And we have a cool night again, 11°C and the same cloudy but nice day.

I updated the documentation a bit, folding the finished into the rest producing a more or less homogenous whole.

The rest of my time is taken up by helping Ronny find some new and elusive problems in TeleSales. For example one where TOS2000 and TeleSales presented different results about the same data. Checking the same in OMSI-3 proves TeleSales wrong. For the consumption's the key is composed of five fields (year, order-address, item, delivery-address and invoice-address) In TeleSales only the first three were used. So, more work for Ronny.
The big issue, in this case, is that the error has been present in TeleSales since the first release and that it is an error that is easily spotted if TeleSales and OMSI-3 are compared and yet none of the testers, neither Jan nor Peter nor any of the opco's ever noticed
He was not happy today with several of these errors reported and then some more problematic stuff where we now know what is wrong but cannot do anything because the error is in the language itself. And to get that fixed you need to present a watertight case using the provided sample database from Progress. That is a big Bother.

 

My *nix knowledge needs some boost.

I noted some time back that I finally got Mandrake running on Yaku. I did get a lot of errors during the install and I cannot get X running. I did the install just to see if I got it up on Yaku, he has been refusing everything except DOS and OS/2. No Windows (not even Win3.1 on DOS, the Win-box in OS/2 won't start either) neither any of the Caldera Linux versions.

So now I have Mandrake (7.0) running and nothing to do with the box, it is sitting under my desk running idle. So I logged in and typed vi without filename. That is the first time I start vi without X. Ok looks a bit bare so I wil quit and try with a file. Heu .... how do I get out?
I haven't got a manual here so I find myself in the swimming pool, deep end, I don't know how to swim and I don't find a ladder to get out. I notice a sort of welcome screen with a few options (q for exit, help for help etc.) so I try q and Q and ctrl-q and all other expectable combinations. All to no avail. After a while I get ready to ctrl+alt+del my way out. But hey, this looks and feels like DOS but it isn't, this is UNIX and you don't do a three finger salute if you haven't locked up the whole box (in which case you need the reset button anyway). So alt+F2 into another session. start vi to see what that welcome screen showed. Ha, just type q and enter. But that only works to close the welcome screen. Damn, two sessions locked up.
Alt+F3 third try, good try. Sanity kicks in and I try man vi and finally find I should use :qa! to get out of vi.
And, after searching for the ! key (I am using a FR keyboard but vi treats it as a BE keyboard) I do get out.

This is exactly the kind of situation novice users encounter and cannot get out of.
If the installation goes well they get a graphical desktop where things look more or less familiar, there are icons and menus and things work more or less as expected. There are after all not that many differences in a WIMP environment.
If the installation chokes somewhere the novice user will choke as well. Digging up old DOS reflexes, which can only be done by older people, Ronny for example never actually worked in DOS, is not going to help much. Even some rudimentary UNIX knowledge is just of limited help. For example in Yaku I haven't seen a directory listing. DIR doesn't work of course but typing li doesn't do anything either while typing man li does provide the man pages.
And the manuals provided on disk or in the shrink wrap are no use either. Most they will explain the installation assuming everything goes right with a footnote about reading such or such log file when things don't work as expected. I haven't seen a manual that provides the command to read a log file. In DOS you do a type xxx.log but in UNIX, you're free to guess.

I have so far only done some installation and no deeper work. Time to pick up some manuals and start to become more seriously involved I guess.

Adios