to test the relations. And what is the point of having a hierarchy if you don't test it? Yes I spent most of the day on programs that will be useless. Snork!

Working without interruptions is just lovely. You can really get up to speed under concentration. Unfortunately when you get sidetracked you are likely to get far from the main route. Yep, I lost a lot of time in the byways of the internet. and 'compliant' becomes 'complaint'; -->

Mailbank is not deserted. Either that or the resident Cat is running the place. I didn't have mail in the office so I was typing in a third, rather strong, notification when suddenly stuff popped up in my mailbox. That was around eight o'clock locally (would have been 01h00 at Mailbank) so it could be that the server did reset itself. Though why didn't it do that yesterday?
Hmm, more likely the Cat, first locking out all those pesky humans and than taking over. Sounds incredible? Check out www.salem.gov (or is that gov.salem).

After having been overrun by a car a man is brought to hospital.
The nurse asks him :
"Are you maried?"
"No, nurse, this is the first accident I had."

1999-12-30     Thursday

The thermometer is lying again, it says 0°C but there is no ice. There are however lots of clouds and lots of rain. Another storm is approaching so after a memorable Christmas some people will get hit a second time by and about new year.

After trying out a few paths I have got the method for testing the HCC fields worked out. When I have to solve a problem I often dive in and start coding right away without analyzing the problem. Most of the time I take all the right turns without actually considering them. That is intuitive programming and when it works it is wonderful. When it doesn't I am in trouble. If I keep banging away at the problem I go from trouble to deep trouble. Like I did about a year ago on the Logistics Order Relations problem, I tried to push square pegs trough round holes. While there was a nice big rectangular hole on the side.
This time I caught myself just in time. Taking a step back is paying off. The code tomorrow should flow.

Tomorrow, the last work day of the millennium, I'll be operator (BOFH ?) but with only three colleagues there won't be much happening. Well, he claims to come from Hell, I think I'll just send him back home --> Most operating companies are closed down as well so I don't expect troubles form that side.

The mail servers were shut down this evening and will be started up again on Sunday. So called to prevent millennium viri from attacking. That means I'll be cut of from the world again tomorrow. I just hope the web-access isn't cut either. Though, maybe that wouldn't be to bad either.

1999-12-31     Friday

Winter still hasn't decided yet. This morning it rained, by noon the rain stopped but the day remained overcast. With temperatures hovering between 3 and 5°C.

We are only four at the office and that is because there has to be someone from each module. Well that is the official explanation, only, Chis and Walter are on the same module but had used up all their available free days. And from OSI nobody came which isn't surprising because the rest of the week nobody was here either. Sven is on duty for OLI and I am holding the fort for OMSI-3 and TeleSales. The idea is that someone must be here to help out if an opco has a problem, which is reasonable. Only, all the opco's are out.

As sys-admin, my third or is that fourth responsibility today, I got a call from someone at the NVM (the Netherlands-opco, which is strangely enough not more closely related to Head Quarters -- Venlo -- than, say, Australia ) asking if it was safe to install Service pack-5 on hit NT machine. In true BOFH style, knowing Microsoft, I told him it should be OK to install but that he should make sure it was finished before midnight because the millennium roll over during the install maybe could possibly cause problems. I don't think he trusted me so he will probably wait till Monday. Phew, users these days. No balls.

I was hit by the a millennium bug first thing in the office. When logging in to the AS/400 I start up a personal program which changes some settings (library list, message queue, etc.) and which drops my in my own menu. Most other programmers automatically enter the development environment while users enter in their respective test or production programs. I am being special again I know but I needed that flexibility when I started here on the financial package which is developed on another system. I wanted to get a selection menu before I was dumped into the development environment. So I hooked a program into my user profile.
In that program I send a few messages to myself, one at noon to remind me that the lunch pause is due, one at the evening to remind me to wind down and go home. For fun I added a 'Good morning' message. The trick with that is to schedule it for the next day (hear the bug coming). Doing that is not difficult but I wrote the program in CL (equivalent to a shell script or a DOS batch file) just to add to the difficulty . I actually didn't write the handling for a year change. It only occurs only once a year and I didn't ever take the time to do it. Until now.

We got a call from someone in Australia telling that they had passed the millennium border without being bugged down.

I got the HCC_ testing program build and tested and the prompting program is also nearing completion. Just the alternate, restricted subfile filling isn't tested yet and the options and function keys aren't displayed even though they work. That is user interface stuff so I leave that off till the last moment.
Quite a productive day. I was so intensely busy that I only noticed I forgot my lunch when the security people came around at 15h00. The rest of the building was empty so they checked who was working where.

Traffic this morning was negligible, open roads, no trucks and just a few cars. Normally when I am on the road, between 6h15 and 7h45 there is a lot of heavy traffic, mainly truck and lorries avoiding the rush hour or rushing to get to their cargo to its destiny before the opening times of factories and shops.
The eveing however was quite unpleasant. Lots of drivers that are not accustomed to drive in the dark and searching for direction signs, switching lanes without looking and for no apparent reason. Hectic. And nasty.

I must add the netwidows to the links site. BTW what are the requirements for admission to that group? (I added the link to the bottom of my page as well, right beside the Gang.)

I am going to roll over to the new year daynotes tomorrow and move the notes from 1999 to a separate subdirectory. I find time tomorrow.

Hey, who did turn out the light !!

1999-12-32     Saturday

1999-12-33     Sunday

:-)