An overcast and warm night at 17°C turning into an overcast and not so warm day. With a few sunny spells and the overcastting clouds are silvery, not grey. Overcast but not downcast.

Jan wants to use a reserved field in a file (TT). This means that I should change the field description in the file and that means I have to recompile all the programs that use that file in anyway. And then a few programs must be changed to handle the newly used field. There were three fields still free to use according to their description. After checking the programs I notice that the first of these fields is actually used but the description was not changed accordingly. No doubt because it was too much of a hassle, it is after all a lot of work and the actual description is not effectively used anywhere in the programs.
Apart from work on the AS/400 (for me) it also requires a rebuild of the synchronization schema for TeleSales which is not only a lot of work but tricky as well.

 

In stead of sorting trough a stack of paper cluttering my desk (my keyboard is balancing almost an inch above the actual desk) as I intended I worked on my calendar.

The days are shortening markedly. The sky straight above is a dark bluish indigo when I get up. And mist is hiding the horizon which should be a dark red. It's 11°C thanks to the open sky and thanks to the sun driving away the mist we have an open sky after 9:00 as well.

During my search for the trigger file problem I find a bug in the invoicing program. Last year and this year we have been plagued by duplicate record in the statistics file. After searching form more than a man month I finally found, and solved, the problem. Now I found a potential second source for the problem.
Before an invoice is made the invoice must be calculated. the invoice program checks in the trigger file for the calculation flag, if the flag is down, no invoice is made. If the flag is not down the invoice is made.
When the trigger isn't found the flag is not down and the invoice is made.
This is not correct of course because no trigger means nothing has been calculated (or, even worse the invoice has already been completed).
This could lead to duplicate statistics (and other nastiness) but until now nothing has actually gone wrong. That is been reported as such.

And I weeded some more in the PRS.

And rather late (about 17:40) Robert from Belgium calls about the correction for the archived Val problem I solved a few weeks back. He asks for instructions (just do what is described as solution in the problem report. Duh ) and then ask how he can check if the correction program worked as it should. That last is tricky. To be honest I don't know the answer. because I don't know how the problem records actually entered the system. I can only suggest to check the orders and related invoices before and after the correction.
Right he says. and mails me a user profile and password so that I can check.
Tomorrow.

Cool, hot, cool, hot nights. Of course some (hello, Matt) will not call a night at 17°C hot but for me everything above 15°C at night is too hot for comfort. The rest of the day was nice. Cloudy but not grey.

I spent most of the day losing time checking the results of the correction program that ran in Belgium. The remote connection is however very temperamental, sometimes I get nice and reasonably fast responses but sometimes I have to wait for minutes (plural) between commands. Trying to scroll down trough a report that way is really a concentration breaker, By the time I reach the bottom I sometimes forgot what I was looking for.
It takes so much time that I don't do any other real work.

And for some reason I don't get any internet connection in the afternoon. That is no surfing and no external mail.

 

Home, quite late, I went to help my brother with the new greenhouse. He is working on the foundations and he needed to get a few steel bars in the garden. They are not too heavy but to reach the garden they must pass trough the house and being about 5m long that is rather difficult.
Passing trough the hall, up the stair, trough the widows and then the acrobatic part over the roof of the bathroom. For that part one man, me, has to balance the bar, holding only one end while keeping the other off the roof while the other man, Peter, goes into the garden climbs up a small ladder reaching up to get a grip, swing the side the first man releases to the side and down. As I said each bar weighs about 20Kg which is not too much to carry but holding only one end makes it feel much heavier, especially when the other end must be maneuvered carefully.

A welcome change after sitting on my lazy ass behind a screen all day :-)

And we have a cool night again, 11°C and the same cloudy but nice day.

I updated the documentation a bit, folding the finished into the rest producing a more or less homogenous whole.

The rest of my time is taken up by helping Ronny find some new and elusive problems in TeleSales. For example one where TOS2000 and TeleSales presented different results about the same data. Checking the same in OMSI-3 proves TeleSales wrong. For the consumption's the key is composed of five fields (year, order-address, item, delivery-address and invoice-address) In TeleSales only the first three were used. So, more work for Ronny.
The big issue, in this case, is that the error has been present in TeleSales since the first release and that it is an error that is easily spotted if TeleSales and OMSI-3 are compared and yet none of the testers, neither Jan nor Peter nor any of the opco's ever noticed
He was not happy today with several of these errors reported and then some more problematic stuff where we now know what is wrong but cannot do anything because the error is in the language itself. And to get that fixed you need to present a watertight case using the provided sample database from Progress. That is a big Bother.

 

My *nix knowledge needs some boost.

I noted some time back that I finally got Mandrake running on Yaku. I did get a lot of errors during the install and I cannot get X running. I did the install just to see if I got it up on Yaku, he has been refusing everything except DOS and OS/2. No Windows (not even Win3.1 on DOS, the Win-box in OS/2 won't start either) neither any of the Caldera Linux versions.

So now I have Mandrake (7.0) running and nothing to do with the box, it is sitting under my desk running idle. So I logged in and typed vi without filename. That is the first time I start vi without X. Ok looks a bit bare so I wil quit and try with a file. Heu .... how do I get out?
I haven't got a manual here so I find myself in the swimming pool, deep end, I don't know how to swim and I don't find a ladder to get out. I notice a sort of welcome screen with a few options (q for exit, help for help etc.) so I try q and Q and ctrl-q and all other expectable combinations. All to no avail. After a while I get ready to ctrl+alt+del my way out. But hey, this looks and feels like DOS but it isn't, this is UNIX and you don't do a three finger salute if you haven't locked up the whole box (in which case you need the reset button anyway). So alt+F2 into another session. start vi to see what that welcome screen showed. Ha, just type q and enter. But that only works to close the welcome screen. Damn, two sessions locked up.
Alt+F3 third try, good try. Sanity kicks in and I try man vi and finally find I should use :qa! to get out of vi.
And, after searching for the ! key (I am using a FR keyboard but vi treats it as a BE keyboard) I do get out.

This is exactly the kind of situation novice users encounter and cannot get out of.
If the installation goes well they get a graphical desktop where things look more or less familiar, there are icons and menus and things work more or less as expected. There are after all not that many differences in a WIMP environment.
If the installation chokes somewhere the novice user will choke as well. Digging up old DOS reflexes, which can only be done by older people, Ronny for example never actually worked in DOS, is not going to help much. Even some rudimentary UNIX knowledge is just of limited help. For example in Yaku I haven't seen a directory listing. DIR doesn't work of course but typing li doesn't do anything either while typing man li does provide the man pages.
And the manuals provided on disk or in the shrink wrap are no use either. Most they will explain the installation assuming everything goes right with a footnote about reading such or such log file when things don't work as expected. I haven't seen a manual that provides the command to read a log file. In DOS you do a type xxx.log but in UNIX, you're free to guess.

I have so far only done some installation and no deeper work. Time to pick up some manuals and start to become more seriously involved I guess.

A bit hazy but no mist in the morning (12°C) and almost no clouds all day. So we finally have a good summers day with lots of sun and mercury hitting the lower thirties.

Shopping. The AT mobo hasn't arrived yet so I only return with a spare ink cartridge for the HP 840c printer. With the old HP DeskJet 500 I typically used up one cartridge a year but I made sure I always had a spare one around. At the cost of these cartridges I will have paid more for ink then for the printer in about 3 or 4 years. The old DeskJet did cost about 20 times as mush as a cartridge and I consumed eleven cartridges over its total life of ten years.
The rest of the shopping was for (yet more) clothes and (yet more) food.

The pies I made last week were not entirely cooled by the time we ate them so today I make them just before lunch, giving them a few hours extra too cool down.
The result is that I get lunch ready half an hour later than usual. We have pork roast with fresh haricots (harvested about 10 minutes before cooking) and potatoes served with an delicious but nondescript sauce (pick out the roast, cast a glass of wine in the casserole, add a bit of garlic, ginger, basil and flour, hey presto). Of course I eat to much.

The apricot pie looks great and tastes good. The cherry pie doesn't look good at all, the bottom stuck to the pie form and fell out. After some surgery I get all the pieces in their right place and tough the sight isn't what it should be the taste is just gorgeous.

It is hot and sunny so perfect for playing havoc in the garden. I planted 112 leeks while my father planted some salad.

Then Its off to help my brother on the foundation for his green house.

 

No why do I feel tired tonight?

Nice dry and warm in the morning. Days are shortening because when I start out running the sun is still down. Once the sun gets up the temperature climbs steadily from 12°C at six to well over 35°C in the afternoon.

Did I say nice and warm in the morning? Yea, just what I don't like for running, I prefer cold or wet weather.

When it gets too hot for gardening I retreat inside but not to the attic. There it is about 5° warmer than outside (it used to be 10° warmer before I got the blinds) so definitively too hot to sit behind a screen.

Later I help out my brother a bit with the fence he is putting up along the greenhouse. I am playing mule, shifting slabs of concrete and sacks of sand and holding up the fence till he gets it bolted down, and such.