Grey and dry (and 14°C) in the morning. But for a change it doesn't become sunny, instead it begins to rain in the afternoon.

Theo is back from his holiday in Italy so we ease him back into work (put him on the deep side and give a gentle push :-)

And I lumber on on the trigger problem. I thought I saw a possibility to repeat the problem but a few hours testing later I am at a death end. So I retrace and try another tack.

 

In between I tried to install Corel Linux (from a free cover CD) on Yaku. Without success.
I tried a few versions of Caldera OpenLinux, a version of RedHat, now Corel all to no avail. Mind you it has probably nothing to do with Linux because I cannot install Windows on it either Neither Win95 not Win98, both distributions from Microsoft, want to talk to that box, the installation freezing up after loading the mouse driver. OTOH the hardware is working. I have installed and reinstalled OS/2 (V3 and 4) several times with nary a problem. And DOS (both V5 and 6 from Microsoft and V6 from DigitalResearch) work, even Win3.1 can be loaded.
Maybe I should try the old SlackWare distribution I have laying around. This doesn't have an automatic install routine so maybe I can actually get far enough in it, doing everything manually, to learn where the actual problem is. Of course, with Yaku in the office I cannot spend much time playing with it.

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Grey and raining, strongly, in the morning after a warm (15°C) night. From about 9h00 to 16h00 it is grey and dry and after that it is grey and raining again.

I am not making much headway on the trigger problem. Most alleys so far have come to a dead end. There are just a few programs left to check, if they don't hint to something I will have to go digging into the data in Belgium or Germany. And that will be looking only because it are production data bases.
Yea, data-mining means something different to different people.

Norway is going to implement TeleSales, Jan is there to set things up for them. Of course they get errors that we haven't seen yet. After chewing the problem some time Wilbert cannot swallow it and calls me for assistance. After which he leaves me to work on an authorisation problem on NT.
More than an hour log-gazing later I know what the problem is.
For a new order, default values are retreived from the AS/400 by calling a program there, passing the variable name. The PC of course uses ASCII characters forming the variable "C$OMI3-O5TRNT" and throws that towards the AS/400. There, being a good old IBM box, things don't work in ASCII but in EBCDIC, so every character is converted according to the code pages used. The dollar ($) in the name becomes an Angstrom (Å Å) for which of course no match is found in the program defined table. The big difficulty was in finding out what the dollar was transferred to. Because I was working remotely, via telnet and on my own screen I never saw the Å , all strange characters came out as blanks.
After trying, retrying, head banging and retrying again (and a some colour full language) I finally solved the problem. Of course this problem is going to strike in other places as well and the solution I pulled out of my hat is, at best, a stop gap measure.

 

I found a cover-CD with Mandrake (7.0) on it and tried that on Yaku. Again no luck with the automatic installation. This was however a 'full version' with a character based manual install available. I followed this all the way and I got the whole lot running. There was however no way to get X windows running with my screen/adapter combination. Later I rebooted (dual booting with the OS/2 boot manager still working so I got into OS/2 by default, closed down and rebooted again) and got all the way to the log-on prompt but with the keyboard as dead as a fish on the moon.
Sigh.

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Grey and raining, lightly, in the morning after a cool night (10°C). Again dry and gray from about 9h00 to 16h00 and after that it is grey and raining again. Raining hard. Easy, this is cut and paste weather.

I have been very busy doing ... not much of anything. Well I did continue research on the national-objects list. After the working of where and how all the pieces fitted together I asked Tom, from operations support, what I actually had to do. After some confusing e-mail's he comes over looks at the programs, thinks two minutes and says 'nothing'.
Yep all the research was actually not needed.

After raining all night it stops at around 7h00 but the day remains grey with low clouds. How low? Well starting at 0m (divide by 3 to get it in feet).

One of the files I made for V7.09 has to be changed. Easy but tedious job. How do you liven up a tedious job? Simply add some extra functionality (which is never asked and which has no impact on the users) that may make the program more interesting and easier to reuse. Bright idea.
Of course this meddling breaks the program in interesting ways.

And another file has to be prepared for use in TeleSales which means all the fields must renamed

 

I just tried to install X windows on Stone. Everything seems to install normal but when I start X windows the mouse dies. It is not hardware because under Win, on the same box it works.

Stone ?? That is my old 386/40 full tower box with a giant 200MB disk and 8 MB of RAM.
X-windows?? Well, sort of. I am running DR DOS-6 on it, with Win3.1 installed and now I installed Quarterdeck DESQview/X. When I originally installed that, in 1992, it worked. The only thing that has changed and that could have an influence is that I am now using a switch box to connect my mouse/keyboard and screen. I am going to try it without that switch.
The main reason I keep that box is sentimental, it was the first computer I owned. I don't actually use it much but I have to switch it on about once a month to prevent the hard disk from 'sticking'.

How often do I have to repeat this? Grey and raining in the morning, at 14°C. Followed by more greyness and more raining interspersed with grey and dry spells. And one sunny moment, from 11h59 till 12h10.

Shopping. I brought back some interesting hardware. Well, a 10Gig disk and a 500MHz AMD chip are not really interesting. What is however is that I asked the slowest chip and smallest disk he had. I had expected to get a 300MHz AMD and a 2Gig disk or something in that range. So even with the smallest and slowest components on offer you can build a box that is more than adequate for standard office use. I also asked for an AT style main board and some memory. The smallest memory modules available were 32Meg SIMMs but you need two of them pushing the price up over a single 64Meg DIMM.
Once home I noticed I got an ATX main board iso an AT one and I want it for an upgrade of an old AT box. I'll swap it next week.

 

Later, after dinner and doing the dishes I make an apple pie. This is the first time I make a pie on my own, I used to stand by and lend a hand when my grandmother made them so I remember the basics. Only that was more than 25 years ago.
I do have good kitchen instincts however so the end result is almost a success. The only mistake is the bottom, being too thin. Because I didn't have enough apples I did split up and make one apple pie and one apricot pie. Both delicious so we eat too much.

It rained tonight but the day itself is dry (but still grey of course), the pavement remains wet till evening though.

It is 11°C so a good temperature for running.

Most of the day is spent on fumbling with a new box, cobbled together from old spares and a new processor (AMD K6/500). The rest of the day is lost in reading and shifting stacks of paper and stuff around.