After the rain this night it was dark and cloudy in the morning but clearing out gradually to present a bright afternoon. The temperature is slowly sinking.

I spent most of the day in looking up problems and facts.
In Germany they should convert to version 9 of OCS but they seem to be looking for a reason to postpone it. So last week we got a load of 'critical' errors that must be solved before v9 can be implemented. They claim these things are bad enough to stop the upgrade. For example they get an empty selection screen somewhere in the process of starting a new order and they have to click it away (OK or Cancel button). Of course that is a critical bug. (btw the version the are using now includes this bug s well). Or in another place they want to have have a critical need for a function in TeleSales that they now have in OMSI-3. So I investigate it in OMSI-3 and the function is there but doesn't work. Most of the problems are like this.

In between I transfer some program to System test and do some other cleanup actions. And I refine the XML program a bit.

 

At home I enjoy some frustration on Caitlan.
As I explained to JHR , I am approaching Linux on Caitlan as a typical Windows user. Of course typical users don't RTFM, only double click a readme file if things are finished (in Win typically the last option of the installation process is selecting to view or not to view the readme file which typically explained how to install. Logic? What's that?) or if things don't go. Most users just have a look at the CD, dump it in the tray and wait for autorun to do all the work. Clicking OK and Accept when asked.
So I don my user hat, dump in the CD and boot. And, as reported yesterday, Linux installs, and works as it should. Well it looks OK. To make sure I work in 'user' mode I moved all my Linux books to the attic and placed Caitlan in my bedroom, right on top of Harper, my main box.

So today I poke around a bit.
And I hit a first frustrating thing. In a lot of windows (note the lowercase double-you:-) (RPM, Konfig,...) the arrow keys don't work for navigation, only the mouse works. Not a problem but quite an annoyance.
Next I notice that somehow my keyboard is configured as a US keyboard while in fact I have a Belgian keyboard (AZERTY). After searching for about, say 30 seconds I get into the keyboard configuration and open a box with different keyboards to select from. The box doesn't fit my screen (XGA) and it doesn't have a slider. Bother-1. The arrow keys work but moving up beyond the Bulgarian, which is at the top of the screen, the window doesn't scroll, the selection just goes up without you being able to see what you are selecting. Bother-2. After trying a few times I settle for the French keyboard (is also AZERTY with only minor differences). After removing the US settings I get a usable keyboard.
Then, I drop in the applications disk that came in the box. Close the drive and wait. Hey Autorun works (that is autorun.sh) and I get a selection screen. I select StarOffice (5.1 version), and click on the English Install. After whizzing and seemingly loading a bunch of file the process stops with the RPM manager on screen. I don't see anything interesting there (no error messages or such either) so I close it. I also don't find anything about StarOffice anywhere. The problem is it did install without asking where it should be installed, I clicked install and no questions were asked nor was any information provided (I know there were messages on the status line but I for one can't read them on a 500 MHz box, sorry). Hasn't anyone patented the single-click install method?

I will try to find the stuff tomorrow, cause today my time is up.

BTW My cold is almost over, the nose is still a bit stuffed and runny but manageble.

The clear, dry and dark night gives way to a clear, dry and bright day. But what a glorious red transition that was. And later the dry, clear and bright day morphs into a dry clear night trough a strikingly similar and equally red process.

Volker, from Germany is here to explain all the sudden problems. And some of these are indeed real problems. Others are, in our opinion rather annoyances but he chooses to differ. He has a point in that the 'problems' are experienced by his users and he admits that they are indeed annoyances but, just like RSI stems from a very small stress factor the annoyance builds up and becomes a real problem. Ronny wants to adhere to the standards that were laid down in the early stages of the development but he can only hold out on true technical issues. While Theo tries to say yes and no and maybe (and a lot more), all at the same time, and succeeds in doing so. The result is a debate about the principles of computers used in business and the general meaning of life.
I see the point Volker is making and he is right in most of his arguments. The problem I have is that most of the problems are not new at all, most existed in the previous release but were never reported. Yet they are put forward now as show-stoppers.

We solve one of the real and very stingy problems. Very simply stated a file pointer was updated to a wrong value, going from 7 to 14 to 14 to 14 etc. . While it was simple to correct it took a lot of sweat to find.
The rest will be solved later but they don't prevent the migration to V9, either by being workable or by having a workaround.

In between (and after) all this I continue to work on the FTP program. I am hitting a wall by now however. The existing FTP programs assume that file names are never longer than 10 characters (10+3 really) and that path names are only 25 characters long. Of course I need longer fields.
This means that to continue I should perform a database change with all the associated problems. If I don't do this the receiving party must change their programs and they don't want to (smells a bit politically). So now I am waiting on a decision from above.

 

I didn't touch Caitlan nor any other computer (except Miona for posting this) at home. And for adding the The Gang @ Seti page on my (distorting) mirror.

We had a bit of rain this night (well the roads were all wet and unless someone has amused himself that means it rained) but the morning is gloriously red with lots of colour shifting broken up clouds. Later all the broken pieces of cloud combine again for a generally grey day.
The days sure are shortening, I see the sunrise while on the road to work and I see the sunset while on the road back home.

I worked out the documentation for one of the problems we tracked for the Germans yesterday. The Assortment file is automatically filled by the trigger handling (if the client is set up for assortment tracking). The minimum and maximum ordered quantities are filled there as well. Of course after a single order the minimum and maximum are the same so a hard test on them (as TeleSales does now) poses a problem. There is however a special manual maintenance program.

After getting that part of the documentation ready I set out analysing the FTP programs. I got the get-go for changing them so now I can lookup what, where and how I have to do the change. And (of course) things are just a wee bit more complicated than they looked.

 

I have been gathering JavaScript snippets by surfing around and saving pages al lot recently. Of course full pages contain way too much (and some contain less than decent pictures) so I started too extract the actual script parts and analyse these. That is going to eat a lot of my free time.

And I couldn't help but throw a hoop to Robert. He posted a letter and opens his reply with "Please don't get me started on this." . That is like waving a red flag of course <G>
(I know he doesn't have the time to pick up a fight so I will leave off immediately. )

It was raining this morning and it rained this evening. And because the sun is afraid of water we didn't see her all day.

We worked our way trough a few problems in TeleSales. Most of the problems are reported now but are not caused by the new release. For example now they say that changing an amount on a 'return with related order' causes the price to be blanked. Which turns out to be true. Since April. Cause it was then that Ronny changed the entry from an updatable browser to an entry dialog box. That change was accepted and the whole lot has been in use (production) everywhere. The problem is not that things like this are reported but that users claim it worked correctly up to a week ago.

And then I did find out that the change to the FTP programs to handle our larger path and field names is much more involved than anticipated. On a first check only eight programs needed changing. To get an understanding of how the whole thing works I walked the source. And ended up with about 20 programs with rather fundamental changes needed.
I opened a small can but it is full of worms !

 

I woke up last night at around 2:00 with belly problems. Which turned out to be a form of diarrhoea which kept me awake for the rest of the night. At first I thought I had just eaten too much spaghetti (was true) because my condition improved throughout the day. But now I am not feeling too well again and I did not eat too much (steak with cauliflower).
Maybe it is just fatigue.

More or less overcast like yesterday but it remained dry. By being overcast at night the temperature doesn't drop below 15C which is a bit on the warn side for me.

I continue on the FTP stuff. Slowly a picture is emerging about what must be changed where. FTP remains a bit of a tricky thing. I did manually send the XML file to the correct pace on the server yesterday. I did save the actual manual action in a kind of script. When I tried to send the stuff this morning using that script I got all sorts of errors. I changed almost everything, all to no avail. Even manual sending didn't work anymore.
So I left things as they were and did something else. Then, at around 11:00 I tried again with the original script and it passed as it should. Why? Too much wind maybe.

I also solved a file-locking problem by adding extra error trapping to some programs.

And we (Theo and Ronny and I) discussed a rather tricky problem. Well it was not a problem really. When an order line is changed we clear out the amounts on the main screen to indicate the change. Afterwards the order gets recalculated and the correct values are shown again. Of course if the users makes the price manual no recalculation is needed so we don't clear the values. Jan finds this confusing (he is right but he is knows why we do it an he knows there is no short term solution.
The main reason to do it this way is because we don't have a routine that calculates a single line. It's the whole order or nothing. And to keep performance reasonable we don't call that after each change.
I push a bit to get the best solution, a change in the basic calculation program to make it possible to handle individual lines. While best it is also the most expensive (time).

Dry and grey in the morning with just a few patches of sunshine. And way too hot at night (17C) while the day temperature doesn't really rise above that (19C). The sunny patches of the morning gave way to rain in the afternoon.

Shopping. The extra power supply has arrived. In fact two have arrived because Steven didn't know if I wanted a 300W or a 230W supply. I don't remember what I ordered so I pick the 300W one. They are A-Open supplies which means they should be OK.

I spend the whole afternoon in the basement noting down the wine we have. Years ago my father started collecting wine. That is he bought one bottle and if it was good he went back and bought six more. I am now doing more or less the same. Now we don't buy expensive wine as an investment or something, no we buy reasonably cheap wine, mostly at less than $5 a bottle although we don't actually mind the price too much. We buy wine to enjoy, drinking one or two bottles a week. This means of course that the stock changes a lot and currently the wine is not ordered or classified. Not even noted. So I went into the basement and noted all the bottles. That is all 156 of them, not counting the 45 small ones (25cl or about two glasses each) and a few lose ones.
It is more fun than loading and unloading concrete like last week but not much because the basement is just 1m70 high and I am 1m76. Which means I ended up with a sore back and a few bumps on my head.

My father is away for two days so I make diner for myself. He doesn't like chicken nor rice so I make that, with curry sauce. I only made one mistake, I used two table spoons of curry powder in stead of two teaspoons. This is Chinese curry, so I ended up with a brown and rather sharp sauce. Not bad, after washing down with a good glass of rose wine (one of the loose bottles so there are still 156 bottles registered).

It started to rain Yesterday in the early afternoon and it kept on raining till about the same time today. A soft and steady rain. The temperature obviously remains quite level as well.

At 14C it is a bit warm for running but with rain I can still run cool enough. The result is that I can run the long distance without getting overly tired. And with the shortening days my running is entirely in the dark again (I don't sleep in on Sundays) which I love as well as the rain.

I do take it easy in the morning. And later I play couch potato to watch the closing ceremony of the Olympic games. Mainly for the fireworks. As that falls just after the noon I make my lunch and eat it in front of the TV. Lunch is rice with mushrooms, shrimp and some left over chicken with a sweet-sour sauce. Yep, I reacquainted myself again with my chopsticks this weekend.

In the afternoon I enter all the wine in a database. Just as good a method to learn to use a database as any other. I am using Approach, which is part of the Lotus Smart Suite package. This is a nice and easy database (storing data in dBase format) without much in the way of programmability. Just something for me <g>
I have only been programming databases for about 10 years now (on the AS/400) <G>