Week 07, 2000 ,Svenson

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14-02 to 20-02

MM-xxxxv     Monday

2000-02-14

It was a clear night so we have frost again (-2°C) but the roads are dry (really dry). It remains dry and sunny until about 18h00 when it starts to rain.

Some people from Progress come by today to demonstrate the capacity of their Web-enabling tools. The result is that both Theo and Ronny are out in the demo room most of the day so I can work unperturbed. And I get all the II/DR programs adapted and some get tested as well. Just one program must be handled but I cannot do that alone because it is used by some other modules as well.

I noticed that I have got a problem on my site. All the pages I want are visible and all the links I want work. There a re a lot of links that don't yet work (for example go to Timareen and try from there to get at Aria and back, this works on my main system but not locally on Miona) but most of those point to pages that, like Aria, aren't finished yet so they are not intended to work properly. What should work however are the images. For example Timareen should have steel.jpg as background, just like the computer page, only it doesn't show. Now the site at iTool is a mirror of what I have on the E: drive on Miona and when I browse locally every thing looks normal.

Another strange thing is that when I browse from the office (Netscape4.6, Opera, MSIE) my daynotes have the yellow gradient, both on the iTool account and on the mirroring Mailbank account. When I surf from home, via Miona with Netscape 4.5 (nothing else installed at the moment), the Mailbank account has the backgrounds correct but the iTool account doesn't. The .JPG images are always visible but the .JPG background (mottled gray, steel.jpg) doesn't show up.

MM-xxxxvi     Tuesday

2000-02-15

Tonk, we got 8°C, positive, this morning. Someone is really confused up there, minus two yesterday, plus eight today. The weather gods are playing yo-yo. And it rains (same as yesterday evening?) until noon.

Theo stays home today, but he keeps working. Well he does handle and forward some mails from America, so I assume he is not taking a day off. One of these mails is about the new interface proposal for the order line entry. The Americans want to add lots of extra information. That will of course kill all the performance gain we made and it makes the function far less intuitive.
The intention was to present a fast order entry display where the user could almost blindly enter order lines. Only two fields had to be entered (item and quantity) all displayed information came from one file (=instant display) with only two buttons, Entry (default) and Cancel.
The American proposal has 9 entry fields, with quantity and item not adjacent and not at the top (and quantity before the item!), and 7 buttons. The information to be displayed has to be retreived from different files (3 or 4 depending on the situation). The result will be confusing and slow. But how do we convince them that they don't really want this? We collected some arguments but the discussion will not be simple. Especially Pieter will not agree with us, but then he is prone to disagree with everybody. Principally.

I dug up some additional programs that relate to the DR/II problem and started solving them.

MM-xxxxvii     Wednesday

2000-02-16

We didn't have weather today. !-- It started off this morning at 6h00 with a clear open starry sky and 4°C. When I got to my car some ten minutes later it was drizzling, just out of towns, must have been 5 minutes later again, I got a serious shower of hail stones. When I reached Genk that stopped and the rain slackened off again so that by the time I got on the highway it was dry again. About 20Km further (another ten minutes) the wind picked up suddenly and with such force that I had problems keeping the car on a straight line. Just after Born it started to rain again, with the wind not slacking off, and a few kilometer further the rain turned into sleet. By the time I reached Venlo it was dry again. On the road home this evening it was dry with only a little breeze but I noticed several places with snow and ice still on the grass besides the road. -->

Theo redistributed some of my workload, passing some of it to Koen. So now I will probably finish early with what is left. Well I did finish a few more II/DR programs, but new ones keep cropping up.

Robert Ruelle in Belgium has tackled the S3 problem, well almost. He installed the new program and he has isolated the problem records in the S3 itself. He only has to delete these now but he was a bit nervous deleting data from his production database. He just needs some hand holding and a few reassurances. Once he really understands the situation he is ready to go.

I am home early. Yep, the first time this year I leave the office well before 18h00, I actually stay only 20 minutes longer than. I should.

But then my brother comes in. He has a problem with some texts that we scanned in and OCR-ed last week. He gets a lot of notes at work but all are on paper so we often scan them in and convert them to .txt files. He converts these to WordPerfect 5.0 (indeed the DOS age format) for correcting and referencing. The problem now is that he can not reach the end of the texts, he is always missing a few pages. When I try to read them on my computer I am also missing some parts. The strange thing is that each editor reacts different. Word Pro drops the last page(s) from some files and refuses some other files, WP-Win (6.1) drops other parts (on one it drops all the text without giving a message) and on some files it complains about the file format. Word pad cannot open some files and drops yet other parts of those files it can open. Well, I try various editors, both on Win and OS/2 but I never get the texts loaded fully.
He'l bring the papers back for re-scanning tomorrow.

MM-xxxxviii     Thursdy

2000-02-17

It doesn't feel like freezing this morning but yet it is just 0°C. And it rained most of the nigh. Now if you add rain and frost the result is an interesting road condition. Once past Genk the roads are dry and clear but it took some acrobatic driving to get there. Of course between six and seven there is almost no trafic so it is not much of a problem if you get on the wrong side of the road at times. Apart from a heavy hail shower at noon (just when the boss and a few architects are out for a walk <<BG>> ) the day is dry but cloudy but with enough breaks.

I do solve a few more II/DR programs. With just six to go I will probably finish tomorrow. In between I help Dimirty to pin down a problem. Basically an easy problem but he has been starting himself blind on it. Quite frustration for him but it happens to everybody from time to time. He has been looking at it for hours on end without finding the problem. he finally calls me. I come over, take a look and, within a minute point him to the error. He he.
That happens to me all the time, I solve (well pinpoint) other peoples problems fast and effortless but I keep slaving on my own problems.

On an other "in between" action (well I do more in-betweens then normal stuff) I find and solve another problem. Loek noticed that the handling of orders with type "already shipped" (typically when a client picks up the goods directly and afterwards the order is recorded) are handled different in TeleSales as compared to OMSI-3. He doesn't know if this is intentional or not so he ask Theo, who doesn't know it of course so he passes on the mail to Pieter (and Jan, with a CC to me). Pieter misinterpreted the problem and gives an off-topic answer which throws Theo and Loek totally off course. Jan responds with two answers (one correct to the actual problem and another to cause more confusion).
While this goes on I check my mail, test the programs and see that there is indeed an error. Only when I report it as solved to Theo do I notice the flurry of mail (only the very first was CC-ed to me). I explain the actual problem and solution to Theo so now he can get Pieter back in line and give Loek a solution.

Yesterday evening I couldn't get a connection to America. Both iTool, for my main site, and Mailbank, my backup site, are based in America so I couldn't upload. That is why I uploaded to the free web space (50MB) I got with my free account at Freegates.be . This is in Belgium itself. I tried to mail the Gang but that mail passed trough both Mailbank (my mail account) and iTool (the Gang mail list) which I couldn't reach.

This morning I did send the mail from the office (after the company mail server finally got up) and just then noticed that the Freegates.be site was unavailable. It looks like all connections to and from Belgium were down. (the office is in the Netherlands).

MM-xxxxix     Friday

2000-02-18

There is about 4cm snow and more is still falling. On frozen ground (-1°C). While I had some exercise yesterday, it reminds me that I should get new tires. They are still legally acceptably but I use to make them work hard in corners and I prefer to replace them before they betray me. The snow stops at the border and it stays dry except for one light shower just before noon. By evening all the snow has gone.

I managed to not fix all the programs I intended, even though things went well. Theo is slowly getting the hang of how we work as a team while the architects don't form a team at all. Just a little coaching and subtle pushing goes a long way in managing a manager :-)

I am going to break down and restore my site over the weekend, mainly to get links and references in a more reasonable working order. So if things don't show up as expected you shouldn't worry. Everything will be available again before Monday. Maybe, if all goes according to plan I should be down no more than a few hours on Sunday . But when I plan things ...

MM-l     Saturday

2000-02-19

It's raining, no snow, and the temperature is up (5C). Most of the day it's dry but lots of clouds and a few showers keep the day gloomy.

I went shopping but the new Zip drive hadn't arrived yet so I didn't bring anything new home (well, I don't count the bottles of wine and olive oil, nor the new t-shirt etc. ).

While discussing a date for painting the front room (we did one wall a few months ago, now we are doing the rest, but with my father suffering from asthma we cannot paint while he is home) he mentioned that he will need an e-mail address. He is pilot and while the government I rolling out its computer infrastructure (subcontracted to Siemens and it should be ready in a few months, that few months is stretching for more than 20 and no end in sight) there are some problems in obtaining the latest official papers. It happens often that he calls the office in Brussels and they have the necessary documents but can't distribute them. The clerk sometimes proposes to e-mail the stuff. Normally you get at least one e-mail account when you sign up with an ISP but he hasn't got a connection yet (pulling wire in an old house is not that obvious).
What is the best way to set up an account?

I was thinking of registering a new domain and putting up a site. Mainly in support of the books my father writes as it seems that the publisher is not interested in doing so. Most hosting services that I checked allow for up to five e-mail addresses and between 5 and 20 Meg in their basic offering. So that will be easy enough to set up (if I find a way to get two or more accounts in Netscape). Then I checked out the registration service for a .BE domain. What first strikes me is that they ask 2500BEF ($71+) for setup and 2000BEF ($57+) per year. Autch. And a few paragraphs later I notice that they don't allow individuals to register, you have to be an organization or a firm. No tax registration means no domain registration.
I guess I will pick up some .COM or .NET domain, the NSI rate of $35 looks positively cheap.

Of course I got my day numbers wrong, I use roman numbers but the Romans didn't use XXXXX for fifty. They used the L (from Lazy maybe, after all they had to chisel it out in marble and there is a huge difference in l or xxxxx when doing that).

I didn't work on the changes to my site (to get the links and backgrounds working properly) as I intended (but tomorrow ...). The only change I made was the new link to Wendy Ward-Johnson's page on the Daynotes mirror (both on the main page and on the widows page).

An inspector of the IRS to one of his "clients":
we fully understand your problems,
but our computer is not programmed that way.

MM-li     Sunday

2000-02-20

It appears to be -0°C, there is no wind so it doesn't feel cold but there is just a touch of frost. For example on my car the front window if frosted over while the other windows are just wet with dew. Fine running conditions.

While checking the files on my sites and my local copies I found stray graphics files mixed in between the html pages. I know how this came about. I compose everything on Harper where I save everything on a Jaz disk. Most images (backgrounds etc.) are copied from Venlo and get here on a floppy, together with the html files. But Harper has no connection to the rest of the world. So I copy all the files to a floppy, climb up to the attic and copy everything to Miona. And it is probably there that I make the most mistakes by copying the whole diskette to the disk and then copying (instead of moving) the files to their intended location. Later I synchronize (about once a month) the Miona situation to the Jaz disk I use regularly on Harper (it's an external SCSI Jaz so I can pick it up and connect to any computer around here). After some months the situation has become rather confusing.
I cleared some whole directories from the iTool site and reloaded them but I am afraid it doesn't solve the problems.

I have been pruning back some shrubs in the garden this afternoon, taking advantage of the fair weather. And I made some photographs. Which I am not going to post yet. Once I get my site cleaned up however I'll put them on show.