Daynote ,Svenson

MM-xxxviii     Monday

2000-02-07

Happy winter. Its about 8°C at the coldest time of day, more typical of late spring than the deep of winter. And we have got rain again. A light steady rain, but just as wet as a downpour.

I adapted a few more programs for the II/DR ownership change. I couldn't test a few of them (GAI050R and GIA010R) because they are not registered in the cross reference tables and direct calling produced an endless loop.

And I had to update Jan and Theo on the problems I solved last week. Mainly because the Germans are not playing along. They are more or less blocking us. They have got the TeleSales programs as first opco, somewhere around June/July 1999 because they really wanted to use them. They were going to do the main testing. And, being a pilot project they were going to get preferential support. They didn't test the programs. They installed them on a few PCs, tested for about two days and then let it rest. During that resting period the Americans got on board. Now they did test seriously, causing us problems no end. We did some custom work for them and by September they started introducing TeleSales to the actual users. In October they had the whole system up and running as their main (and only?) tele ordering system. We still had no word from Germany. After the Americans the Belgians took up TeleSales and after some minor problems had it up and running as their production system. Then, in December the Germans picked up again and started to throw problems back at us. Each problem was called a 'show stopper' with them calling "you solve this or we don't take it". The result is that they still aren't using it. They seem to test, until they find something that doesn't work as they want it and then stop testing until we solve the 'problem'. So when we had an option on a menu and they wanted it on a double click, they called it a 'show stopper' and refused to test until we changed the program.
They have long run out of credibility by now. And just today they found a real problem. Sigh.

While this political game is developing, Ronny is wrestling a few problems with the introduction of version 9 of Progress. Most things work, a few bugs can be worked around, some other things work but look a bit different. There are however a few problem that are real. One of them for example is the pooping up of a message demanding that a field must be filled (on-leave trigger going off) but this is while the user tabs into the field, before he even gets a chance of filling in a value. This is unacceptable behaviour of course but before we can call on Progress we must find exactly why this is happening. I think this is fun but Ronny is looking a bit phased out.

We got a new member being introduced into the Gang: Ben Rota. Before actually getting onto the main Daynotes.com list (well he got on the list alrright, but not on the official bio page. Yet) he will have to face the dangers on the mirror at Brian's site. He is one of the people that keep Ars Technica up so you can expect quite a lot of interesting cutting edge stuff on his daynotes. Well the notes are not actually daynotes because he adds only when he has some interesting things to report. Which is often enough, not like some other dayno ... what? who do you say? Yea, what about Svenson? Oh.

I added him to my own mirror (and to the drop down list under the map). Check him out from time to time.

For people that didn't pick up my additional post yesterday. The FTP access to iTool is fixed again. I don't know what was wrong but Sunday afternoon I couldn't get my FTP client (CuteFTP) to connect even though I tried everything (except reinstalling Windows). In the evening, at 23h00 the connection was up again, without problem. The possitive effect of this temporal glitch is that I actually tested out the file manager from iTool. While not the most efficient and fast tools around it works and it lets one pass though a firewall that blocks FTP. Neat and handy.

Adios