It rained most of the night, with some lightning early on, but past eight it gets dry. And apart from one more burst of rain it remains dry and even gets warm.
And now while typing this (at 22:55) I see the full moon rising, a bit hazy but in a black cloudless sky. Just a little mist obscuring the stars.

I pass the change to the Transaction file maintenance program over to the system test environment for approval.

Then I help Ronny at finding a problem with the orders that remained in the OH_P file. This is a temporal file used for passing unfinished orders (no real number yet) to and from the AS/400. In theory this file should be empty at the end of the day. In reality records remain in it if for some reason a program (either AS/400 or PC) gets canceled or if the network breaks. So some records are to be expected. In Belgium (why is it always Belgium?) there were 1700 records in it. They don't do any harm but they do indicate some lose ends, comparable to a memory leak.
After some prodding and probing (mental image of a dish of spaghetti and you have to compare all the strings to find a pattern) we notice that the transaction code is empty in all but one record. Somewhat later we find that, if the code is empty the header (OH_P) is filled for calculation but no calculation is done. The code can only be empty if the user actually clears it and the code is required, with a test just before saving. The only way records with empty codes can exist thus is if the user clears the code, requests a calculation and then doesn't save the order.
Later still I find two old problem reports; One that demands that order cannot be saved if the code is not filled. And the other that the code must not be filled for offers. The discussion between an offer and an order is only made at the time of saving.
And finally, after some consulting, we conclude that the code for is totally irrelevant for offers so whether it is filled or not makes no difference. So we must make the code mandatory at all time (with a good default).

Trough all that I didn't have time for reading all the Daynotes.

And I got into somewhat of a discussion with Tom (yes, The Tom or should I say Our Tom). Some time ago there was a discussion about search engines. With Tom indicating that he uses an external service because (among other reasons) he doesn't want to run CGI scripts on Hydra. Which I think is a valid reason.
He is also running the Seti@home program on his computers, including Hydra.

When I look at that situation, from the programmers side, I see an inconsistency. Some unknown programs (CGI programs) are not allowed to while other, equally unknown programs are allowed to play. Looking at it (as a programmer) both Seti and CGI programs are just that, programs (Seti is coded in C but distributed as binary, CGI programs can be almost any language). A well written CGI program is just as safe as any other program running on your box on top of that, most (but definitively not all) CGI programs, and certainly the scripts, provide their source so they can be checked. Ok, that is not trivial. But then Seti doesn't disclose it source (they say why on their site) so cannot be checked
When he looks at the situation he sees things from an administrator/opperator side (and we all know that programmers and sys-ops have very different and opposing views (except when looking at users of course &l;g>). He knows the Seti program in the sense that he has ran it for years without ill effects or misbehavior. And the Seti organization is a well organized and disciplined one, not set at maximizing some revenue. In a word he trust them and their program. He doesn't know the ins and outs of CGI programming and he knows (rumors and facts) that CGI scripts can pose security treats. So he doesn't trust them.

This clearly is just a difference in view (programmer versus sys-op) and not a difference in philosophy (Tom versus Sjon).
The proof that, when I don my sys-op hat, I apply the same philosophy as Tom?
I don't run a search engine even though I do have CGI ability on the hosting server. So I could copy a program and script and run it. I don't know how these things work so I don't do that. Yet.