Week 18, 2000 ,Svenson

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01-05 to 07-05

MM-cxxii     Monday

2000-05-01

Labour day (public holiday)

A little misty but warm (13°C) in the morning. A little misty and cool (16°C) at noon. A little misty and cool (12°C in the evening. Looking straight up there is blue sky and only a few clouds but down towards the horizon there is only greyness.

Labour day. So nobody works. Logical.:-)

I took the HP Deskjet apart. As I mentioned on Easter Sunday it stopped picking up paper automatically. Manually pushing a wheel inside the printer would make it accept and print. I expect it is time to get a new printer. Well, even if it had not stopped working I would be looking out for a new, colour printing one. Mainly to get the ocasional photo printed, most printing I do is black and white (that is why I always run out of white ink).
I decide to open up the old DeskJet to find out what is actually wrong. There is nothing to lose if I break it completely and there is a (slim) chance of actually fixing it.
So. I pick it up. Easier said than done with the cables inaccessible and sneaked behind the rack. Once I get it on the attic I start looking for screws but find none. The whole box is held together with plastic tabs and notches. In all of the printer I fins only tree screws, one holding the control panel in place and two others holding down the paper guide. All the rest is fit and fastened like a gun so it can be opened and totally dismantled without tools. Inside I find nothing broken but I notice that some of the gears are strangely asymmetric with some cogs, cranks and pegs transferring the rotational motion of the paper rollers into a linear motion for the paper pickup and the paper eject mechanism. The asymmetry and the strategically missing gear teeth work together to engage some gears only when the print head is in a certain position for feeding or (another position) for ejecting paper. A wonderful piece of engineering really. Of course opening up the box spilled all the gears out and I have a hell of a job getting them back in. In the correct position, before opening I could only see 7 gear wheels, after opening there are 15 wheels on a heap.
After a few hours I succeed in reassembling the thing and I even get it working again. It even picks up the paper again so in a sense I repaired it. Only, I broke one tab and now the paper eject doesn't work. that is the paper falls out instead of gliding smoothly out onto the output bin.

One thing I learned is that a ten year old inkjet printer is dirty inside. With lots of small dried up drops of ink that fall out everywhere and when you try to brush them up you get nice black smears.
Another thing I learn is that inkjet ink printed on paper will wash off with water but the same ink printed on fingers, clothes, desktops or anywhere else doesn't wash off at all.

Translated form the tear-off calendar :

Men, says a famous actress, are exactly like teeth. It takes a while to get them. Once you have them they hurt and bother you at times. And when they are gone they leave an emptiness behind.

MM-cxxiii     Tuesday

2000-05-02

Mist all day, not dense but limiting, not a single ray of sun gets trough. No wonder then that the temperature hovers around 12°C all day.

We finished the performance adaptation. It provides somewhere between 30 and 50% improvement. Not enough really, performance improvements never are, but it is about the only way the performance can be improved without changing the functional design. Jan will be here tomorrow for testing it.
During the adaptations we did notice a few bugs that in Progress itself. Some of the performance increasing techniques that Progress consultants proposed don't work if the database is not a native Progress database. We are using an AS/400 database (DB2/400) so, after migrating some server based tables to the database the program began to behave erratically. Solving that took more time than the performance adaptation itself.

And I got two unplanned programs to be included in V9 (which is officially closed) immediately. That were to be maintenance programs on two files that, as far as I knew, were prototypes only. The files will almost certainly need changes before they can effectively be used. I didn't start them because the performance adaptation had higher priority.

In the news ?

Well nothing serious. On occasion of Labour Day yesterday most politicians and social organizations engaged in verbal battles and, hopefully, all the rhetoric remains just that. The general tenet was something like 'everybody should work less for more money and the state will provide free --everything-- for anybody who needs it'.

MM-cxxiv     Wednesday

2000-05-03

A rainy morning (at 12°C) starting of with a light drizzle at 6h00 gradually intensifying to a veritable torrent by 10h00 and then slacking off again. Although it remains somewhere between mist and drizzle the whole day.

Jan should have come for testing the performance stuff but he doesn't turn up (he calls instead). So we apply the adaptation everywhere without his approval. This applying does involve some unexpected changes. And a lot of keyboard wear.

To cool my fingers I visited all the daynoters for this week. Sorry, no time to pick up the missed notes from last week.

And Then I tackle (pickup, investigate, solve and test) the problem with the F14 on the additional order line detail screen. This was a misleading function because it got invoked from an order line but impacted the whole order. Yep, the function is disabled now. (prs-13???)

And I start the maintenance programs that Theo requested yesterday (prs13499). I got the objects reserved and the sources in place but no code written yet. That must wait till Friday

In the news.

France Telecom, the telephone "monopoly" in France had a bug in its computers. Half of Paris was cut off by this. People couldn't call out using regular phones. Of course if the normal phone doesn't work people grab their mobile phones. As a result the GSM network got overloaded and virtually broke down. The problem should be solved in the morning.

Dr. Keyboard has added links to his past notes, going back one and two years. His previous-year link sits under his previous day link, logical. His two-years-back link sits under his next-day link, logical? Not at all, intuitively it seems to point to his next-year page.

A Mail Tom rage seems to have struck the daynotes gang. I am not sure why but his e-mail address is poping up all over the place (unless it is a sort of DOS attack).

Found this opening on a LinuxWorld article ( www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-2000-05/lw-05-remedies.html ) about the MS trial.

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and then misapplying the wrong remedies."
-- Groucho Marx (1895-1977)

MM-cxxv     Thursday

2000-05-04

Mist and rain, nice combination, to start off the day (at 12C) but at noon the weather turns and becomes nice and sunny.

I took a day off for the inspection and maintenance of my car. My car must go to the inspection, each year after the fourth year (or after an accident) if it doesn't pass it has to be fixed and re-inspected. This inspection used to be a government service but it has been privatized with a government run complaints commission. Since the privatization blackmailing has all but disappeared but more cars are called back for re-inspection (incurs a second fee). Traditionally the inspection means a few hours queuing but this time I was the first one in. And I was out about ten minutes later, wow. And it (the car that is) requires a general maintenance (250.000KM) visit to the garage.
And that went without problems as well.
I had expected to be gone from half past seven to one or two o'clock. I got home at ten.

In the news.

The stock exchanges of London and Frankfurt will fuse to form a new single unit. It covers 53% of European transactions and will be second only to Wallstreet. NASDAC has a stake in the fusion and other European stock exchanges (Milan, ...) are expected to join as well.
The exchanges of Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam fused a few months ago to become the second biggest exchange in Europe. Between London and Frankfurt.

Harper, my main system is starting to misbehave.
Often when I close a program like Netscape or CuteHTML or Explorer the program will close seemingly normal but about a second later a GPF message for the just closed program will pop up. This used to happen once every few months but recently it is happening more often. Almost daily. I haven't lost data yet nor have I had problems with program setups but I don't feel comfortable about it.

Can processors develop BSE, or Altsheimer? Or is the disk suffering arthritis?

MM-cxxvi     Friday

2000-05-05

Misty morning but turning sunny, and it turns into a nice springy day.

It is a holiday in the Netherlands today, for them the war (WW2) ended on the fifth of May. This holiday means there is almost no trafic so commuting is a relaxing pleasure. It also means I am BOFH for the day. <G>

I have to do nothing as operator so I can work un-perturbed at the maintenance programs I started on Wednesday.

In the news

A DIY guy around here connected the water piping directly to the gas. Not only did he get a wet furnace but half the town got cut off from the gas supply. That's what I call Tom-style. If you do something then do it thorough.

All the newspapers have the Iloveyou virus on their front page, with varying and not all consistent comments (but not too far off the mark most of the time). RealSoft (my emloyer) and OCE (where I work) both got bitten yesterday (all problems solved by now). Being off, I did not notice it until this morning and, as I use Netscape as mail client I am more or less immune to script attacks. Netscape is too stupid to understand these things.

How many real love-letters will remain unopened and be deleted today?

MM-cxxvii     Saturday

2000-05-06

Just an itsy bitsy mist but no clouds and it turns into a really nice spring day with the temperature rising to 28°C. By evening clouds crop up and while we don't get rain some other parts of the country are inundated.

Shopping. First time I get to the new Masset shop. The same old stuff with the same old person, jus another (bigger) location. As is typical in a city center that is almost entirely made up of shops the concentration of shoppers periodically shifts from one are to another. Such a shift just happened so he had almost no visitors anymore and although his regular clients kept coming he did loose out on occasional visitors.

I ordered a new printer to replace my terminally ill Deskjet 500. The Deskjet 840C I'll get next week, may be a razor blade handle but it is relatively cheap and capable of printing colour. If I didn't want colour I would have gone for a laser but I intend to print photos with it. Not often but often enough.
The colour printing I did, up to now, was on a Canon BJC70. In its favour this is a portable printer. Less favourable are its speed and its quality. And the ink consumption. Being portable means only very small ink tanks can be installed, there is just enough colour ink to print one A4 sized photo, on a second page you are almost guaranteed to run out on one or more colours.

As the weather is rather enjoyable I remain outside, lazily gardening the whole afternoon.

Oeps, did anyone miss my Thursday and Friday notes?
I did post them but to the wrong directory. And I was too busy to check them out after posting.

MM-cxxviii     Sunday

2000-05-08

No mist and rather bright, even early in the morning. And by noon the heat is turned on, with the temperature rising over 30°C. By evening there are heavy thunder clouds drifting by but they don't stop here so it stays dry.

I did not go running. For one it would have been too hot. Which is no excuse. I have been missing some sleep the last few days so it would be a good way to recover a bit (and I didn't take a siesta yesterday). So I sleep an hour longer than usual.

Later, when Peter comes in we pack up our tools and go to Diest where Suzan is busy clearing out the old house of her aunt (which died last fall). We are busy there till quite late and I spend the rest of the day cleaning up and gardening..