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Week 15, 2000 ,Svenson

Sjon



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Kelshon Saga. The logs. (book37.4 p105)

10-04 to 16-04

 

 
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MM-ci     Monday

 

2000-04-10

 


 

Again a perfect spring day, with the temperature evolving from 4 to 19°C and almost constant sun. Ideal weather. For sitting in an office behind a computer. Sigh.

I started on an invoice-printing problem. Users can select a few criteria for creating invoices, such as a period or a specific order or a range of dates. All these criteria are taken into account for creating the invoices in the database and adding them to a print-file. Because each country has different invoice layout requirements the actual printing is done separately based on that print-file. The problem is that not all the selection criteria are passed on to the actual printing program. The result is that every thing from the print-file is printed. Nothing is printed twice of course but if two selections run at the same time some invoices end up on the wrong printer. Also any invoices that aren't printed right away are picked up with the next batch.
The big problem with this passing of the criteria is that each opco has its own printing program so any change we make to the program interface must be applied in each opco by the local programmer(s). Changes of this type are not popular and the documentation must be as near to perfection as possible. (ps there is no current documentation of the whole printing data flow. but you probably guessed that.)

I noticed one article in The Register ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/000410-000004.html ) that sound too good to be true, some internet regulation that doesn't bring in the government and that cuts layers out of the deal. It could have an impact on domains. Maybe cutting out cyber squatters but also, potentially, cutting out some legitimate registrations if it gets applied retroactively. For example, I registered Swijsen, com org and net, but I am only using the com domain at the moment (I intend to pass one of the others on to my brother but intentions don't count in this world) so I am 'squatting' the two others.
I guess I should follow this

Oh boy, a new competition. On the Daynotes gang Tom started off a new trend, by locking himself out of his own computer. Now everybody has to admit to beginners-mistakes. There is no price for the dumbest mistake.
Yet. (maybe an extra paragraph or honorable mention in the The Spotlight ?)

My father was just back from his trip when I came home (no time for logistics so we had cold pizza) but he didn't try out the digital camera for landscapes, which was the reason he took it along in the first place. Well other opportunities will come .

Oeps, just noticed I stil displayed March on the redirector page. Changed it. I am just one week out of sync wit reality it seems, not bad really !-- has been wors anyway -->.

 

 

 
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11, Tuesday, next day.

 

 
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MM-ciii     Wednesday

 

2000-04-12

 


 

Raining. Yes, the weather forecast was right (they promised never to do that again<g>). It's cold (well, 4C) and wet and grey and windy. There are quite large and sunny breaks so it was not gloomy.

Again head down at the documentation but also on code archeology to find out a few old methods.

Dinitri found a problem with the II/DR programs. I solved it but it is not satisfying. Normally a user has only access to the invoice addresses owned by the module he is working with. That was implemented. The address manager must have access to all addresses but almost none of them is owned by the General Address module. The result was that the GA program, when called from another module stumbled a bit. The change allows all modules the possibility to select any address, test later in the modules must then trap the owner problem.
That is called short notice, short solution.

Changed the link to Bo Leuf, using his redirector, on the mirror

And the old Toshiba is dying. Peter brought it in but he needs another portable. With Lotus Symphony (remember that one?) and WordPerfect 5.1 (and this?) installed. I could give him Mita, the 486 mini-notebook but I intended to push that into Linux firewall usage (if I get the PC Card slot working again). So I will have to get the Fujitsu LiteLine ready..

 

 

 
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MM-civ     Thursday

 

2000-04-13

 


 

Yesterday we had sunny weather with a few extended spells of rain (real rain, not the drizzle we have been "enjoying" these last weeks months). Today we have raining and grey weather with a few extended spells of sun. The temperature got parked at 5C, morning, noon, evening.

I have been hacking at the documentation, mainly for the invoicing part of OMSI-3. The main reason was that I had to solve a problem with the filtering in the invoice printing process. And I got it solved.

Ronny is, together with Theo, introducing the Progress people to TeleSales. The Tele Ordering application (web based ordering) wil be done by them.
According to the planning I should be doing that, in cooperation with some Progress people. Now it seems the whole planning is being by passed. I haven't seen a byte of coding jet, I haven't even been included in any of the discussions or presentations. The reason that is brought forward is that I don't know the tools and the project must be finished on short notice. Valid reason. Only, I just heard that one of the Progress people is new, recruited off school just a few weeks, and will be learning the tools 'on the job'.
Yea, right.

Not that I am now sitting idle.

I let my brother choose which note book he wants as "temporal" replacement for his old Toshiba (286/12 1M 20M). The problem with the Toshiba is that it is failing slowly. The keyboard is temperamental with various keys refusing to work at times and the hard disk is giving strange DOS and BIOS messages ("int-xx error xxxx" type of stuff ) This is not surprising as it is over 10 years old and has seen extensive use, it has traveled a lot as well. (My brother was deck-officer, mainly on gas and chemical tankers, before he became pilot.) The Toshiba has been in his dorm in Zeebrugge these last few years.

The replacements he had to chose from were my old Mitac (486/100 40M 2G) which has no CD and is missing some bits (it is actually a sub-notebook) or a new Fujitsu LiteLine (AMD K6/350 32M 2Gb) this has a CD drive built in and gets up to 800x600 (actually it is a Mitac 5033 but I only found out later).
He only runs WordPerfect 5.1 and Lotus Symphony 2.0 (on DR DOS 6.0) so both notebooks are over the top.
He couldn't chose so I did. He will get the Fujitsu and I keep the Mitac (for a firewall, remember). So I will be installing his stuff on it. Got Win98 and a few of the standard programs on it a few days ago. (Standard means 'standard here' : Lotus SmartSuite, CorrelDraw 4, WordPerfect 6.1, Psi-Link (for the Psions) Netscape, etc. (no MS stuff other than the OS) .)

I got bitten. Hard

I had the Fujitsu notebook for Peter ready. I installed Symphony and WP5.1 and Norton AntiVirus. Then rebooted.

And it never came up again. It trudled for some ten minutes and than dropped back into DOS mode with the message that Win#$%^&& couldn't load because HIMEM.SYS wasn't loaded. Heu.
Up to now it ran and booted OK so I thought Symphony or WP had changed something (it had changed the config and autoexec so maybe it had done just a bit more). These are old DOS programs so luckily there wouldn't be changes in the registry. I checked the autoexec, only a path statement added, and I checked the config.sys, only files=20 added. There was no himem.sys in the config.sys so I added it. And rebooted. Same problem.
I tried Save-mode but got the same error. Oh oh, how do you get Windows repaired if you cannot get into Windows?
(And who is saying Linux is difficult while Windows is easy?). Yes I have booted a few times off the installation CD and that doesn't change a sh****.
Running the startup with selective loading of the drivers shows that HIMEM.SYS is found but that it cancels because it cannot get control of the A20 gate. On some BIOS's there is an A20 related option so maybe the installation has messed with that (almost virus like but not unheard of). The BIOS is from Systemsoft (r1.2) and has only a very limited set of options. Nothing about A20 there. I remember from somewhere (old-times) that cache settings can (could) some times interfere with the A20 gate so I disable all caching. To no avail.
Short of scrubbing down the disk and reinstall I don't see a way out. And if the BIOS is altered even that may not be enough. I could need a BIOS flash.

Luckily this is not my only computer (yea, I am a kind of Joe-sixpack, I sort of buy my computers in six-packs :-> ) so I can still get on the internet.
However, Fujitsu doesn't have my model on its site, not for sale nor on the support pages. On the support I find nothing even remotely remotely related to my problem. I also don't find a BIOS upgrade. I do find a support mail address in Europe and fire off a mail. I will not get the reply here but it is now about 23h00 so I intend to pack it up for the day.
I do remember that Fujitsu doesn't build all its notebooks themselves (if any) but that they OEM some from Mitac (one of the biggest notebook OEMs). And a number at the bottom looks familiar (5033) so I surf off to Mitac.
They do have some notebooks with that number (5033e, 5033d, etc.) and after some searching I find my exact problem mentioned in their Q&A section. With a fix. The problem seems to be related with Norton AV which somehow grabs the A20 gate and never releases it again, not even when prodded by a reboot. The proposed fix is a line added to the autoexec and a reboot.
It doesn't help at all but I now know that the culprit is Norton AV. Just get rid of it should do the trick. But how do you get rid of a Windows program like that, if you cannot get into Windows?

Shut down and ponder the reason of life for some time (go down, lock the house, brush teeth etc. ).

Back up I restart the notebook and Lo it gets into Windows, taking over twenty minutes to do so and the box runs slow. I mean SLOW. I have got 12 icons on the desktop and they appear one ... by ... one (almost a minute between first and last). Something is clearly wrong but I do get in Windows. Then I do something stupid (well what 'd you expect?). I reboot. And Windows doesn't want to play. Back to square one. More than an hour and a few boots later I know that Win will start if and only if I do a cold boot with the Win98 CD inserted.
Ok, in Windows, move mouse to the start button (it crawls from the screen center to the corner). Click, the start menu rolls up (should pop but nothing pops now), move to Settings, wait for the menu to display, click on control panel. Between this click and the window actually being displayed an filled with icons took almost two minutes. You know the way further. I uninstalled the Norton AV stuff.

Too late to test now (almost 03h00 and I have to get up at 05h45 at the latest).

 

 

 
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MM-cv     Friday

 

2000-04-14

 


 

Cool, windy, rain, sun, clouds, .... We are getting it all (no Tom, no snow and the temp is positive). Later on the bright spells become longer and outweigh the greyness.

A new 'problem' cropped up in Belgium. The interface for starting invoices is a filter screen. You select the address or the period or ... and the invoicing gets submitted to a background job-queue. That works (not like a charm but ...). But. When you don't enter an invoice date the *current date is used. Most of the time the current date is the day you see on the screen, if however the job has to wait in the job-queue until after midnight the current date is not what the user saw when he submitted the job. Still no problem. The Belgian operator knows this so to make sure he gets the right date he fills in the entry field over typing the date. Most of the time he over types with what is already proposed so the program doesn't see the difference and still passes *current to the invoicing. Some night the backup takes long and the invoicing shifts back.
Result : a problem report with status To_Be_Solved.

I got bitten Yesterday.
Not by a Virus but by an Anti-virus. (that is why I didn't post a thing yesterday).
I had packed the notebook and during my lunch pause this noon I started it up for further meddling. Hey.
I got a clean boot, going in Windows without as much as a hiccup. And the speed is almost normal (got the cache still turned off). Some tests later I can declare the box healthy and ready for delivery.
BTW I did get a reply on the mail I sent to Fujitsu, .... from the postmaster declaring my mail undeliverable. Nice site they have with no support and fake mail address. No wonder they can claim they don't get problems about their computers.

I was just lucky I was using such a user friendly system, even Joe Six-pack can use it <Malicious Grin>.
Hey give me Linux, this Win stuff is much to easy for me <MG>.

 

 

 
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MM-cvi     Saturday

 

2000-04-15

 


 

No improvement in the weather to be noticed. So we got sun and rain and clouds and wind, all at the same time (where I was born this type of weather is indicated by "carnival in Hell").

From my shopping expedition I came back with a 100BaseT card for the notebook. My brother is picking it up this afternoon so I must install it at once. And it works at once. Plug and Play has come a long way and there is still a lot of work to do but with PC Card and USB devices it works reasonably well.

I did catch up on some sleep during a long siesta.

No gardening, its not the right weather to enjoy gardening. The radishes I sowed last week are out so this time next week we can start eating them (and I'll have to sow another batch).

And I installed a modem ( Diamond Supra V90 ) on Cindy at my brothers place. He had to go early so I didn't yet get him an account for an internet connection. I have a CD from FreeGates ready so next time he is home and I am there I can set it, along with his mail.

 

 

 
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MM-cvii     Sunday

 

2000-04-16

 


 

A reasonable 5°C but a chilly wind greets the day. Although there are at times threatening clouds it remains dry and by the afternoon the clouds are gone.

Nice cool weather for running :) against the wind most of the time :(

I start a few jobs in the garden but the morning weather isn't favourable so I stop and retreat to the couch for some reading.

More potatoes (100 pcs) must be planted in the afternoon but by then it turned sunny so that was not at all a chore. There remains some space, currently occupied by scorzonera, that should be free by next week for a last batch of 50 or 60 potatoes.

ToshibaMy brother is off with the Fujitsu notebook (and I forgot to take a picture) but he left me the old Toshiba. I took it totally apart for cleaning. Well I think I got all the screws out, I didn't loosen the cables because these notebook connectors are rather delicate. There was surprisingly little dust inside, Only in the keyboard (I pried off all the keys) was some dust and hair. I vacuumed the lot with a small special 'keyboard vacuum cleaner' (I got almost a matchbox filled). And I got everything reassembled and working again. Cleaning didn't however cure the keyboard problem so either dust got into the key-switches or the switches are just worn out.

 
 

 


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Swijsen © 2000

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