Nice dry and warm in the morning, well a bit too warm at 20°C. The day itself is less hot than yesterday but humidity is up. In the evening we get rain, all five drops of it.

I find no way to explain the extra records in the trigger file. So I log on to the Belgian system and start looking for localized versions of our trigger handling programs. But find none. So I go looking for other programs that might interact with the trigger file. And find nothing either.
So there I am, a day lost and not getting closer.

Still too hot at night with a few bursts of light rain, hardly enough to moisten the soil but the top temperatures are down to the middle twenties.

We have a holiday in Belgium (Ascension of Marry) so I stay home. That is one advantage of working out of the country. We have free on Belgian holidays because we work for a Belgian firm, but we also are free on Dutch holidays because we are employed at a Dutch company.

I have been busy almost the whole day clearing out some space and moving Caitlan to my main desk (still in the bedroom). And I installed Linux (Caldera eDesktop 2.4) on it.

That took the whole evening. I had the installation lock up three times. The main reason though was that I read a book (with Beethoven's 7th on the background) while installing so I paid not much attention when I had to enter things. I think everything works.
I am not sure because it is not on a network and I have no speakers connected all the rest seems to work.

I have got a KVM with serial mouse and AT keyboard but no sound pass trough. A cursory search in t'net didn't turn up any. I know KVM switches are intended to hook multiple servers up to one Keyboard-Video-Mouse and servers typically don't need sound. But there must bee enough people using these switches on multiple workstations to find some with sound support. Maybe I should wait and check Bobs hardware book

It's cooling down a bit (12°C) and most of the day looks like a typical Belgian summer : comfortably warm, lots of clouds with sunny breaks and a few light showers.

At work I have a fairly standard day as well. Or rather a quite day with no urgent calls and time to check some things out.

OMSI-3 is the old order entry system on the AS/400. Fully character terminal based so not at all 'modern'. It is efficient and quite performant as well but in this day and age it is definitively passé. Which is why TeleSales was developed. Originally TeleSales was a subset of the order entry program developed in Progress. From a fast and efficient subset it has grown to a full replacement for the order entry (losing its performance on the way). Of course today everything must be web based and e-named so an internet program was designed (well 'designed' (comment: censored) ... and became TOS2000. That is still being build.
So, now we are on the brink of having three order entry systems. And now it seems that all three use different business rules to determine which products can be ordered. As I said that is "design". On corporate scale.
Of course now, after the 'design' and when the implementation is all but finished the business rules must be determined.
And BTW OCE is also working on a SAP implementation so in a few years time we have yet another order entry system.

And I make a change to the transaction type file (well, to the maintenance program thereof). I should have done so before but I misinterpreted the problem report.

 

And I find a slightly disturbing inconsistency in the Open Linux installation. I did the install accepting all the defaults, except for the screen where I selected the LG 500LC from the list (being quite surprised to find my desktop LCD listed). I made two users, col and sjon. When I use a terminal windows (bash shell) I can only see the user directory for the user I logged on with. As it should, col cannot access the /root/sjon directory. When however I go via the "explorer" (Kfm ?) I can look into the directory for the other user.
Doesn't look good.

Dry and warm (14°C) in the morning with just enough and the right kind of clouds to show off in long red bands while the sun laboriously climbs over the horizon. And it stays that way until after 20:00 when a slow rain descends.

Theo had a discussion planned in the morning about passing over the TOS2000 system from the Progress people to Ronny and me. This should be done somewhere in September.
Sasha, one of the developers from Progress doing the TOS2000 programming (lead developer actually) had a small problem so we had to go and help him on a bit. Ronny has been doing that all week but this time he needed me because the problem seemed to lay on the AS/400 side. Well it wasn't but logging the communication coming on the AS/400 we found the problem. Something with a before and an after transaction trigger. A quick and dirty solution was possible but Q'n D solutions have a habit to bite back later and later could be when the current developers were gone so that we would have to solve it we pushed for a good definitive solution.
And we got that, at the cost of extra work for Sasha. <eG>

Afterwards (afternoon) we had the planned discussion. Which did not lead to a conclusion but it did cause Theo to notice some upcoming problems that were not (yet) on his horizon.

And then, to stay in style, the Belgians pulled another stint.
During week 25 to 29 I worked on a correction program for the problem with archived orders in status VAL. A very tricky program to test. I also adapted the actual archiving program to prevent the problem from recurring.
The danger was that the new archiving program, when run before the correction program would irrevocably destroy the records needing correction. Upon delivery I added a description of how the programs should be used, explicitly stating (twice) that the correction program had to be run before installing and using the corrected archiving program. Later the operator, Robert, from Belgium called and I walked him trough the process on a copied set of data. All went well.
Now guess what they did? On they active production database.
Ha, I see, nobody needs a second guess.
So now they lost their data and there is no way to get it back without destroying several days worth of work.

It's like giving someone a hand grenade with the instruction, in 24 point Arial, to 'pull out the pin and throw the grenade'. And then seeing them throwing the pin.

It started to rain yesterday evening and it continued to do so till early afternoon. At times it was only drizzling. Now its cool and dry.

Normally, on Saturday I sleep in till about 8:00. Because Suzan isn't home however I had to get up at 6:00 so I had a few extra time for cleaning up the kitchen.

Shopping. The baby-AT main board has arrived so I pick that up along with a 64MB DIMM and a floppy drive. I should have picked up a CD drive as well but forgot.
The rest of my shopping only netted food and clothes.

Shopping was a bit short skirted because I had to prepare lunch and pickup my father again from hospital.
Lunch was steak with haricots, fresh from the garden, and young potatoes, dug up yesterday. Decorated with a good pepper sauce and washed down with a good Australian red wine. And finished off by a ... long siesta.
BTW on Saturday and Sunday Lunch is the main meal here.