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The years starts drab, with a grey sky and intermittent rain. The last remnants of snow melt and are washed away. To make the Autumn impersonation complete the wind picks up. I got bitten by a millennium virus. No, not a computer malfunction but a user malfunction. And the user that's me. As usual on new years day I ate and drank too much.
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Another warm and grey day with various spells of rain. With just enough of a watery sun in the morning to remind us she is still there. It is about 10 to 15 degrees too warm for what I call winter. And with the wind and rain things look more like autumn than anything else. First workday of the new year so everybody runs around giving best wishes and shaking hands. I almost suffer RSI from that.
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Way to hot for the season, 8C at 6:00 is not acceptable for winter. I think I am going to return it and ask my money back. Nice sunshine in between the clouds though. A rather hectic day in the office. I started off by checking the Progress data-server maintenance programs (the V8-to NX conversion). And I worked out how to do one of the new validations. In between we had a serious problem with the database synchronisation between the Progress schema and the AS/400 database. We applied all the known tricks but still sometimes some files just couldn't be accessed. The only reference we find in the Progress knowledge base is something about the year transition. We ate the last of the cheese left over from new years day. With a glass of sweet white Jura wine.
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The temperature stays to high and the sun stays away. In stead we get a rainy grey day with a wind that is picking up. We did some deep digging on the Progress problem. And most likely we found it. Normally the database on the AS/400 is composed of physical files (tables) without key, and logical files (indexes) containing keys (one each). It is possible to include an key in a physical file but normally we don't do that. Oh, I did sent a request for clarification to the people in Italy. They had a bunch of questions about the way we will handle their local adaptations. They didn't tell how they had implemented these local things in the old, OMSI-3, environment. The reasoning behind this ( www.theregister.co.uk/content/7/15759.html ) article in The Register? BTW, Aloha Dan, check the Thursday wallpaper (click on the owl) :-)
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It is 1 degree cooler than yesterday. Wow. To compensate for that lost degree it rained. All day. Sometimes hard, sometimes light. And the wind that started picking up yesterday remained fairly strong. We worked out the solution we reasoned up yesterday for the Progress problem. And it actually worked. Then I got a mail from Norway. It really looks like I turned back the clock one year. Last year on the 21th of January, I tested out a motherboard and a chip for a Linux box. Today I actually started assembling the box. Is this www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/15809.html a business opportunity or yet another initiative bound for nose-landing? Combine this www.theregister.co.uk/content/7/15813.html with the article I mentioned yesterday and you will notice a hard time coming for lawyers.
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To warm still but with a frigid wind blowing. And practically no rain. Almost no sun either with clouds racing by, chasing away the few short breaks. Shopping. Neither the English version of Windows (ME or 2000 whatever arrives first) nor the network kit have arrived yet so I only bring home some wine, cheese and fruit. Rest day as usual so I don't do much.. Well I did pick up the new box I started on yesterday. I didn't get far though. I changed the layout and I removed the redirection on my site. I didn't get any comments about it so either nobody noticed it or the changes are appreciated.
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Cool, not cold, with a fair bit of wind throughout the day. After a beautiful coloured sunrise that sun thinks it has done its job and promptly she retreats behind the clouds. Getting a bit shy I think. Cool enough with a good refreshing wind for running. Well, at about 2C I think this is the ideal temperature. You cool down well enough and yet nothing (fingers, nose, ...) freezes off. I completed all the connections on the firewall and everything got recognised, booting straight into DOS off a diskette. Well I did have some problems because the power supply had no 3.5inch floppy power lead, after ransacking my spares cabinets (notice the multiple) I found a four pronged power splitter with one small connector. So everything works, he.
2001-01-01 , Monsday MMI-i
Kaptain's log. Kelshon, Guardian date 207.1
Current (22:30) temp is 12.9C in, 6.8C out.
I don't use special backup programs, I back up things by copying. I guess I copied in the wrong direction yesterday, overwriting my December directory with an older copy. Anyway, this morning I missed the complete month. I could get most of my work back from other copies so I actually lost just a few files that I can recreate.
Yes Tom your file is safe.
So apart from recovering files and showing my uncle how I print pictures from the camera I didn't do much. We had fun with the camera. He used to take classic pictures and develop them himself in a small darkroom in his basement. So he was quite impressed with the digital camera. He doesn't have a computer and he is convinced that computers are too complicated for him. And I don't think I can persuade him to try it out.
stuffed people around the table.
2001-01-02 , Tuesday MMI-ii
Kaptain's log. Kelshon, Guardian date 207.2
Current (23:20) temp is 13.5C in, 8.7C out.
After that I start on the rewriting of the price-calculation. If I get that worked out it should be possible to request the price for a single line or item just as easy as it is for a whole order. The trick is to separate out all the routines that use the order and rewrite those. This is going to take quite some time to get right. Which is why I start on it now, even before the validations changes have been worked out completely.
You know keeping two balls in the air is more fun than just one.
2001-01-03 , Wednesday MMI-iii
Kaptain's log. Kelshon, Guardian date 207.0003
Current (23:20) temp is 15.7C in, 5.1C out.
Maybe a delayed millennium bug. Not unlikely because the 31 of December was the 366th day of the year while 2000 is actually a once in the 400 years exception on the once in the 100 years exception on the leap-year rule. I wouldn't be surprised that Progress closed the year after 365 days.
(The reported error is due to a mismatch in a checksum that uses the file-creation date.)
2001-01-04 , Thursday MMI-iv
Kaptain's log. Kelshon, Guardian date 207.0004
Current (23:20) temp is 14.6C in, 6.7C out.
Of course I did just that with the LOG_ The result seems to be that the file handled immediately following the keyed physical got mishandled. Another problem is that files ending with an underscore are a problem. In de p__index file that underscore gets stripped off so the file isn't recognised.
We spent about the whole day cursing and sweating on that.
Lawyers, lawsuits etc are about the law. Law is a form of Codex. Codex comprises Code. Programming is all about code. So money thrown at lawsuits is a natural phenomenon in IT.
Logic < SG > (sad grin)
2001-01-05 , Friday MMI-v
Kaptain's log. Kelshon, Guardian date 207.0005
Current (23:00) temp is 14.8C in, 7.2C out.
After that I more or less finished the documentation for the Progress maintenance programs. I did find a bunch of orphaned programs among the lot as well as some that seem to be plain wrong (probably orphaned as well).
Sounds like they get a problem each January. Last year it was with contract prolongation. This year the program for manipulating maintaining price lists crashed. Hard. I spent the afternoon on that but whenever I tried it worked flawlessly. And yet I have some core dumps as proof of the problem.
they grow when you aren't looking
2001-01-06 , Saturday MMI-vi
Kaptain's log. Kelshon, Guardian date 207.0006
Current (23:00) temp is 14.5C in, 1.6C out.
The intention is to make it into a firewall. It is based on an old AT chassis. A true steel case with the top that hinges up. It has a 200W power supply with the on/off switch on the right side like the original IBM PCs. I threw all the rest out. The drive chassis (true lacquered steel) come out easily. I added an old 2.1GB Quantum Fireball and a Maverick 12x CD drive and a brand new 3.5inch floppy drive (so now I have a 160MB Kalok hard disk, pre-IDE, and a good 5.25inch 1.2MB floppy drive on my collection of spares). I installed a Soyo motherboard with an AMD K6-200 and 64MB memory. Then I noticed I didn't have any AGP cards ready and only one PCI network card. I don't need AGP graphics (and I have a few PCI card spare) but the board only has 3 PCI slots which would/will be taken all when I get the second network card.
I'll try to install Linux tomorrow for a test. Then I need to learn how to make a firewall out of it.
2001-01-07 , Sunday MMI-vii
Kaptain's log. Kelshon, Guardian date 207.0007
Current (23:20) temp is 2.5C out, 14.7C in.
Well not realy.
Old case
As you may notice on the picture (a bit dark but with full flash it was to light) just on the corner closest to the camera there is a heat sink fitted on a voltage regulator. Of course this is sticking out almost a full centimetre too high to fit in under the drive cage. So I have all the right bits and pieces working nicely with a good and almost silent power supply. And it just won't fit the box. While pushing, trying to get the thing fitted anyway I did break the CPU fan.
So, firewall project canned. (till next week maybe :-)