The day got off to a wet start with drizzle and a cool 8C. Things dried out later although the sun was replaced often by threatening clouds.

I just got a problem from Germany. On a maintenance program you get a crash when adding the first record. Everything works normal afterwards. Just a slip of the keyboard.
It's not a big problem and once I knew what was going wrong it was easily fixed. While in the program I fixed another problem. More a usability thing than anything else

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Later I clean up some programs that I have left open in the test environment while they absolutely don't belong anymore. These are just leftovers from testing. It is rather difficult to debug a program if the source isn't available and once a program is shipped out the source is moved and renamed by the version management system. The easiest way to debug is often to take the program in test for maintenance and just recompile it. If the problem is not actually in the program but elsewhere (usually only in the users perception <g>) the program must be removed from Test.
I sometimes (read=almost always) forget this so I must clean out the system later.

 

At home I instruct my brother how he must use the film scanner. The main problem here is just that he wants me to explain things in stead of experimenting with the stuff himself. It is almost the same routine as scanning on the normal scanner so a single demonstration is enough. Of course with the Nikon Coolscan hanging off Timareen (AMD K6, 200MHz, 32MB) that takes a lot of time.

When I start out, at 6:15 there are a few holes in an otherwise complete and black cloud cover but by the time I arrive in Venlo, at 7:40 there are just a few clouds in a clear sky. the same transition occurs a few time throughout the day but it remains dry.

With the German problem finished and passed on to a higher level I can start (again) on the Free Of Charge program.
As I mentioned last Monday there are no formal or written specifications, just a "it must be possible to ..." and a "use this field for ..." indication in the Problem Reporting System. So now I am making up the design specifications while I am actually adapting code. In a sense that is fun to do but it is not at all helping my productivity figures.
Jan first got a Free Of Charge request from Belgium and he tackled it by making Ronny add a button to the screen. Later another opco (the French?) wanted to be able to track what orders were made FOC so he quickly changed to a free field in the transaction code file. It is obvious now that he didn't think about the whole process. Simply turning the price on all lines to zero will not cancel out the transport costs or invoice fees or quantity rebates. Nor is it clear that these have to be zeroed out.
What was that seven-P acronym?

In between I streamline my documentation. It is getting so big that I need a search mechanism. Of course I can't make that on company time.

 

My brother has been scanning in some photo negatives but it is taking far more time than he thought. Of course the scanner is on a slow and memory starved box and he is scanning at about 3500x2800x24 resolution. He asked if it was possible to hook up the scanner to his computer (400MHz Celeron with 64MB) but he doesn't have SCSI so that is a no-go. I wanted to give him the Nikon software so he can at least manipulate (ex rotate) the pictures but after searching for almost an hour I give up and send him off with the MGI FotoSuite SE that came with my camera.
That is probably better than the Nikon stuff as well.

Last week my posts were way to elaborate really. So now I am back to a readable size. (Until I get carried away again <G>

It rained while going to Venlo and it rained coming back from Venlo. in between it rained some more. Oh, there were a few dry moments in between. I think. All that rain means there was no sun so the temperature fluctuated between 12°C at 6:00 and 15°C at noon.
Summer 's definitively gone.

I produced a working adaptation for the Free Of Charge request and I build up a document (html) with some sort of specification for it. Of course there are still quite a lot of questions open but by actually posing them I just may get some answers to work with.

Ronny, who has bin running idle for some time now, started on a problem that Koen encountered. While trying to simulate it we run into a couple of new problems. Well they aren't new of course. It's just that nobody noticed them before (did I mention we have a highly qualified testing team?). The online validation simply never actually validates anything. Since late last year. And one of the validations is just plain wrong. Since somewhere in 1998.
Of course we didn't find the problem we were actually looking for.

 

At home there is a problem with the electricity circuits. We have six separate circuits (attic, basement, light ground floor, sockets ground floor, light 1st floor and sockets 1 floor) each with separate fuses. Some when in the morning, while my father was busy on his computer, half of the sockets on the ground floor died. No fuses were blown. And only the sockets in and going to the kitchen were down, the living room, TV room and office were fine.
I quickly made an extension cord with two male plugs and connected two sockets, one live and one death, both on the ground floor (same fuse). Now all the sockets are life again but of course this is not a long term solution. Somewhere between the switchboard and the kitchen we have a loose wire. When that makes contact no (for example when a train thunders by) we have the perfect short circuit. And hopefully only a blown fuse.
The electrician is warned (should come tomorrow evening) but I am sceptical about what he can do in an evening. If we have bad luck we may have to rewire the whole house and with the current cable all worked into concrete floors and brick walls that is not a quick job.

The girls got a new member. Check out Lynne.
Now I wonder, most of the daynotes have a 'most recent' link somewhere. Opposing that some of the netwiddows have a 'last posting'. Sound suspiciously similar to 'last post' <G>

It remained dry to day. Well I did count five or six drops on my way home but that could well have been a flight of mosquitoes passing overhead. Missing out on the rain doesn't mean it was sunny all day.

The specification document for the Free Of Charge change is done as far as I can do it and the programs are fixed up again. I even added comments in the code in places where I expect additional changes depending on how the questions are answered.

Together with Ronny I checked out some other problems in TeleSales. Mostly (but not entirely) due to Theo being over stretched Ronny has been without real work for a time but now a few problems passed down the line so he is back in full action. Which means he solves the problems much faster than they arrive.

And Koen is grumbling about access routines that don't work and about some language statements that don't work. He grumbles a lot as usual. And then he asks me questions which I answer, wrongly according to him (as if I created the programming language). Somewhat later while demonstrating the code to me I notice he calls the access routine with the wrong parameter. Auch, silence (for about ten minutes) <Grin> I am used to this type of action from him so I don't react to it. He does the same with Ronny and he does react on it.

 

The electrician came, saw and, well conquered. Sort of. The problem was some loose connection between the switch board and the kitchen. That was obvious. But it could be in one of the sockets or in one of the split boxes (set inside the walls and under the concrete floor). He found the lose wire in the second socket he opened. I could have done that searching as well but I had no inclination whatsoever to start crawling around opening and closing sockets in the dark yesterday evening.

I think I need a new keyboard, my left shift key only works if I press sideways on it. I am not a heavy typer like some so I seldom wear out a keyboard. This one for example is about 5 years old and that shift key is the first problem (my first keyboard on Stone, from 1991 still works flawlessly).

Again a grey, sunless but dry day. The temperature however is climbing again. O rather not sinking at night (14C).

I went back to the Free Of Charge program and actually finished it including the unspecified things. I found some indications in the TeleSales problem reports. Of course nothing was ever mentioned about this and the function didn't even exist in OMSI-3.
Now it all works. And there are specifications.

 

The CAI whines about not being able to wiretap as and when they want. Now if they sell most of their communications companies to foreign owned third parties the Americans could get rid of their eavesdropping agencies.

 

My brother wants a printer, with colour, and asked me to look out for one. I got a HP 840C ink jet printer recently and it works quite well. So I think about buying the same model for him. One advantage of having the same model is that I only have to stock one type of ink cartridge.
I tried to order the printer via the web-shop at Masset. I didn't get the order trough however. A first mistake was that I didn't want to enter a telephone number. I am never home to pick it up anyway. Of course this is a required item and not filling it in throws up a message that doesn't say which field was missing. going back the form is empty so you have to fill everything in again. Adding the (fake :-) phone number gets you past that hurdle.
I couldn't clear the next hurdle. After the first form you get a second one where you fill in the method of payment. I want to pay cash when I retreive the goods in the shop (I left the delivery address blank as indicated on the first form) but that is no option. Only via some sort of Yahoo payment or trough a bank (BBL) or via a credit card is possible. I want to use the credit card but I get rejected each time because the amount is to high. (6399.00 (=$160) while the message indicates a 15 digit field) .
I send in a mail about these problems. I will see him tomorrow in the shop anyway.

And I got a reply. To pass the hurdle you have to leave off the decimal point. Which makes the printer look a bit expensive (639900)! I think that is not entirely intuitive. ()

We're still saddled with warm nights (13°C). It remains dry but grey till about noon then it slowly becomes sunny and quite enjoyable, up to 27°C.

Shopping. The power supply still hasn't arrived. It is probably 'made in Taiwan' and coming on foot. He couldn't check on the expected delivery date because his NT box had locked him out of the world. Some firewall coding in NT had locked all the ports down and he didn't know how to unlock them. Just show that Windows NT can be made secure <g> . I confirmed the printer that I tried to order via the web, it should arrive next Wednesday so I can pick it up next weekend.

Catch up. After doing the dishes after lunch I sat dawn and .... woke up at around five. And I don't feel like having caught up enough yet.

Clear skies (with starts) at 6:00 but later mist rises up all over the place. By 7:30 we are in the midst of a local pea soup but by 9:00 all is clear again, building up for a warm day. Reaching 29°C.

16°C is way too hot for comfortable running. Certainly so with the bridges. I do get back home, trailing puddles of sweat.

I sort trough my diskettes and CD's looking for the Nikon drivers. While I discover lots of forgotten treasures the drivers remain well hidden. I need them to move the scanner over to another computer. The idea is to hook him up to Oswal, running Win98.

After washing up the dishes I do a deep clean of the kitchen. And I spent the rest of the afternoon mowing the lawn. The grass has been growing unchecked for about four weeks now because I only have time to cut it in the weekend and the last four weekends were basically wet. And I refuse to use the electric mower on wet grass.

I tried to install Caldera Linux on Caitlan some time ago. Whatever I tried nothing worked. That is I could get it loaded and running but once installed it would forget there was a floppy and CD drive in the box. Nah if Linux won't go I thought I could try Windows. The 98 version.
Nada. That doesn't even see the CD drive for installing, I never get beyond the DOS prompt from the boot disk.
It's back to the attic and my screwdriver set.