Daynote ,Svenson

MM-liii     Tuesday

2000-02-22

An itsy bitsy frost on my car, at 0°C, and a dry day. Not sunny however and the temperature doesn't get over the 3°C mark. So the weather is holding.

The workshop continues so I am largely undisturbed. I don't get 'in the code' however. Like a writer who has "almost finished" a chapter but cannot find a fitting finale. I do solve some programs.

Somewhere in the afternoon I get a call from Jan. Just to indicate that the Americans have done his job (testing) and they approve the adaptation on the filling routine for the Statistics file (the duplicate S3 problem). So I close the problem report and send the program to Belgium. The problem was solved on the third (2000/02/03) and, because it was urgent, I spent time on it that I should have spent on the V9 problems. Jan should have tested it ASAP but instead he did send it over to America. It was urgent, so it took him 19 days before reporting back that it is OK.
Yeah, managers.

The mail account for my brother works sending and receiving. I only have to set up a shortcut on my desktop so he doesn't have to search for it.

I had about an hour to spare this evening so I finished the hardware side of the new box. As I mentioned some days/?/weeks ago I am assembling that from spare parts, left over from various old boxes and some experiments. One of these was a Western Digital 6.4GB disk. Last time I remarked that the AMD K6-2 /300 was defect so I used a 200MHz AMD K6 (from Pat). Now I find that the hard disk is defect as well. It does spin up but the BIOS never finds it. I just happen to have a new IBM 22GB disk gathering dust and when I try that, on the same cable and power the BIOS finds it and identifies it. I don't plan to use the IBM in this box so I pull it out again and replace it with a 13GB Quantum Fireball which I have already used in Aria.
This booted the box right into Linux but of course the hardware is totally different so after the loading screens from Caldera I don't get anything. But it proves that the disk is recognized. The defect disk is just from last year so maybe It is still under warranty so maybe I can swap it (if I just can find the invoice).
All that in about an hour and a half. I wonder sometimes how these magazine reviewers do it when they say it just took them five minutes to install a disk. Pick it up and connect the cables maybe but screwing it in is then probably not included. That is not as easy as it sound, you got to hold the drive in one hand, aligning the holes for screws to the holes in the case, then you pick up a screw and a screwdriver (which inevitably is out of reach) and try to get the screw in without dropping it in the case. It doesn't take a lot of skill, no degrees requires, just a bit dexterity, but it is not that easy either. Definitively not when you do it in a mini or smallish midi tower case.

A full report later.

Adios