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Sjon
 
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2000-07-25

 


Grey and raining, strongly, in the morning after a warm (15°C) night. From about 9h00 to 16h00 it is grey and dry and after that it is grey and raining again.

I am not making much headway on the trigger problem. Most alleys so far have come to a dead end. There are just a few programs left to check, if they don't hint to something I will have to go digging into the data in Belgium or Germany. And that will be looking only because it are production data bases.
Yea, data-mining means something different to different people.

Norway is going to implement TeleSales, Jan is there to set things up for them. Of course they get errors that we haven't seen yet. After chewing the problem some time Wilbert cannot swallow it and calls me for assistance. After which he leaves me to work on an authorisation problem on NT.
More than an hour log-gazing later I know what the problem is.
For a new order, default values are retreived from the AS/400 by calling a program there, passing the variable name. The PC of course uses ASCII characters forming the variable "C$OMI3-O5TRNT" and throws that towards the AS/400. There, being a good old IBM box, things don't work in ASCII but in EBCDIC, so every character is converted according to the code pages used. The dollar ($) in the name becomes an Angstrom (Å Å) for which of course no match is found in the program defined table. The big difficulty was in finding out what the dollar was transferred to. Because I was working remotely, via telnet and on my own screen I never saw the Å , all strange characters came out as blanks.
After trying, retrying, head banging and retrying again (and a some colour full language) I finally solved the problem. Of course this problem is going to strike in other places as well and the solution I pulled out of my hat is, at best, a stop gap measure.

 

I found a cover-CD with Mandrake (7.0) on it and tried that on Yaku. Again no luck with the automatic installation. This was however a 'full version' with a character based manual install available. I followed this all the way and I got the whole lot running. There was however no way to get X windows running with my screen/adapter combination. Later I rebooted (dual booting with the OS/2 boot manager still working so I got into OS/2 by default, closed down and rebooted again) and got all the way to the log-on prompt but with the keyboard as dead as a fish on the moon.
Sigh.

While winding down for the day I found this article in The Register. I am not very clever about economics but there are some good arguments in there.


Adios
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Swijsen © 2000

What book would your realy like to have?
The cheque-book from Bill Gates, please!