Dry and grey (and 10C) in the morning turning sunny and windy in the afternoon. Not bad.

I got a day off ... to go to the dentist and have my car serviced. Nothing special, routine maintenance at 270000km for the car and routine maintenance for the teeth.

I make pizzas for lunch and enough remains to serve dinner as well. ps When I am home lunch is the main warm meal here. This time the dough works out perfect and the topping gets up to that same level. With a bottle of good Italian red. Bonisimo.

Later I go helping my brother some more. Shifting 75 flagstones and another 500 kg of sand cement and concrete. Something is infecting daynoters, Tom is playing with concrete (demolition) and now I am playing with concrete as well (construction).
Both back and nail breaking <G>

Even though we have sun all day it's not a particularly sunny day. Quite nice actually.

I had a day of yesterday, and the office hasn't crumpled to ruins. So, I am not indispensable. Sigh <G>

I picked up the Free Of Charge modification again. I had to drop it to get the code page problem solved. It basically was finished so I only had to clean up the code a bit, test it (and solve a minor bug) and transfer it to the System test environment.
And handle the administrative side of this (updating the PRS).

While I was checking the PRS for the Code page stuff Theo threw me a curve. Sometime ago I had to check out what fields should be used for the maintenance of the Web Catalogue. So I did and the issue got pushed back. Now that project resurfaced. With a deadline set on Friday. That is next Friday. So I start checking an existing program that uses XML. Somewhat later Theo comes back with some questions and some new points. The problem is that we don't actually know how we are going to communicate with the catalogue application. We could use GET and PUT instructions (TCP) or we could use FTP. Or we could use something else entirely.
So now I know the XML layout I have to produce and I have a deadline but no protocol or transfer method yet. We will find out tomorrow. Maybe.

And Theo hands me a fax from Belgium where they have a wrong warehouse printed on a return note. The printing program is a local function, even one where we don't have a template program, so if it is wrong it is their responsibility. Of course if they simply print what is in the database it could be a bug in the order entry program so I check out that first (after requesting a new password on the Belgian system).
That is an in-between that will probably rear its head again tomorrow or the day after.

 

The back channel discussion about Daynote member requirements has run its course and no real actions will be taken. Tom is preparing an extra page for the Daynotes site though. The main and indeed only real requirement is communication. And grinning.

It rained today. Morning, noon and evening. Not hard as predicted but steady with only a few shorts breaks. Even during the breaks it remained grey. Until the evening, when the sun actually peeked underneath the clouds.

I started a new program, and finished the main procedures of it, for building the XML file. While it usually is fun starting something new there are a few problems involved with this project. Yes I know the dead line on Friday but that is not the biggest problem. Mainly it is not entirely decided how things will work nor how they will be organised. We did have a meeting with Sandri this morning to see what and how we could use an FTP module from his project. It seems to be easy with a few snakes lurking in there. For example you can specify a filename up to 10 characters and a path up to 25, which is not enough for us; the receiving side (Catalog) is set up to use automatically generated filenames (date and time in it) of 20 character and they initially refuse to change that. That sort of snake. (Yep the type our American friends call Politics:-).
Oh and by the way, I must build an XML file but I don't speak XML (yet) and I don't have the DTD (Document type definition or something like that). But hey, I am the only one at work with a personal web site so I must be an Web wizard.
Well I made a good start and with luck I get far enough tomorrow to have something working to present.

 

At home I found the Nikon driver CD for the dia scanner (a Nikon CoolScan II) so I disconnected it from Viderian (my fathers box) and connected it to the Advansys card in Oswal. There are two reasons for moving it. First, Oswal is located in the living room, just opposite of the kitchen door. The kitchen is the only room in the house where smoking is allowed mainly because otherwise the curtains and walls turn brown too soon. And smoke settling on computer and TV or Hi-fi equipment is not healthy. The problem is of course that the kitchen door is always open so the smoke from cigarettes and cooking (which has the same negative effects on electronics) escape freely in the living room. The computer there inevitably changes from beige to tan and later to light brown. The scanner has no cover so the lenses inside get dirty decreasing the scanning results.
Another reason is of course that Viderian is an AMD K6-200 with only 32 MB RAM. Enough for Win95 and WordPerfect or the occasional Dbase but definitively not enough for image manipulation (the Nikon scans slides at up to 2700 dpi).
Oswal is an AMD K6-2 / 300 with 64MB RAM, which is sufficient (not plenty, just sufficient) to run image acquisition and manipulation stuff (under Win98). And it sits on the attic, not an entirely dust free environment but the dust is of the non-sticky kind and can be blowed away easily (after which it settles down somewhere else I know but ...).
Initially I had no problem connecting the scanner to the SCSI card and the software installed without problem too. Win98 is rather boring if it work you know. The interesting bit came when I tried to scan. Hehe.
You see I have my digital camera connected here as well, via USB. And I all the image software (MGI, FotoFinish, Nikon, ...) want to use the digital camera as default image source. Of course somewhere deep inside each program there must be an option to switch that over to another source. After searching and trying for almost an hour (including one BSOD :-( ) I find how to use the CoolScan II and get a nice picture scanned in (at 1944x1296x24 and 240KB it is a bit big to post. And not interesting at that (an IBM promotional slide for a portable PS/2).

It is cool (10, rising to a top of 16°C) and dry with quite variable cloud cover. Sometimes grey, sometimes sunny but most of the time somewhere in between. Now this shot shows why I love Autumn. It is about the best season for pictures and ambience. It is the season which leaves the best impressions. It is nature, jubilant and feasting before the lean tine of Winter.

I hammered, filed, scrubbed, drilled and ... sweated on the XML program. By 17:00 it worked about correctly so I send it (attached to an e-mail) to Robby for checking. He does the Catalogue side. A few mails later I know that the basic layout is OK, but ...
Al the data is converted to character values. In the process of converting sizes the RPG program drops the decimal sign (a point) and that is needed on the other side. And I leave leading and trailing zeros (and blanks) in it while they are not expected. So I have some more work to do.

I started on the actual sending part, using FTP but I didn't get far into that yet. If it goes as smooth as the XML building I may actually get things demonstrable before the deadline.

 

On the financial front.
Normally our company publishes its half-year figures early. This year they were published late and they were not all to bright. A bad sign for the market analysts who dig in and find out that the American branch has been working way under the predicted results and that the company tried to hide this (things like writing off restructuring losses over 20years). The result is that the stock value has plummeted (sinking from around 65 Eur to 34 Eur in four days). Of course rumours start flying and we today we get an open letter from the boss explaining that everything is going all right and that is just a panic reaction from the stock market. That there are no problems and besides the problems are only in America. Etc.
Shees.
Of course there is nothing wrong. They just took too big a bite when things were going well and now swallowing is not easy.
BTW stock jumped up again 8% today. Does anybody understand this market?

All right, it is Autumn. It doesn't snow like someplace in Canada . Hey, it doesn't even rain. It is nice and dry with lots of beautiful clouds, not the grey stuff but pure white with some blue in between.

Deadline come and gone. The XML program was ready, the FTP stuff not but I could do that by hand. Nobody came to check things out so the deadline passage was not noticed. That is typical in the type of corporate setting I am working in. Projects are set up and given a strict schedule (mostly unrealistic) because they are absolutely needed. And then nobody checks them on time and sometimes they get implemented and never actually used. This one will be used but the schedule seems to be a bit loose.

On the other hand the changes Ronny made over the last few days have quickly been tested and most of them are not approved. Either because the tester didn't read the answer description to the problem report or because Ronny did what was asked and not what was wanted.
And that does differ some times. Well, sometimes it doesn't but most of the time ...

And this afternoon I was sit-in-BOFH . Had to do only one request for transferring files. And, in true BOFH style, I did get the files into an undefined state. Ready but not available in the intended environment. <G>

 

Privacy is important and here we have politicians telling that. Unbelievable, there must be something hidden here.

Nice sunrise and rather good weather with few clouds and lots of sunshine.

Shopping. The power supply that I ordered finally arrived. But now it turns out to be an AT type and I actually wanted an ATX. No problem says mister Masset and he changes the order. Of course being an AT type was the reason for the long delivery delay, The new order should arrive Wednesday.

It was perfect gardening weather and I did some weeding. But not for long. My nose has been training for the marathon (running) and my throat feels like sanding paper. Add to that a light headache and general listlessness and you get a common cold. Sniffing and sneezing, lovely :-(

While I didn't do much I did take Caitlan apart and reassembled her again. All the components are new now, no old relics are left. I will see if I can get Linux Installed again. With floppy and CD support.

I just discovered that my right ear is bigger than the left one. I was fitting a pair of earphones with a rubberised guide that clips over the earlobe. On the left side I had to pull the speaker 2 millimetres lower and on the right side I needed some 4 or five, pulling the speaker lose from the rubber guide. Lop-eared? Maybe one ear was pulled on more when I was young. And I needed a lot of ear pulling then <g>.

Just as nice and even less clouds than Yesterday.

Acceptably cool for running (9°C) but I didn't go running. Just to spite my nose who has been running yesterday and didn't stop today either.

After lunch I do a deep clean of the kitchen. Which takes most of the afternoon.

And later I install Caldera OpenLinux (eDesktop 2.4) without a problem AND with CD and Floppy accessible. The whole caboodle installs straight off off the CD. Disassembling and reassembling the box seems to have solved the problems.
Now even though I selected the complete install (yes Tom, including the partridge) there is not much of usable stuff on the desktop. Most of the extra stuff is hidden in the K-menu and requires some adjustments. Mainly adjustments in mind set.
I am approaching this in JHR fashion, the dumb (but not stupid) user.