A nice dry and warm (about 15°C) morning though the roads are still wet. And after a beautiful sunrise the rest of the day stays dry. Till about 21:00 when my brother arrives for moving out the old television, of course that's when it starts to rain.

A fairly uneventful day at work so I can spend time at researching the usage of the life cycle indicator for items in the OMSI-3 programs. It seems the indicator is not interpreted in the same way in all the order generating programs. Now could that be because there are no documented business rules?
Yeah, what is the problem, we are only using that field for about 8 years. Well, yes, maybe it is time to come up with business rules now, after all we still need it for 3 or 4 years before the SAP system is ready to take over.

I expected a call from Belgium but now it appears that the sysop is on holiday. So probably nobody knows what went wrong or even what was done and not done. the result is that their lost orders will remain lost. Probably indefinite.

 

I stopped to maintain my daily pages. As I mentioned some time ago they were taking too much space and I was keeping the week notes running as well resulting in double postings. The amount of work for me doesn't really change because the only extra work was a copy and adapt of the day page to show a next-day and a cut and paste from the week page to the actual day page. Now I do a copy from the week page to the redirector. the only gain is the copy and adapt of the day page.
By copying the daily content to the redirect page I accommodate those browsers that don't support (or switched off) redirecting.

Again dry but it is much cooler (10°C) and quite misty with visibility of less than 100m at places. By the time I reach Venlo (7:30) the sun is piercing trough for a nice warm day.

I almost finish my Item Life cycle investigations in OMSI-3.

Somehow I broke Outlook (the 97 version) without doing anything. I normally use Netscape as mail client but I have to start Outlook a few times a week too clean up mail and to organize my 'job mail'. I delete all the personal mail from Outlook but keep it in Netscape and vise versa. This afternoon I tried to start Outlook and I got a 'mail 32 blablabla is corrupt' message with the proposed solution is to reinstall Outlook. Which I cannot (and if I could I wouldn't be allowed to) do myself.
The strange thing is that I did not install or change anything this week nor last week. Must bee the moon.

 

My floppy (and CD ROM) problem on Caitlan are probably hardware related. During a reinstall (after scrubbing the hard disk using a DOS boot diskette) I noticed that after the Loading and Booting Kernel messages the installation takes a few seconds while "Mounting modules Floppy" and gives up (status "skip") going on to probing for PCI and skipping that as well. On the probing SCSI the status turns "none" and there is indeed no SCSI cards installed.
The CD ROM is an old Optics 12x drive and when I set the BIOS to boot from CDROM,C,SCSI, I get a boot failure on the CD ROM.
So either the hardware is crap (could be because the floppy and CD and network card come from my pile of "spares") or the hardware detection in the Caldera eDesktop 2.4 is not up to snuff. I'll try another distro next weekend.

I like this weather no end. Cool nights and warm days, 9 and 23°C today, without sweltering heat nor rain. With some mist in the morning and just the artistic cloud or two. Only sorry that I must stay in the office all day and, with the shortening days it is turning dark when I finish the dishes in the evening.

In Belgium they often give away supplies free of charge. Of course 'free of charge' is not a specific option so to actually get it all the prices on the order must be cleared, set to zero, and the price-source-code must be set to 'manual price'. This is a bit tedious so they asked a simpler method for doing that, something single click (© Amazon:) like.
And they got it.
Now the French also give a lot of supplies away (the free beer type of business ye know). They were used to do that via a special transaction code. So mow we must make that possible as well. I just started on it but this must be done carefully because the transaction types are used for quite a lot of things.
Now don't ask why Jan or Pieter didn't come up with that transaction code method for the Belgians in the first place. Now we have two unrelated methods to do the same and no way to reliably trace back all the free of charge orders. It would be best to remove the original solution again but of course you never remove features.
You only add.

My Outlook is fixed again. Someone from IS-GA came around, looked at the message, popped in a floppy and copied the mail32.dll over. That fixed it. I was in mind of trying that myself but you never know what actually is hiding behind those error messages and, hey it is their job.

And then, in the afternoon we get an explanation from Jean Piere Buuron (Jempy) one of the TOS teamsters, on how the WebSpeed (™) server works and what procedure is used by them. Not exiting but clearly explained with just enough detail to understand but not overwhelm us. We have to take over the project in a few weeks time so it is about time to get to learn the principles and the tools used.
Later (next week?) we should get some explanations of how and where they implemented the whole lot.

 

I said I loved this weather. Did I mention that mosquitoes also love it?

Again the sun is late, and blushes a deep red. Afterwards she quickly burns away the mist

I got some work done on the Free Of Charge adaptation for OMSI-3. The transaction code file is something of a catch-all so the adaptations, while quite easy at first sight, are just a bit less so in reality. Surprising, neh?
With luck (good or bad still to be decided) I can do the change in TeleSales as well.

Koen is changing some things in the address related part of TeleSales. Koen did build the original (AS/400) address modules and still maintains them so he is the natural person to maintain the corresponding TeleSales part. There is however a small () problem. For a start he hasn't worked in the Progress environment for over two years, actually he was only involved in the pilot stage). On top Koen is used to do the things just 'his' way. And 'his' way is the only good way. On top of that he doesn't like the version management tools. And he uses 'his' programming standards, which happen to be different from the standards used up to now. And every time he sees something he doesn't like he says so.
Ronny tries to explain things but Koen doesn't listen. And Ronny feels each and every comment as a personal attack. To which he reacts a bit agressively.
And poor Theo is trying to calm things down.

Cool night, misty mornin and the sun is ashamed again. Like yesterday the mist is frightened away by the sun and the day soon becomes joyfully sunny. Later in the afternoon high clouds dim the brightness a bit.

The boys from MSCC (Microsoft Competence Center (yes I know it can't be) ) need to fill up the 'Catalog'.
As things go now they transfer data from the OPRS system () to our product tables (PT). The data is generated in Venlo (oprs) but the local operating companies maintain (=change, delete and add) it later. The Catalog can be filled from ORPS but the local changes must get into it as well.
They use an XML file for passing the data but they want to know what we can provide as input from our product files. The product files are owned by logistics (OLI), I work on sales. So guess who can lookup what must be passed?
Right.

And then I go on preparing a resume on the life-cycle codes as used in OMSI-3. Theo needs that for a meeting on Monday.

 

Dinner is baked haddock with potatoes and a mushroom-and-herbs sauce. Which goes down well with a bottle of cider.

A summer day as it should be, starting off relative cool (12°C) but sunny and warm later on. The predicted rain and thunder doesn't materialize.

Suzan still isn't back so I get up at 5:45 , missing my sleep-in again.

Shopping. First to the barber who eventually finds some hairs to cut. I go early (8:00) to miss out on the queuing. Most other shops only open up between nine and ten so I wile my time strolling trough town. And I finally return without computer stuff.

In between the preparations for lunch (haricots and steak with small fresh potatoes (about 20 potatoes for 300 grams)) I lend a hand to my brother who has painted the gate to the garage and is reassembling the lot again.

And later I go over to his place to help stabilize the soil, mixing in cement to produce a sort of dry concrete mix, for foundations for his greenhouse.

A summer day as we usually have around here. It rained, slowly, all night and with a few interruptions up to the early afternoon. Then there are just a few breaks with the sun peeping trough.

Running. While it rained all night and the best part of the morning it did not rain while I ran. At 16°C I would really have loved some water cooling.

I spend most of the day lazily cleaning the kitchen, the tiled walls do need it. While I don't really like it I don't hate it either. And I am making sure it is done right without tiring myself :-) .

Later I pop open Caitlan and replace the floppy and try the Caldera install again. To no avail, I keep getting "No kernel driver for system auto available". A few lost hours later I have swapped almost all components without success. The frustrating thing is that, apart from the floppy and CD ROM everything works and the installation itself does recognize both of them. The problem only crops up on the first reboot.
Time to fish up another CD, lets see, hmm, on which pile did I drop the Mandrake disk? Or maybe I should try Caldera 2.2 or 2.3 and later try an upgrad. ...