Daynote ,Svenson

MM-clii     Wednesday

2000-05-31

A bit of a nebulous start of the day but without wind or clouds. Heated by the sun the fog rises but it takes till about noon to get it burned away totally. the result is a fairly cool day starting at 5°C but getting close to 20°C in the evening.

I got almost zero productivity today.

First the server had ups and downs. After some searching by Wilbert the problem was that the number of licenses was limited to about 10. Normally we don't notice that because that server is for our project only with tree or four people connected. Now there are those TOS developers all logging on. Wilbert pulled up the number and all was well again.

Then we did hit a performance problem in Progress. When reading a record and displaying some fields sometimes the result snapped up on the screen and sometimes we had to wait for over a minute. Again after spending a lot of time on it we found that this only happened with two fields (last-ammend-user and last-ammend-date) and even then only is we didn't specify the full qualified name (including the file). So even if you explicitly open a certain file the Progress editor still walks trough the whole data-dictionary to find the correct field.

And then I had a discussion with Koen about the performance of the calculation program. I tell him the program, on the AS/400, is not the problem. He checked the source and sees that there is a potential problem and so doesn't believe me. The problem he sees is real but the result of using an OMSI-3 program in TeleSales. the programs must use different files but cannot be adapted (that would break OMSI-3) so there is a work around that involves file copying and overriding before and after the program. That eats performance. So he thinks we can solve the performance problem by (drastically) changing the method used.
After testing he finds that the whole process, including copying, takes about 0.6 seconds. The total process from the user point of view takes around 15 seconds.
So he concluded it is useless to spend the time on reducing that 0.6s to probably 0.4s. The bottle neck is not in my program.
Which is just what I told him.

Headline in the newspaper :

Belgian law contains absurdities and anachronisms.

Now I wonder why that is reported in the 'news'.

There is an estimated 45.000 law-norms, 15.000 of which are punitive. (estimate? Oh yes I forgot counting is higher math and these people are lawyers) About 3.000 new rules are added each year. The CVP (which is now in opposition for the first time in about 40year) proposed to remove rules that don't apply any more.

I have been surfing along on my daynotes mirror and I wondered why Kerri didn't post anything new. Now I found out. She moved out from the iTool account to another site. Glad I found her back.

And Brian is down at the moment. Well his site is. Or am I looking in the worn direction again? Maybe, because Marcia is available.
Hmm, must check later

And then I stumble on this "Remedy will not work" article in Linuxworld.
I agree mostly with it but I look at it a bit different.
IMO Microsoft or the Baby Microsofts will remain the dominant force and we need it that way. By keeping one big (or a few less big) unit strangling the market other companies are forced to develop new niche markets. If you take MS totally out of the market a lot of smaller companies will try to fill the resulting gap, sucking in talent to develop things we now have, to essentially reinvent the wheel. That is talent now working on more innovative projects.