Its grey and cold, with no sunny breaks, real October weather. The only improvement is the lack of rain, Apart from a little drizzle in the morning it remains dry all day.

I solve the invoice address problem from Friday. And catch Jan actually testing. (I uploaded the wrong version of the program and he caught it :-). Later he 'test' it over my shoulder and lets me put the problem report in 'accepted' status.
After that I tackle a problem on which I started more than a month ago. Surprise, I am a bit behind on the planned schedule.

While speaking of Jan. I mentioned that I am interested in all sorts of hardware. Now he comes around with an old Amstrad laptop. He is willing to part from it but I have to name a price.
It is an i386SX/40 notebook, with 1MB of RAM and a 120MB harddisk. It has a greyscale (4 or 8 bit) VGA screen. He has Win3.1 installed and demonstrated it so the thing is working. Only the battery is non functional. Now what is it worth?
My brother could use it as a trade up from is aging i286 Toshiba but I guess he is more interested in the Fujitsu (AMD K2/350, etc.). I see only one reason why he would go for it and that is because he leaves the notebook in the pilot residence when he is at see or home. It is there unguarded and unlocked so it could be stolen. Everybody knows there are no locks there so nobody leaves valuables hanging around so the chance of theft is low, but still.
If it were free I wouldn't hesitate at all, but Jan is too good a sales man to let go of things for free, even though he doesn't use them.

 

And I still cannot reach my site for updates. (Wake me up if you can.)

I noticed Masset about this yesterday and I got a reply today. He asked if I had replied to the mail from NSI. What mail? While asking that I a mail from NSI drops in. When I got to actually handling that mail about an hour later, I had a confirmation reply from NSI stacked on top of the original. How so confirmation, I haven't replied yet!
Hah, another mail from Masset, in between the two NSI mails (but dropped into another folder) mentions that he did answer to NSI and that I only had to handle the domains at Joker because he doesn't know the password. That is called service I guess.
Of course I don't remember my password and I don't find the note with it (what else are sticky notes for?). Luckily (or not, depents on your point of view) Joker has a service where you can request the password. You ask the password for a certain domain and it is sent via (unencrypted) e-mail to either the owner or the tech-contact of that domain, not to the requester.
So now the DNS change should slip around the web. And I am going to change passwords.

Just apply some patiens.

The temperature stays low but the sun is back, only struggling with the odd high cloud. Dry all day.

The Ausies, down under, found a problem in the conditions program.
It is possible to enter negative values. Just like in normal accounting all the values should be positive with a separate indication to distinguish discounts from levies. The biggest problem is that the user can't see that he entered a negative value, the sign isn't displayed. Hmm, needs some adaptation.
Apart from receiving, checking and solving a problem from Australia I spend most of the day recasting and fleshing out documentation. I have got the style and structure down pat. Just a lot of holes to plug.

 

My site is still not back alive. I am wondering how long a normal address change requires to trickle down. Of course now the extra effort in keeping this mirror polished is paying off.

Every time someone asked the son of a famous doctor for his name he answered:
'I am the son of doctor Seymoens.'
One day his mother said
'Boy, why don't you just say "I am Michael Seymoens"? That is a lot simpler, isn't it.'
The other day he met someone who asked :
'Hey, aren't you the son of doctor Seymoens?'
Unto which the kid replied:
'Well, until yesterday I believed that too. But then my mom said it wasn't so ... '

Lots of drizzle in the morning and back to greyness all round. But most of the day stays dry.

I had to redo the change for the Australians. There were two options for solving it. Ether you throw up an error and wait till the user corrects his fault or you correct the error without stopping the user. I used the second and Jan wants the first.
He is the boss, so ...

 

Delphi will work on Linux. I started dabbling in programming with Basic on a Comodore64 but once I got to University I got into coding seriously with Turbo Pascal (version 2.1 and up) on PCs (DOS 2.2 from Olivetti). I have been letting my Pascal skills slip these last years but I think I am going to get into it again on Linux.

And my site(s) are resurrected. It actually took about three days for the DNS change to travel around the world and back.
Well, there is a chance that you can visit the regular site but I still cannot post. the DNS cache in Venlo got updated but I cannot post from the office. And the DNS cache at Freegates (or used by ..) is not updated so I cannot post from home. Bother (or is that a piffle?)

And then the mail server at Mailbank has a problem with his Raid array so I cannot get at my mail anymore either.

It is, at 13°C, grey and hazy, almost misty for the better part of the morning. Later it becomes dry and sunny, even warm.

About a month ago Jan reported the problem with the archived VAL orders. That got solved and ready for distribution. At the same time he also reported a problem with the Trigger file. The trigger file contains a list of orders (order numbers) with flags indicating their position in the process from shipping to invoicing. The orders enter the file the moment they are shipped by logistics and are deleted after they are accounted for in the statistics file. The lifetime of records varies from a few hours to a month.
That is theory. Jan found records surviving in the wild for more than a year. On our own system we don't see this type of records but some opco's, Belgium and especially Germany, have loads of them.
I started investigating the whole environment (yep Bob, turning environmentalist again:) in which this file is used and abused. It is a tricky problem again because we cannot duplicate it on our own system.

 

There is progress. I can see my own domain and I can get mail trough it but uploading still doesn't go.

Apart from not being sunny the day is nice. Not too warm nor too cold (for me) and dry.

Shopping. Mostly a food gathering thing but I do stumble on the Caldera 2.4 shrink wrap and pick it up.

My brother relocated a deep freezer. Well I helped relocate it because these things are not made for portability. Of course it first had to be emptied, shifting stuff over into another freezer. I went over a few times because in between the moves things had to thaw and re-freeze.

And now I just fired up the barbecue for baking a good slab of sheep. I am using a real charcoal one so I wil have to sit close by. Unless you invite people from the fire brigade it is not a good idea to let it go unattended and unlike a gas powered one you cannot switch it off for a moment.

Again not sunny in the morning but dry and warm. Later the sun comes out but never long enough to get the temperature soaring.

A bit warm for running but not problematic. Just a cold shower later and I am back alive.

I did about the same things as yesterday. (moving the spare freezer back, scanning in a few extra pictures for Matine, mow the lawn and do a few other garden chores, ...)

Minus the sheep, which by the way was delicious, that is.
Today I chop some cow parts into a sweet-sour sauce and serve it with rice dry cooked with a bit of onions and a pinch of ginger. Equally delicious.