Week 05, 2000 ,Svenson

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31-01 to 06-02

MM-xxxi     Monday

2000-01-31

This is ridiculous. It is winter, it should be freezing. There should be snow and ice. All over the place. Do the weather gods suffer from some kind of millennium bug? It is 11°C, in the morning. At 6 o' clock, the coldest time of day. That is ELEVEN CELSIUS, positive. And it is raining, lightly. Hey, Up There, This Should Be SNOW.

The Norwegians keep struggling with the contract prolongation. To begin with the ran the Price Maintenance module again. With a changed reference date. Now there remain about 240 contracts that still are not prolonged. While trying one of these individually they hit a real bug. That is if you want to activate a contract but you don't actually select any contract lines the activation program doesn't select anything. It does however tries to print something. And it fails with a crash. I can (an will) solve that but I have no idea where the prolongation goes off track.

This being my anniversary, we have an extended dinner (burps, oh, sorry), with a bottle of wine (hips, oh). And no home activity. Now why, oh why did my father correct that date .

MM-xxxii     Tuesday

2000-02-01

Nobody is listening up there. I mean it remains too warm (11°C) and dry.

I solved and tested the bug we found in the price maintenance yesterday.

The II and DR adaptations are not going as they should. Quite some programs don't handle the files in the standard way. This means that the management tools we use did not trap all the occurrences of the II and DR files. So now we have to track down their usage by hand.
One positive thing was that there were no interruptions.

I am slowly ( emphasis on slowly )changing the links all over the place here (except on the daynotes). On most, but not all pages I had them arranged in the left margin. Now I am migrating them to a separate table at the top or inserted on the right. Well I am still not sure if I should put the table on the top or on the right. I keep the left margin rather wide because, once printed it looks more like a regular manual. I am not sure why manuals have a wide left margin. With most people being right handed it would be better to have a wide right margin I text books so that you can write in it without blocking the text while writing. The only advantage I see is that filing pages in a gin bound folder the holes shouldn't cut out some text. a margin of just over a centimeter should be enough for that however.
Nah, maybe someone else from the Gang knows an answer to this. There are quite some writers among us.

MM-xxxiii     Wednesday

2000-02-02

Still too hot (8C) and we got a little bit of rain. But also a lot of sun, falling straight in my screen.

The Belgians called with a problem in the posting interface (from invoicing to financials).
Basically there are two interfaces to the financial module (OFI) one before invoicing and one after invoicing. Both postings must reach a balance. In December they noticed that they were missing lots of invoices in OFI. This was due to wrongly scheduling of their batch processes, with archiving orders (end removing them from the active files) before they got posted. We informed them that they should change the ordering of the processes. Obviously they didn't do that and now they are missing invoices (for almost 30 Million). So I quickly changed the posting to lookup orders in the archived files as well.

And I got a mail from the Americans about duplicates in the S3. This is a problem that has cropped up in a few places but we never found out why because we couldn't replay it here and the opco's that got the problem were unable to explain when and how they got it. Until the Americans hit the bug. They do use their brain and reported the error with a good indication of the when and how. And now I know it is indeed a bug.
So now I can start to solve it.

It is short shift this evening. I guess I am burned out for the day.

MM-xxxiv     Thursday

2000-02-03

There is a little frost on my car this morning, even though the thermometer is not convinced (it says 2C). And later there is some rain.

While Ronny was involved in a meeting with some sales people from Progress I solved the S3 problem that the Americans reported yesterday. As usual testing took more time than actually solving the problem. The problem occurs when more than one order is billed on a single invoice (collective invoicing) which is typically used for billing a client over a period in stead of at each shipment. It is also used when an order gets split up by the logistics module. When a (sub-)order is shipped a record for it is created in the trigger file. Later the trigger file is processed and for each order in it the S3 file is filled with the invoice information. Now you get two orders with the same invoice so that invoice gets added twice.
Easy if you know how it works. The only problem is that in a few opco's that use collective invoicing we never got that problem. That I why I assumed the duplicates were caused by something entirely different. Like the erroneous restore in Spain.

When Ronny came back from the meeting he was fuming with frustration. The Progress sales people had come to explain how, with their tools, we could make our TeleSales programs available trough the Web. As usual it would be easy and everything would go automatic etc. etc. Well the kind of talk aimed at managers that don't understand the technology used. Now it is unlucky that we currently have one manager who doesn't understand the technology at all and the other manager, Theo, is too new on the project to actually grasp the way our programs are interconnected. Now add Ronny who's patience span can be measured in seconds and you get a potent cocktail.

Adding to that we noticed that a change between the old version (8) and the new version (9) of Progress handles case sensitivity in field testing differently. When you had an X and an x in the database scanning for X found both. Now only the exact case is found. This impacts a lot of programs and requires en extraordinary amount of manual scanning (AS400 database fields are handled differently from internal fields.)

I did post yesterday. I really did. See, it is there .
But I actually re-posted the Tuesday pages, so the right page only arrived today.
I maintain the notes on my main system, then copy them to a diskette, climb up to the attic and post from there. Yesterday I took the wrong diskette up.

MM-xxxv     Friday

2000-02-04

The heat is on again, well heat, I mean 6°C. Together with the rising temperature we got descending water. Packaged in short but intensive showers.

I solved the posting to General ledger on Wednesday because the Belgians were having real problems. After solving I placed in the system test environment so that Jan (or Pieter) can test it. We should only send programs out after testing by Jan or Pieter, and Theo really intends to apply that rule. Of course they hadn't looked. This afternoon Jan came in from Germany with the great news that he had discovered a serious problem there and that I should drop everything to solve it. Yhea, great. Could it be the Germans have a posting problem?
I am clearly scoring good points (if there are bugs in my solution however ...). He isn't though. He wanted to ship it immediately to Germany, without testing. After a short discussion he agreed to test it. In Germany, with a copy of their production files. I know it is not easy to test it locally , but for some "not easy" translates in "too difficult" .

Ronny is still struggling. He definitively is not the person to work under pressure. And he is not good at accepting directions from someone else. And compromising is something he doesn't understand . He is doing the job, as told, all the while grumbling. There is no time for an alternative, so he has to. I am doing my best to tone him down a bit and keep him on track.

For me the death lines are approaching fast as well. But the closer they come the more I enjoy myself and then more relaxed I am (which adds to Ronny's frustration :-)

Being under pressure does however mean that I am not doing much at home anymore.

MM-xxxvi     Saturday

2000-02-05

It remains too warm, with 5°C this morning, but is stays dry today.

On my customary Saturday shopping I pick up two Compact Flash storage cards (16MB) for my camera. At about 60 Euro each they look reasonably priced at Bigs. Last week I asked at Masset if he had these but he didn't know what Compact Flash cards actually were. So now I show him one and he looks it up at his supplier. It seems that these Kingston cards come at around 70 Euro before taxes and before profits. So I paid less than the cost price. I like that.

My brother has a Psion Series-5 (mine is an older 3a). This has 8MB internal memory and a 'proprietary' expansion unit. Well CompactFlash cards were so rare when that machine came out that it made no sense to advertise the socket as anything different. But I plugged in a CF card and it was immediately recognized as a new 16Meg drive (no booting required). The last time I looked at Psion they were asking about ten times that.

After taking some shots with the camera I notice that it is very sensitive to shooting against the light. Remember this is a very cheap thing. It has a small lens which, together with a light end distance sensor are protected by a flat piece of glass. When light falls on that at an oblique angle you get streaks in the image.

I seem to be having a problem wit uploading to iTool. Normally I use CuteFTP but since yesterday I cannot connect anymore. The only way to upload is via the file manager that iTool provides. This is not a good tool for uploading. It doesn't replace files, you must first delete the existing file and then upload the new one. And it doesn't do more than one file at a time. It takes about ten minutes to do the upload and it requires attention, normally I upload in about one or two minutes and I can do that in the background. Something must be done about it. But not today anymore.

MM-xxxvii     Sunday

2000-02-06

Still warm (6°C) and dry. Not like winter should be at all.

It is about as warm as it can be before breaking into sweat while running. The running by the way went quite well.

I intended to finish the new box for Linux but instead I did some cleaning out in the garden. Lots of plants are budding out about two months too early. The result will be that those buds freeze off in a few weeks time and the new buds that will follow will be much smaller. It promises to be a green summer with lots of small flowers. Some, like the old roses may die off totally.

I removed the iTool settings from CuteFTP and recreated the profile from scratch. To no avail, I simply cannot get access to my own site via FTP. The only way to upload is via their file manager and while it works it is rather clumsy for replacing daynote pages. Especially going trough a slow modem link. I will give the iTool help desk a bit of work tomorrow. Just to see how long it takes them to call up Matt :-)
The main (only?) advantage of the iTool file manager that I see, but I must test this first, is that I could upload pages from the office. Using FTP to/from unauthorized sites, is blocked by the firewall, and the only authorized sites (for us) are other company sites.

Quick update (posted on Monday but it relates to Sunday)
I tried to update and I fiddled with the settings in the afternoon. All unsuccessfully. But at around 23h00 in the evening I could FTP again as if nothing had happened. Either someone at iTool noticed the problem or someone removed the knots in the telephone cables. Yep, the helpdesk escapes again.