Week 19, 2000 ,Svenson

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08-05 to 14-05

MM-cxxix     Monday

2000-05-08

Low mist which is burnt away by the sun in about half an hour. So we are in for another hot day. later in the afternoon clouds build up and we get some short but extremely heavy showers, with thunder and lightning.

I didn't get any mail or web access yesterday evening. The strange thing is that I did get a connection to my ISP but I couldn't reach any sites or servers. So I could not upload my pages or download my mail. Heck, I couldn't change my mail to forwarding to Venlo again.

And now, here in Venlo, the mail server is locked down. For virus clearing and to prevent new spreads. The viral love letter, when opened not only deleted a lot of files and spread itself, it also seems to have scheduled itself via the registry so it would run again at startup. A lot of computers have been disconnected from the network and are being checked and cleaned. Talk about lost productivity.
Love is in the air.

Nobody loves me. Well not really but I never got a ILY mail at home and the single one I got at work was from the program that sends us reminders about internal courses at RealSoftware.

At work.
The mail server finally got connected up again at around 11h00 and I promptly received all the mail I had sent out on Friday back as 'Undeliverable'. Some of it has become irrelevant (like the ILY source sent to Phil Hough) but some has to be resent.

And also at work.
At about 16h00 the power fails. Not just to the company but to about half the town. That also means no trafic lights.

Power went out at about 16h00 and by 16h30 was not restored so I went home more than an hour earlier than usual. I did however get home as usual at close to eight. Two reasons. Hitting the road early landed me in peak trafic. And due to the heavy thunderstorms trafic was a stop and go affair with a few drivers slowing down for the rain and thus blocking up the highway. .

MM-cxxx     Tuesday

2000-05-09

Almost no mist and again lots of sun in the morning. And though there are some clouds in the afternoon they are hardly noticeable. Of course this drives the temperature up. To 28°C

The TOS people are coming up with lots of questions. In response of which I added some more to the documentation.
And I completed another maintenance program for V9.

I (finally) updated my mirror to reflect the new address for Matt Beland. He still has his pages at iTool Zanova but that will not last.

MM-cxxxi     Wednesday

2000-05-10

The same weather as yesterday. The night temperature doesn't drop far enough (16C at half past five) so the days high gets higher as well. All the way up to 30C which is too hot for me. Again there are heavy but very localized thunderstorms late in the afternoon.

At work the mail server is down again. Until about eleven and then it is death slow.
I finished the coding for the maintenance programs though one is giving errors.

The connectivity problems at home are getting really out of hand. I haven't been able to update since Saturday. The reason?
A firewall turned firewell.

I just plugged Miona back into the modem and all seems to be OK. Of course now I can only browse the web from Miona. At least I can upload again. If you missed me and want to read the last additions you should start from last Sunday. No that there was much of notice.

MM-cxxxii     Thursday

2000-05-11

The weather gods are playing in Canada. The result is that the weather doesn't change around here. Another warm night (15°C) is followed by another warm day (28°C), again followed by localized thunderstorms in the early evening.

All the maintenance programs are finished. I stopped coding at half past five. Did the last tests and posted the program to the S environment. At six (18h00) the release got frozen. Anything not finished and posted by then is being forwarded to the next patch.

In between I explained how the logistics module handles orders. Not that I know exactly how it works but simply because Theo was dropped in at the deep end. Pieter wants order-tracking in TOS, the new Web-enabled ordering system. He wants to show the client the status of the commercial order but also the status of the resulting logistic order and the subsequent purchase order.
The problem with this is that there is no simple direct relationship between these different orders. In the simplest case, a client ordering one item that is not in stock, do you get a one-on-one-on-one relation. In more typical cases a single commercial order can result in multiple logistic orders that link into new and preexisting purchase orders.
When I was working for OLI I struggled for three weeks with the order-relation program. And now Pieter wants it build in into TOS. I think that will be the best way to prevent clients from using the order-tracking function. Unless it is simplified beyond usefulness.

In the news;

Because there will be more and more pensioned people and less and less working people the paying for pensions is bound to become problematic. The government has now decided to set up a fund that should, by around 2020, be big enough to sustain payment for pensions without additional budgetary funds.

Most pensions (except for self-employed people) are paid by the government. About 5% of the income of working people is currently used to pay for the pensions. That means that now you don't pay for your own pension but for the pension of older people.

MM-cxxxiii     Friday

2000-05-12

It remains warm and humid with a few thunderstorms. It may sound boring but it isn't half as boring as weeks of drizzle.

At work I did some small fixes but most of the time went into documentation. I am now writing documentation for every function that I have to work on and slowly a picture is showing up. It is like masonry where a huge block of stone is slowly being transformed into a monumental sculpture while the stone master chips away. Cutting fine detail at this place and at that place while the rest remains unformed and rough.

One problem cropped up in America. On an order the user can alter the address for that order without affecting the address for other orders for that client. The intention is to allow delivery at another address for example due to road works or an other temporal situation. The problem is that, once the order is archived (after invoicing) that special delivery address is deleted and thus unavailable.
While solving this I find out that the special delivery address actually is archived as well but that the archive file is not used in the OMSI-3 (and TeleSales) modules. So sales apparently loses the address. That problem exists since 1993 but has never been reported before. And of course the archiving of the special delivery addresses is not mentioned in any documentation. Additionally the archive contains duplicates (if I read the coding right, our data is too bad to make that out).
Well now it is documented, and next week I will solve this mess.

In the news.
Well, lots of stuff but nothing worth translating.

MM-cxxxiv     Saturday

2000-05-13

Nice change in the weather. Heu... warm and humid without thunderstorms although they are never far off.

Shopping. I bought back the printer I ordered last week, a HP DeskJet 840c. Nice enough with as bonus both a parallel and a USB connection but without cables so I will have to use the parallel port. After setting up things I notice that I just ran out of electricity. Well, not that I used up all the electrons but I don't have outlets available anymore. I have some quad-blocks that aren't completely used so with some rearrangements I could free up one of them and bring them up but that rearranging will cost some time so I may well get me a few extra blocks.
And I struggle to replace the batteries in my cordless mouse. This uses two AAA cells but to install these you must pry off the cover and there are no screws. And of course I lost the manual for the poor beast.

I spent most of the day in the garden :-) . Mainly weeding :-( .

I couldn't upload yesterday.
Seemingly the problem was at iTool Zanova as nobody could reach Tom or the Daynotes pages. Tom wil move over to his own box, probably taking the Daynotes along, shortly. I plan to do the same but not as soon, I have to wait for ADSL. As soon as either of us leaves Zanova the chance of losing both the Daynotes and my mirror will be reduced.

MM-cxxxv     Sunday

2000-05-14

Simply warm, 28°C, and sunny today, not the high humidity so no chance of getting thunderstorms.

The morning temperature, 13°C, is too hot for running. Well I do run but I don't really enjoy it. I really prefer cold weather or rain to run in.

With the weather w have it is an ideal day for staying out in the garden.

In the news

In Enschedee, the Netherlands a fireworks warehouse took fire (arson?). A local television crew and the local fire guards arrived and started their work. Moments later about 100 tons of the fireworks stuff exploded. Blowing away whole houses. All of this was taped on film. About 15 corpses have been recovered, some 200 people still remain 'missing' but this being a weekend it is possible a lot of those will only come home this evening.
One of the questions posed (mostly by politicians) is how it was possible to have such a depot in the middle of a residential area. No one (of them) knew that it was a fireworks depot. Of course no one prefers to remember that the warehouse existed before the area was released for building houses.

Now the politicians, in the Netherlands but also here in Belgium, start wring their hands, they can device new and extra laws.