Week 09, 2001 ,Svenson

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26-02 to 04-03

 

 

 

Sjon

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2001-02-26  ,  Monday      MMI-lvii

269

Less cold than yesterday morning, about -2C, but much more ice. It has been freezing and than some under cooled rain fell. Forming a thick bumpy layer of ice, with individual raindrops sticking out. Most of the roads were clear though. Once I hit them it started to snow. Joy. By evening all the snow was gone again.
Current temp is 14.7C in and -1.7C out.

I have been analysing validation-10. This was implemented in TeleSales on the Progress side by Ronny and on the AS/400 side by Mark. Now the Progress side gets removed but of course the whole function must still be preserved so I had to find out the differences.
And I did find some. Well almost the whole method and all but two field tests are different while they should have been the same.
So I got some extra work.

And Ronny noticed that the SAP people had changed part of their interface. Of course they didn't bother to inform us. Why, breaking someone else's programs is just fun. What is fun though is that they added a feature that they pulled out a week or so ago. I told Theo then that they would come back on that decision but he was sceptical.

 

I worked some more on my accounting sheet in Lotus-123. Even with a few unexpected expenses I keep a surplus. Now how do I get a surplus displayed in blue (and a deficit in red)?
Hmm, must check the manual.


If mais-oil is made by squeezing mais, and olive-oil by squeezing olives,
how do they make baby-oil ?

 

Kaptain's log. Kelshon, Guardian date 207.0057    

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2001-02-27  ,  Tuesday      MMI-lviii

275

Almost as cold as yesterday but no ice at all. And no rain throughout the day. just sun that got veiled a bit by high, thin clouds. In the afternoon thicker clouds started greying up the sky.
Current temp is 15.0C in and 2.7C out.

My father was a bit better yesterday but tonight he had trouble again. So I didn't sleep much.

Yesterday and today are holidays in the Netherlands. Traffic is low (and fast) and the office is almost empty. Which means almost no distractions.

It also means I am interim BOFH <eg>

I did get the validation-10 problem hammered down. A bit like pushing square blocks trough round holes, if you push hard enough you will succeed.
And I tested the Italian XML_ problem some more and prepared it for shipping. I will send it tomorrow and check the results later (with crossed fingers). If it still doesn't work I will have to pull it trough the debugger working remotely on the Italian system. The issue is that only 5 out of more than 58.000 numeric conversion go wrong. That is like looking for a broken wooden needle in a haystack. With boxing gloves on.

 

And I discussed the transfer of Cindy. Peter is going for a new computer because Cindy (Celeron400,96MB,i810) was not behaving and he intended to give Piet, his brother in law, a computer (replacing an old i386). So I scrubbed her down to bare aluminium and reinstalled Win98.
Of course after scrubbing and reinstalling (only Win98, WordPerfect 6.0 and Lotus Smart Suite) all the misbehaving is history.


... and how do they squeeze whales for whale oil?

 

Kaptain's log. Kelshon, Guardian date 207.0058    

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2001-02-28  ,  Wednesday      MMI-lix

250

Dry and only a little bit cloudy. Providing a nice sunrise with some black silhouetted clouds over a light red horizon. And the large breaks remain with us all day so we get a lot of sun.
Current temp is 17.1C in and 3.4C out.

It turns out that I will have to redesign validation-10 again. Completely. the problem is that this must compare the current order with all the previous orders over a set period. The aim is to prevent phoned in orders that get a FAX confirmation to be entered twice (once while on the phone and again later when the fax comes in).
The way it now works is that the order must be exactly the same. Just changing the sequence of order lines is enough to make it look like a different order while it isn't really.

I do handle a few extra things in between.

 

I intended to post this Yesterday but some how it slipped.
They are trying everything possible and then some. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/17177.html . Now why do I see that mental image of a dying dinosaur?


Your honour, " explained the young man, "I'd like to get married, please."
"All right, what is your age?"
"I'm 22, sir."
"And the age of the bride?"
"She's 15, sir."
"15??? That's too young -- marrying you would be against the law!"
"I see, " said the young man. "Could you try explaining that to the fella next to her with the shotgun?"

 

Kaptain's log. Kelshon, Guardian date 207.0059    

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2001-03-01  ,  Thursday      MMI-lx

560

More clouds but not enough to completely close up. And by noon we had a mostly blue sky. Then we had a band of ominous black clouds passing over. It turned dark as if night fell for about half an hour after which it cleared out again. Not to blue but to a light shade of grey. Later, continuing into the night we had rain.
Current temp is 17.2C in and 1.1C out.

I fiddled a bit with the validation-10 but I didn't get into it. So I picked up another pending issue from my to-do list.
It is possible (required) to build up a customer profile based on past orders. The problem is that when you rebuild the profiles you must first delete the existing ones. Which of course is not possible when other jobs lock the files. Normally a file gets locked only briefly, while a transaction is performed. The Progress Database Server doesn't work this way. The server jobs put a non-exclusive lock on all the files that they open. That 'non-exclusive' means anyone can manipulate (add, change, delete) records but no one can change the file (rename, clear, delete, ...).
So I converted the pro012r program to RPG-IV and added an error trap to it. Now I still need to add some active rescheduling routine that puts the program on a queue that executes after the Progress server jobs have stopped. Now TOS also uses these Progress server jobs and unlike TeleSales (which starts a new server for each client session) a TOS server job doesn't stop when the client stops.
This could develop into an 'interesting' problem.

 

I have been annoyed with Kedit for some time now because it wasn't doing line wrapping. I positively hate a horizontal scroll bar in almost any program (exceptions are graphics and spreadsheets). In Kedit you can set line wrapping on or off but that doesn't affect the text you are viewing at the time. My first conclusion was It Doesn't Work.
Now I found out it is worse than that.
When I paste something in from another document the pasted text doesn't wrap. If I type new text it wraps correctly. However if I change something in an unwrapped part of a document, like adding/deleting a character it wraps all the text from the cursor position onward. Sounded OK until I noticed it not only wraps lines but also removes carriage returns. After wrapping all the following paragraphs are strung together into one single (correctly wrapped) line.
That is not what I call acceptable behaviour in a released product. Free or not.
Of course it could be a problem with my installation CD but I don't have a bunch of different distro's laying around to verify that. And I don't plan on pulling an image trough my standard telephone line.

Another point I find disturbing with my Linux installation is that now I can access the CD drive even when not logged in as root. As I mentioned some weeks ago the CD was only accessible (mountable) by root. Logging off and on didn't help, rebooting didn't help. Even reinstalling the whole thing didn't help. I left the box switched off for about a week and now it works.
That is not what I would expect from real programmers. Maybe from Microsoft (or SUN or IBM or another company with comercial deadlines) but not from the Open source universe.
Disapointing.

 

The CPRM dogfight continues. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/2/17230.html


It is when dinosaurs became dinosours that they got extinct.

 

Kaptain's log. Kelshon, Guardian date 207.0060    

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2001-03-02  ,  Friday      MMI-lxi

211

We got almost everything today. starting out with frost, than mist and fog, low clouds with drizzle (combined with fog and later without), then some snow. At noon we were inundated with sunlight. And I was driving home in the rain.
Current temp is 15.3C in and -1.1 out.

I did not finish anything but I was more than busy. I did add an auto screen refresh on the good old Life game (Conway) that I wrote in RPG some years ago. Basically they needed something like that in OSI and they asked me. Being the resident guru (sometimes) I felt obliged to finally come up with an applicable answer.

After the ray with my special dill sauce, which was not bad atall, I cleaned up my bedroom desk far enough to reach the keyboard and fired up Caitlan. She is running Linux (Caldera eDesktop) just like Aria. And I could get at the floppy drive, reading and writing to one. So maybe I should try to replace the floppy drive in Aria and attempt a new installation.
The Kedit problem is the same though so reinstalling won't solve that..


It is when your instincts aren't adequate that you become extinct

 

Kaptain's log. Kelshon, Guardian date 207.0061    

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2001-03-03  ,  Saturday      MMI-lxii

123

Cool, just freezing but without frost, and clear in the morning but with clouds moving in even before the sun gets over the horizon. Which results in a completely grey (but dry) day.
Current temp is 17.2C in and -0.6C out.

Shopping.
My father is better so he did the regular shopping on Friday so I only had to get some wine and fruit. I did bring the PC and some extra components for my brother back as well. The wireless stuff hasn't arrived. Still. I guess someone is on his way with it. On foot from Taiwan.

And I did my regular weekend resting.


When you are 'footing the bill' for some job, do you need special shoes?
With studs maybe.

 

Kaptain's log. Kelshon, Guardian date 207.0062    

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2001-03-04  ,  Sunday      MMI-lxiii

636

Again just freezing in the morning but without frost, just the beginning of snow, putting a thin layer of snow dust down. And when I get back from running it starts to snow with real fluffy flakes. The joy doesn't last however. By noon all the snow is gone and we are saddled with greyness.
Current temp is 15.4C in and 2.8C out.

Cool and nice running weather and not enough snow to be a bother. Good weekly self torture <g>

Some continued resting and some computer building.

As I mentioned yesterday I brought back a new PC for my brother. Masset often has a complete PC as 'month promotion'. The attraction of these systems is that they are (much) cheaper than getting the parts and assemble them my self. The disadvantage is that I cannot select the parts but most of them are top quality that I would choose myself. Another advantage is that the box can be delivered in a few days. February had an 800MHz Duron with 256MB and a 40Gig Maxtor drive. I declined on the screen (19inch) because I don't need yet another block of glass.

Today I opened the box because I wanted to replace the standard CD drive with a CD-RW and replace the internal modem (a real one with a Motorola chipset) with a network card.
Well opening the box was a first problem. I am used to boxes with a full metal slide off cover but this one has two side panels that slide and lift off (two screws each). The problem with sliding side panels is of course that they fit tightly and have no handles. Three broken nails and 20 minutes later I got the damned panels off.

Kirian, CD against moboSteven forgot to break out the case cut-out covers over the USB port. They bend inward so I have to remove the motherboard. The problem with this is that the board (actually a clock chrystal) is pressed against the side of the CD drive actually bending down a bit. And because the Plextor CD-RW is about a centimetre longer it just doesn't fit (hitting the capacitors). (And, as you can see the two other 5.25 drive bays aren't useable at all for anything other than 3.5inch devices.)
sorry about the quality but my camera isn't good at close-ups
Another potential problem stemming from the narrow case is that the fan on top of the CPU heat sink is just millimetres away from the completely closed bottom of the power supply. I am not confident about its cooling effectiveness.
Maybe this case is designed for a narrower motherboard and a slimmer heatsink (for a slower Celeron) but I am not sure about that. This is about the fourth case where I have a problem fitting a CD drive with an ATX board. And I am not counting my refurbishing attempt of the original IBM-AT case.
Damned cheap crappy case and probably not much different in price compared to a decent A-Open case.

One point of note is that I didn't ask for an operating system. Because I can only get to the shop on Saturday Steven had the box standing there forlorn. So he installed SUSE Linux on it. Nice surprise. Well not for Bill Gates but I don't care much about him. <g>

The result is that I will pass the box I was preparing for my father on to Peter because that, being built in a nice roomy A-Open case has space enough for the CD-RW. OK it has only a 700MHz Duron and just 128MB memory and a 'tiny' 30GB Maxtor drive.
Although I may mix up the various hardware parts from both systems that are now scattered around the attic.


You cannot misuse what cannot be used properly in the first place

 

Kaptain's log. Kelshon, Guardian date 207.0063    

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Swijsen © 2001

A day you don't learn something new is a wasted day.