Week 05, 2001 ,Svenson

---

| Previous week | Most recent | Next week | 29-01 to 04-02

e-Mail Sjon Calendar    Today Lair The Gang   External Links

Top <  Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun  > Bottom

Cool but not freezing, probably because has been raining most of the night. We do get a nice sunrise but after about five minutes the sun rises above the clouds and is lost for most of the day.
Current (23:10) temp is 14.5C in and -2.7C out.

I shot my foot.
Virtually of course. I build the HTTP maintenance program using the standard routines but I added some tricks of my own. On of these caused a problem when used with the standard subfile handling. Of course my trick worked flawlessly and I didn't expect a standard routine to misfire so I was looking in all the wrong places. Lost quite a bucket of time there. Just moving the resetting of a flag solved the problem.

Last Thursday I searched for a problem in Denmark. I saw two possible problems. One the mixing of various releases and a second problem was the presence of a copy of the program in a wrong library. It turned out to be the last one. That extra copy was an older, unmodified instance that got used because it was higher up in the library list (cf. path).
Nice of Jos to let me know the problem is solved, far too often people drop some problem on my desk but later forget to mention they solved it with or without help.

Ronny is off for an operation on his knee. He will be home for at least one week and probably two.
So of course Germany comes up with a serious problem in TeleSales, in the Progress side.
When they copy from a contract (first time they uses this special type of contract) they en up with materials (correct) but this material get a serial number (wrong, only machines and components can have a serial number). The logistics module doesn't understand that and goes tits-up gloriously.
I don't know enough Progress of course. I do find one possibility to emulate the problem but to do so I have to corrupt a contract. If the item in the contract has a serial number (would be silly in every case) then the copy routine (w-ohol3.w procedure ip_opencontracts) will simply copy that. I am not sure if that is actually the cause but it is a first line of attack.

 

Seems that big island over the pond is gripped with Super Bowl fever. Well, while I do like my cereals in a super bowl I don't make such an issue about it <g>
Hey kids, who won?

---

How do you recognise a parking place.
Simple, any part of the road with lines around it and a car on is a parking place.

 

Top <  Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun  > Bottom

Yesterday evening my car was frozen over and this morning it was all clear. That was my car. The rest of the world was shrouded in mist and in stead of dissipating as the day wore on it just rose a few hundred meters and parked there till evening. Now of course it falls down and things start to freeze up.
Current temp is 12.8C in and -1.9C out.

Ronny called in. With bad news.
He had the actual operation yesterday and all went well. Only they noticed that not only was his meniscus split (that is what they operated for, taking it out) but his 'cross ligaments' (literal translation, didn't fin it in the dictionary) were torn as well. Not a big problem, he can still walk or ride his bicycle. He will never play football again however and his recovery will take at least two weeks.

Jan (Geurts) came by and we discussed the action needed for the TeleSales problem in Germany. I did the adaptation in the Progress program. Quite a simple change but it is the first time I use the tools and the language unaided. And it all worked first time around.

Later I finished off some other problems. Like putting the date on the FTP selection screen.

 

I take a day off tomorrow. Mainly to have my car serviced but also to test-drive a new car. I also intend to go to Antwerp, to a book shop there. We all got a voucher for books (or CDs) from our company (new years present) but it has to be taken up before the end of February and it is only valid in that specific shop in Antwerp.
And of course I did place it somewhere special so as 'not to forget it'. And now I searched for over an hour before finding it.
Chaos reigns.

I try the Mandrake install again, with a (slightly) better screen (I do have two spares) and I do get a bit further. Things now hang on the hard drive detection phase.

---

Of course Darwin was right, how could he not be.
Survival of the fittest.
Dictionary :
fit1 —adj. (fitter, fittest) 1 a well suited. b qualified, competent, worthy. c in suitable condition, ready....
And how do we measure the qualification, competence, worthiness etc. ?
Yep, by counting the survival rate.
Circular definition.

 

Top <  Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun  > Bottom

Dry but freezing (-2C) so the car is frosted over, in the morning. This turns into mist (freezing on cars and roads) which later transforms into low clouds. With a single outbreak of sunlight.
Current temp is -1.9C out and 12.1C in.

I have a day off mainly for servicing my car.
That car is now approaching its sixth year, with 290.000 km on the counter. About time to get a new one. Oh, I could keep it for another few years but I think it would start to clock up expenses. I would probably need a new clutch shortly, and new tyres probably brakes as well. And I am getting some, spurious, fault signals on the dashboard (like a warning that the cooling is low while it definitively is not). A dashboard that isn't illuminated anymore. So I see lots of small expenses coming. And it has been paid off two years ago, earning me some new money those last two years.
So I am looking for a new one. And I did some test driving today with a Fiat Multipla. A funny little car, but I liked it. Of course I can get a new Ulyse as well. Or a Barchetta. Or ...
Sigh.

I also travelled to Antwerp for cashing in on a book voucher (a told ye so yestaday). They didn't have much of what I was looking for. I got one book for my father ("De Planeten" (eng="The Planets") which he asked for. I also got the 2^nd edition of "Practical Unix & Internet Security". They didn't have the Oreilly "Firewalls" book nor the "Outlook in 2000 nutshells" <G>. Both of these were on the top of my list but they didn't have them. I think I will have to actually order them.
To get a bit closer to the full amount (5000BEF) I also picked up "Pegasus in Space" from Anne McCaffrey (my favourite author) and "Burning City" from Niven and Pournelle (the only Niven or Pournelle book in store, sigh.).

And this evening my father made a special Chinese rice dish with chicken and pork and sweet-sour sauce and sate sauce and .... lots of my favourite food. And we cracked a bottle of Sake.

Some anniversaries are like that. :-) Yep, after 39 summers I still feel 17.

---

You don't reach perfection by not making mistakes but by recognising and correcting them.

 

Top <  Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun  > Bottom

Dry but freezing again but only a very thin layer of ice on the car. And again the day is misty throughout with mist condensing on about everything. So much so that trees start dripping water like in a rain forest. But than a cold one. ,br /> Current temp is -0.7C out and 9.4C in.

I had to add the date to the FTP job screen yesterday. Did that and today I added the time as well to the FTP job screen. And to make it easy to spot problems I also put the status on it. All unspecified but handy.

Then I solved a bug in the XML filling program. The V8 program was correct, the v9 one not. What the difference between an ON or an OFF test can do.

Then Italians are interested in using TeleSales and (mainly) TOS. They do have a lot of local adaptations and were rather concerned about the possibility to include them in TeleSales. So I explained the methods we used to allow local exits. Mister Rosetti was rather impressed with the flexibility we could provide.

---

If the black box of an aircraft is made indestructible
why don't they make the whole aircraft in the same material.

 

Top <  Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun  > Bottom

It is dry and misty in the morning, not freezing. Halfway trough the morning it starts snowing. Light, thin snow that melts when it hits the ground although, at times it is quite dense and whipped around by the wind. After a whole day of melting snow the evening brings some firmer stuff. Just to clog up the roads I guess.
Current temp is 11.2C in and -0.3C out.

I have been struggling (= losing time) most of the morning to get a simple flowchart finished with Visio. I know Visio is a capable program. It is even supposed to be rather intuitive. For me it is rather to difficult.
I mean, I have to produce a set of flowcharts about two or three times a year and it are always about the most basic type of charts (like program-A call program-B which reads file-C and ...) with only one or two shapes and some connectors. Usually I just start an old version of ABC-SnapGraphics, it is dead simple with no bells or whistles getting in the way. Of course it is limited but even then I don't think I need all of its capabilities. One bonus is that WordPro can easily import the charts. Another bonus is that I cannot remember it ever crashing, not even under OS/2.
Of course a small (it does fit on an old 720KB floppy!) efficient and stable program is not accepted in a corporate environment, we are supposed to use Visio. But Visio is a slow and complicated tool and it doesn't really work (I saved my chart as HTML page which generates a page with a JPG image, only the JPG cannot be rendered by any browser or image editor we have).
I finally succeed in cobbling together my chart and exporting it in GIFF (>spit<). I convert that into JPG (with MGI PhotoSuite) and put it in my hand crafted HTML file.

I changed the start-up program for invoicing recently on request from Germany. They wanted to be able to start invoices without entering the Invoice_Frequency_code (IFC) which was mandatory. It didn't look like a big change. Until I started testing of course.
The actual invoicing program uses an access path with the IFC in it. So now, if the IFC is left blank you only get an invoice if you enter the order number as well, anything that should generate more than one invoice at a time is broken.
I did solve that but it is not an elegant nor performent solution. And it interferes with some of the German local adaptation so they won't be happy either.

---

Be careful, sometimes you get what you ask for.

 

Top <  Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun  > Bottom

After accumulating about 5cm of snow the weather changed from snowing to raining last night. And it never stopped. So we enjoyed a wet and grey but rather warm day.
Current temp is 12.3C in and 6.9C out.

Shopping. I did most of my shopping on Wednesday so I didn't bring back much. Nothing computerish anyway.

Apart from seting up a web cam I mostly spent the day ... resting

---

 

Top <  Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun  > Bottom

Basically we get the same weather as yesterday. Lots of rain, mostly drizzle but also some stronger showers. Oh, and two spell of dry grey weather. Wet and warm.
Current temp is 17.9C in and 7.8C out.

Running nicely with water cooling for the full distance.

After resting some I start tackling some heaps of paper. The work on finishing the attic starts again with a new bench on the south eastern side and after that the rest of the floor will be finished. All that will take some months no doubt but the floor now is covered with stack of paper and stacks of computers all of which must be sorted and cleared up before the new floor can be placed.
Lots of the paper are web site printouts. I do a lot of web wandering at work (fast connection and all that) but of course I cannot spend all that much time surfing there on company time. So when I find an interesting side I print a page from it in order to surf to it later, at home. I print a full page in stead of just noting the URL because I can then easier see what the site was about.
Of course a lot of the pages point to sites that looked interesting at the tome but that aren't really interesting or to sites that loose their relevance after a few weeks/months. The printouts do keep accumulating though. When I check them one or two months later lots of things turn out to be irrelevant. Things that are still seem interesting after two months get stored and visited. The rest should be thrown out.
Which is what I am doing now.

And, thanks to my brother I got some information about sending money around the world without physically packing it. Unfortunately most of them require the recipients account number. And all of them incur a rather hefty mark-up. The good POP (Plain Old Postal) protocol looks more convenient.

---

Why is there a 'best before' date on a cup of sour cream?