Week 17, 2000 ,Svenson

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24-04 to 30-04

MM-cxv     Monday

2000-04-24

Easter Monday

It's a bit misty and wet from nightly rain in the morning and it remains grey till about noon. then the clouds break up and retreat, leaving a bright sunny day in their wake.

I have a day off, well Easter Monday is an official holiday so ... I play around a bit with some new web layouts in the morning. Not satisfactory and in the end I don't really change much. For the moment.

I spent the afternoon gardening. Putting in the last of the potatoes and seeding new scorzonera for next year on my brothers lot. Later I clean out part of our own garden. Got some blisters to proof my work.

MM-cxvi     Tuesday

2000-04-25

Low mist is reducing visibility but once out of town the mist disappears, revealing the pastel blue and red pre dawn sky. With some silver clouds to increase the beauty. The temperature climbs to 22°C on a bright day.

As some opcos will only apply the 7.9 release by next year I apply a bunch of recent patches to the current release. Applying patches means re-testing the patches. Sigh.
And Jan came over to clean out some old problem reports.

In the news

For the last 25 years there have been women in the Belgian Army, since 1981 they were allowed in all and any branch. And still there is no provision for uniforms for pregnant women, nor are, for example, the backpacks adapted to the somewhat different physiognomy of the female upper torso. One (female) Captain relativates saying that the nature of the complaints rather indicates that things are not really that bad for the 3.147 (7.5%) women in the Belgian Army

Hey, Brian, Happy Birthday and such. :-))
Yes, he is growing-older, not growing-up, mind you. He will start doing that in about 50 years time, or so :-)

MM-cxvii     Wednesday

2000-04-26

Clear and bright most of the day (10C rising to 23C), a bit windy but not bothersome. It does dry out the mud hole we named garden last week. Late in the afternoon high clouds drift in but it remains warm and dry.

The pressure is slacking off at work so that I can pick up a few problems I scribbled on some lose papers and backsides. I don't get to solve them yet however.
Performance problems in TeleSales have cropped up again. This time it is the Americans that report a problem with the order calculation. After a long discussion about what must be done with Jan and Theo and Peter we finally get so far that we do some timing tests. The calculation program, on the AS400, finishes in under one second. When it is called from TeleSales it takes at least 5 seconds and, generally for each additional order line added to the order two seconds get added. On top of this the VAT calculation doubles the actual time and, when releasing the order at the end of the process extra validations are added to it. The Americans reported the problem on an order with about a hundred detail lines (that is ordering a hundred items by phone, wow). That could take over 400 seconds, not the ten minutes as reported but way too long by any standard.
The delay occurs in a process that copies the internal record buffer to the AS/400 database files. This is a Progress routine where we don't have an influence. Tough.

Dan Seto will have to remove his HTML-standards compliance graphic.
On his daynote (Tuesday update) he has a closing tag ( </commercial plug> ) without a corresponding opening tag . Can't have that now can we. <G>
BTW that <G> doesn't need a closing tag, it is somewhat like <HR> or <BR>. It only accepts the style attribute like <G style="malicious">

Am I getting old? Antiquated?

I showed some young un an Intel 386 chip saying it was an "Intel 386" .
His response after a brief look : "can't be"
"Heu?"
"They only made that speed on a slot-1, never in a socket!"

The times, they are flying.

MM-cxviii     Thursday

2000-04-27

After some rain at night we get basically the same weather as yesterday, with the same temperatures.

Working (well mostly talking but that is how it goes) on the performance problem in TeleSales. A first try, replacing the 'buffercopy' with 'assign' statements doesn't produce a consistent improvement. Our next try is much more involved, a database change always is, and will take a lot more work.

The Micro Payments topic landed with a thud on the back-channel and the dust takes a lot of time to settle.
(Check Chris and Bob and the others of the The Gang )
One thing not (<yet>) mentioned is taxation. Governments like to put taxes on anything (bet you didn't know that :-( ) as long as the payment is between two non commercial (that is VAT-registered) parties this is a problem. Not worth tackling for small amounts any way. If however the payments are logged at a third party and the total volume gets big enough things become different. You can bet on it that government will take a good, hard look at it (throwing a fair number of bureaucrats at it). Yea, millicent with micro-tax.
And few people would notice it at first. Say you view 30 pages a day (just read all the daynotes and you add up to about 30) at 0.1 $cent per page and you take the Belgian Tax rates (21%) you end up paying 3.6$cent. Hardly noticeable. At the end of the year you have paid 109.5$ to the daynoters and 23 $ to the government (but then to which government?).
(The 109.5$ is of course income for the daynoters and that is taxed as well but this enters a different discussion. )

And extra thought : how do web-crawlers and search engines handle Millicent?

What would Millicent bring in for me?

I just checked my stats (3rd or 4th time ever). Last month I got 2289 page-view hits, 25% of this were the redirection pages which I think should not be millicent-ed, leaving 1716 hits. So I would net about $17 per month from which I would have to subtract the handling costs (unless the Millicent service is free). Of course if millicent chases away visitors things look different.

MM-cxix     Friday

2000-04-28

What do you get is you combine warm weather with lots of water? Mist and fog. With absolutely no wind that translates into a hazy day. While the sun is obscure from view most of the day enough heath accumulates under the haze. Over 25°C even. Maybe Matt would call it a cool day but for me that is about the max, any higher and I am uncomfortable.

I have been tormenting my keyboard to get the performance adaptation done. At one point I had the performance at unacceptable heights, creating over 25.000 order lines per minute. Oeps, an unending loop. In the end I got everything about ready. Tuesday we will do some firm testing. (Monday is Labour day and so we don't work. Logical isn't it?).

In the news.

In Belgium we have one world-famous gun manufacturer, FN (Fabrique National (French for National Factory)). Unknown? Does the name Browning sounds more familiar?
The latest order , some thousand P90 automatic guns (I am not an expert, the newspaper says "the best hand gun in the world, it penetrates five layers of bulletproof coats." (but WTF -who- wears five of these?) ) for Mexico is being disputed. It was authorized by the minister of Trade (?) but later some other ministers (Greens and Socialist) started to protest and want to forbid the export of weapons to Mexico. (The Greens probably because they are against any arms trade and the Socialists because (officially) Mexico does violate the Human rights (unofficial I guess they have nothing, electoral, to lose in the region of Herstal where the factory is).

We had a delicious (well I ate to much) baked salmon with asparagus and a butter/basilicum sauce. With a bottle of South African white wine.

MM-cxx     Saturday

2000-04-29

We got some rain today, not a huge amount but rather a lot of short bursts. The temperature remained almost constant at around 12 °C. Grey, wet and misty day.

Shopping, but nothing conputerish. I will probably need a new printer but that is not a pressing item. My father is off again till tomorrow evening or till Monday, depending on the weather, so I have to fend for myself again. Not a problem , I just have to get the ingredients.

My car is due for an inspection next week and I have to get it to the garage for regular maintenance. So I get it washed, spending a few hours on the inside. But the it is only the second time in about six years that I actually do a deep-clean (© RBT) of the inside. And it was needed.

Oswal (the second Win98 box on the network in the attic) has been behaving strange this last week.
It started with not waking up after pawer-save. I leave it on all time and normally it wakes up easily. Not anymore. Nothing but the reset button did help. This started last week and this week it only resumed once.
Then, on Thursday the disk started rattling. Well it is a noisy disk and I know that Win98 will do disk optimizing things when the box is idle so it didn't really bother me at first. On Friday evening the disk was still active when I came home and by 23h00, when I normally post, it was still busy. Wiggling the mouse did wake up the box but the disk remained active and some of the icons on the desktop disappeared and reappeared seconds to minutes later while other icons disappeared again. Nothing I did on the box would react, I mean I double clicked on the Explorer icon and it became selected, the cursor became an hourglass but half a minute later the hourglass went away but explorer never started. When I explored the disk from Miona, over the network everything looked normal. I could see all the disks and I could read and write without delays.
After a cold reboot everything looked OK again. And now things are still working as they should, no hanging or slowing down. I did nothing but a cold reboot to solve the problem. OTOH I didn't install anything these last months to cause the problem in the first place.

MM-cxxi     Sunday

2000-04-30

While it was dry while I went running it did rain shortly afterward. And a second burst of rain paid a visit at noon. The rest of the day was warm, dry and thinly overcast. While it is a bit cooler in the mornin (10°C) the temperature rises to almost 20°C.

It is a bit warm for running but things go easier then last week.

It is reasonable weather so I while my time in the garden. Not sitting on a porch but weeding and pruning.

Some time did arive today. Not enough postage so I don't get all I ordred.