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Week 13, 2000 ,Svenson

Sjon



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Kelshon Saga. The logs. (book37.2 p93)

27-03 to 02-04

 

 
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27, Monday, best day of the week.

MM-lxxxxvii     Monday

 

2000-03-27

 

 

A break in the clouds was just long enough to start my car freezing; the thermometer, always a bit lazy was still perched on 2°C. Most of the day was typified by this type of moderately short breaks in an otherwise gray cover.

Theo is back, after his course in management techniques he will be the perfect manager :-). First thing is filling in for what happened last week (I could point him to these pages :-?).

Then I added the final touches to the HCC programs, did a last test and transferred the to the S environment. That should be the last of the version 7.9 work on the AS/400 side for me. Maybe something drops out of TeleSales for me later this week.

After that I solved a small problem for Pieter (it probably took him more time to report the problem than for me to solve it :-). And then moved on to ... new problems.
For example the call from one of the OLI testers. I am not working on OLI but he was directed to me because he had a problem with releasing an order (due to an invoice code). Order entry is an OMSI-3 program so ... . Only he was entering an OMSI-1 order (machine order) which only passes trough the OMSI-3 program for calculation and releasing.
After a lot of searching and retrying suddenly the code was filled and the orders got released as they should. I suspect he didn't have an invoice address at first but finally selected one while trying out options and functions at random. Well that is the type of thing most of my time gets lost in.

I did manage to read some daynotes but the group is getting too big. I doubt I will ever get to read all postings each day for any length of time. Unless I start to read a lot faster. Or there should be a few hours extra per day.

Which brings me to the en of this day and I haven't updated my daynotes mirror, which I had planned to do.

 

 

 
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MM-lxxxxviii     Tuesday

 

2000-03-28

 

 

Again a cool, gray day, a bit warmer at 4°C but without breaks. While I didn't meet any rain the roads were wet so some must have fallen when I wasn't looking.

I checked converted and edited the specification for the ATP programs. Ronny has already started on the programming but the specifications are not clear. Lots of Dutch-English (English words cast in Dutch grammatical rules) which occurs often here in the Netherlands, mostly in verbal communication but sometimes in typed texts as well. And a few repeated blocks of text expressing the same idea with the same words but in a different layout and context. It's not cleaned up yet but I am getting there.

I didn't solve any problems today but I prepared a few ones so tomorrow should be a coding day again. If I find the problem in the OLI module that is mangling the comments entered on machine orders (Yea, I am the OMSI-3 man that is why I must check out OLI programs that mangle CCM orders)

And maybe I get some CCM (Consumable Control) on my plate.

I had hoped to get a bit more time this week. Now where on earth di I get that notion from?

I did manage to update my daynote mirror , putting J.H. Ricketson on it (always added to the bottom). I also added him to the Meet the Gang page where I updated the pages for some other members as well. (I pulled some new ID cards from the Wiki wiki forum over at Bo's site)

 

 

 
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MM-lxxxix     Wednesday

 

2000-03-29

 


 

Same colour, same temperature, same humidity, same breaks, ... . Guess what we had for weather today?

I have been kicking around in the OLI programs but I didn't find the place where the comments get shifted. Some program must be reading the TXTCOM file backwards incrementing the lines and updating the file as it goes and the TY file must be updated (or rather forgotten) in the loop. That is about all I have to start with. It is highly likely that the process commences off the INV444R program but that is not guaranteed.

Something like a crash epidemic has broken out at the office. I had to reboot four times (2 times using the on/off switch!) today, Ronny had to reboot twice. Peter, our old manager had his PC returned today, the original complaint was a slow network, taking up to a minute to save even small files. The PC support department reformatted the disk and reinstalled everything (from an image). In stead of a faster connection he had to reboot five times during the afternoon. Up to about last week I only had to reboot about once or twice a week so I don't think the hardware is a problem. I did get the Progress V9.1 installed this week so that could be a problem but Peter doesn't have Progress installed at all.
We are all running Win95, maybe MS built in some sort of switch to degrade Win95 when W2000 came out. Who knows.

I did not read any daynote today. Hey the only time I had my browser open was to search for a phone number on the intra net and once for checking my own documentation.

Yesterday was not a good day to do web things. First I accidentally swapped my day and week redirection pages. Then I deleted the base text for the day (I 'write' most of my texts in Word Pro for spell-checking) luckily after copying to my page so I could recover from the web.
While doing all these stupid thing I noticed that, for the future days on the weeknotes page I have a closing tag for the table that will contain the daynote. The opening tag is copied from the daynote page when I fill in the page. Normally Netscape is quite sensitive to mismatching tags (forget to close a table and you get a crash) but in this case there seems to be no problem. I will have to solve the tag problem however (cant live with errors in the code now can I?) but without making it more difficult to do the copy and paste. Hmm.

I also noticed that I have been using one x too many in the title up to now, yesterday for example was the 88th day and not the lxxxxviii day. Oeps

I noticed that there was football to night . Belgium-Netherlands at that. There is a huge traditional rivalry between them, comparable to the rivalry between Scotland an Ireland in rugby. The match ended on 2-2 which is very good for Belgium and rather disappointing for the Netherlands, they have been winning most of the encounters the last 10~20 years and in tournaments they usually rank much higher. Don't ask me more than the final score because I didn't look, I just caught the result from the new on the radio.

 

 

 
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MM-lxxxx     Thursday

 

2000-03-30

 


 

The temperature is up a notch, to 6C. The drizzle is up a notch as well. Only the grayness is unchanged.

Koen, who made the Consumable Control module (some years ago) had said that the comment adding was not done in CCM but had to be done in OLI. I searched OLI extensively yesterday and it was not in there so today I started mining in the CCM code. The problem here is that the programs are not built to the normal standard but are constructed to a rather different set of rules. The fact that Koen doesn't like documenting his code obviously doesn't help. I did, finally find the location where the comment got manipulated (in a piece of code added last year by someone else). Solving it was a piece of cake, about ten minutes work.
All said and done I did lose two days on this.

While guiding Theo trough the documentation structure that I set up I noticed he has FrontPage installed on his box. Jeekes.
We decided to keep the final documents in MS Word format (company standard and such) but to use HTML pages to structure them for easier retreival. By keeping the documents in Word he can work on them as usual and he can mail them out as usual. For me that is a bit inconvenient because I hate MS Word and MS Word hates me, I never succeed in getting a document in a consistent layout. Whenever I place figures in a document Word shifts them around or even drops them after a few days.

I did set up the documentation in HTML because I needed it for myself and what documentation there was is way outdated and on paper only. I will keep doing the HTML stuff and link in the documents Theo produces. Most of the structure remains private anyway.

I noticed that I implemented the best possible anti-spam measure on my daynotes-mirror. My e-mail address at the bottom (webmaster) is wrong. And the BIO pages are deviating from the real Daynotes . . Maybe if I fix the mail address I wil receive the complaints, so I have a good reason not to fix that <G> .

Jonathan Hassell got his place on my mirror.

And Tom decided to get a year older. Everyone got invited and I will be there (virtually so I will wear my virtual parka).

 

 

 
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MM-lxxxxi     Friday

 

2000-03-31

 


 

Cooling down a bit, to 4°C, but dry. There was a kind of mist, not thick enough to cause any hinder but cutting the horizon off at about one kilometer. And it didn't lift so we had a hazy gray day.

Hazy and gray also describes the day I had. I did a bit documentation and I solved a few minor problems but nothing intensive.

I did read about half the daynotes but I had a backlog so that didn't go fast either. Still about half the page on my mirror to visit.

See ye tomorrow.

 

 

 
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MM-lxxxxii     Saturday

 

2000-04-01

 


 

Adding a bit of drizzle to the cocktail called weather but the rest remained the same gray haziness of yesterday. With the same 4°C to boot (rising to just under 10°C in the afternoon).

On my shopping trip I only bought a network cable. The smallest (shortest) cables available are 5 meter but they were sold out so I got me a 10m cable. Most of my computers are close together so I would do fine with cables of 2 or 3 meter. But I haven't seen such short cables around here. I have made my own cable a few times but that is a fiddly difficult thing to do, especially with the Cat-5 cable, because the wires must be inserted into the RJ45 plug in the right sequence before squeezing them shut. My first few attempts resulted in wasted plugs and cable. It is much easier to buy the cable pre made. And you are sure the cable is wired correct as well. I only wish they would sell shorter cables, straps only organize the cable clutter a bit.

I had a long 'siesta' (sleeping from 14h00 until way after 17h00) catching up on missed sleep during the week.

My brother wanted a print out of the photographs I took of his garden last week. He wants to set up a small greenhouse but he needs a building application for it. This means he needs to turn in a map with a few photographs.
Up to now I had no printer set up on the attic but I have a Cannon BJC-70 bublejet printer sitting there. This is a slow, medium quality inktjet printer with either a 'large capacity' black cartridge or a 'small capacity' 4-colour cartridge (one black tank and one tree colour tank). The best feature of this thing is that it is portable, the main reason for buying it. The worst feature is that it eats ink cartridges for lunch, supper and dinner.
After hunting down the driver disks ( took me about three hours but I did some welcome cleaning up along the way so it wasn't wasted time ) I asked Win98 to install a new printer and it didn't even ask for the driver diskette. Installation went fine.

In the end the prints were worthless because the colour ink had dried up. I never used to print much in colour and I didn't use the printer for about a yaer so that didn't surprise me one bit. I must have some replacements lying around somewhere here.
Maybe I find them tomorrow.

 

 

 
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MM-lxxxxiii     Sunday

 

2000-04-02

 


 

At last we had a dry day again. Starting off with lots of clouds and 6°C, feeling somewhat less due to a brisk wind. By about 9h00 the sun has gained the advantage and it becomes a beautiful spring day.

Good running weather of course.

The garden is far to wet to do much, except weeding and pruning. Next weekend should be better if only it gets a bit drier during the week. The potatoes need planting as do the onions and shallots. And flower seedlings have to be potted. Yep, it is not only at work that time is in short supply.

 

 


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Swijsen © 2000

A day you don't learn something new is a wasted day.