Half the sky is clear and starry (north) and the other half is fully overcast (south) when I get up (at 8C) but by the time the sun apes my clouds are dispersing. The afternoon is even bright with the temp up to 17C.

Last Thursday Theo prepared a document about the changes needed in the order validation process. Last Friday I discussed this with Ronny. We noticed a lot of holes in the document and plugged some while we enlarged others. We actually worked out some sort of solution that could be implemented. Yesterday I combined the original document with our comments and considerations.
Of course the original document was composed in MS Word (v7 or something) and I don't have Word and Word Pro (Lotus) nor WordPerfect nor Star Office (5.??) could handle it so I extracted the text (I have a Word-Viewer but that cannot do edits) and reassembled the whole stuff in (hand-crafted) HTML <g>

Today we discussed it at length (not a problem, with Theo any discussion gets 'at length'). We actually didn't do much of anything else. So now we have an inplementable solution ready, it only has to be worked out and written down. By Theo in MS Word (and by me in HTML :)

The weather is in no hurry to change or settle. After a very rainy night with the temperature sinking to a depressing low of 9C we survive a mainly overcast day where the temperature soars to a frightening height of 12C.

After all the discussion-ing we had yesterday you'd expect today to be a day of quite and assiduous labour.
I had expected Theo to amend his document, including my proposals and the conclusions from yesterday be he didn't have time for it and passed that job on to Ronny. Ronny doesn't like to do documentation and it is not his greatest strength. In our group I am the best 'writer', at least for things that must be done in English and that must be understood by mere mortals (Theo does write better in Dutch if the document is intended for managerial use). However I don't have the time to do it now. My internal snugness must have been visible because Theo assured me that I had to have a final pass over the document.
Hmm, must cultivate my poker face a bit <sG>
After finishing the document Ronny, Theo and Koen started to discuss the whole matter again.

I didn't join in but quietly finished the start-up program for the XML-FTP stuff. I got that finished, tested and refined. Tomorrow I throw it over the fence into the System test environment. See if they can break it.
Of course I need to do the documentation for it.

 

Ronny has been surfing from home using the company as ISP (a free 'service' to the employees including a single e-mail account but no hosting). I don't use that because I took an equally free account at Freegates (now TiscaliNet ) which included a single e-mail address and 30MB hosting but also (mainly) because I don't want my boss to have any control over my web usage.
Now Ronny wants to start a public web site, mainly for posting things about the football (that is soccer if you're from the US). He is not interested in a domain (yet) and he didn't want to put his pages on some free space I still have on my own sites. So I advised him to take a look at Tiscalinet.

I had not checked my ISP site for some time now. Basically because it works. I always (well 99 out of 100) get a connection on the first try. The one time in a whole year they were down was just after they switched owner from Freegates to Tiscalinet. And that was pre announced (switching servers). They are sponsored by adds and by a percentage from the telephone company but, even though they claim to send add passing a user-defined filter, I haven't had a single add from them. They upped their services, you get 100MB free site-space and 2 free e-mail accounts. Best of all I did sign up when it was just 30MB and 1 account but I my conditions were upgraded automatically. Did I say best of all? Better still. They implemented 'surfing credit' that means that for every 2 minutes I surf I get 1 minutes credit. The credit is not paid in money but can be take in the form of a 'call back' where they call you (and pay the phone bill) when you ask.
Back to the point. I advised Ronny to sign up. He is quite enthusiast, especially about the hosting and the credits (after seeing I had unknowingly accumulated about 7815 minutes of credit).

So if you are in Belgium and you are looking for a free ISP take a look at TiscaliNet . You are unlikely to find something better. (Maybe World Online, they were baught by Tiscali erecently)

 

From the Registry :

on NSA :.quote: ".. and even sympathise a bit".
Now I tried to imaging Bob sympathise with them. I really tried.

More or less the same weather, the main difference being the rain which started some when in the afternoon.

I wasn't very productive today. I started with closing the FTP project and doing the necessary administration for it. Just after doing that I noticed a bug.
I made the start-up program so that it could run with or without using its display-file (screen output) depending on a parameter and that worked fine. Only when I called it first without that parameter and immediately afterward I called it with the screen option I got a crash. Turns out the *INZSR routine is not always called when you start the program and that is where I opened the display file. So I picked up the pieces, reconstructed the puzzle, re-tested and closed the project a second time.

And then I did something stupid.
Or not.
I have been using the same password for more than a year now so I figured it was about time to change it. (Please, no comments.)
On the AS/400 that was no problem, just type chgpwd press enter and fill in the subsequent prompt screen (old password, new password, new password confirmation) and you are done. Signoff, signon again and you notice that the old password doesn't work anymore.
Did that on two AS/400's (development box and 'production' box).

Then I had to change the password for the network. That is via Win95 so :
Start, go to Settings, open Control Panel, open Passwords, go to Change Passwords tab, click the Change Windows Password button. Still no problem. Then I got a screen to select all the passwords to be changed, I deselected all (Netware, 2x IBM-Client Access) except the 'Windows Networking Password'. Then I got the dialog to change the password (old, new, confirm new), I changed and clicked OK. The first message I got was telling that the Windows Password was successfully changed. See piece of cake!
I clicked OK to get that message box away and I got a second message in forming that 'The Windows Networking Password could not be changed'. WTF ^{TM Syroid}! Of course there was no indication as to why or how to correct things.

And here is probably when I made my mistake, I logged off.

And I couldn't log on to the network again. Getting into Windows was no problem. Neither was connecting to the AS/400. I just couldn't get on the network and of course most of my PC work is store on the network. I tried some things, rebooting several time during the process but nothing worked. I tried to remove some drive mappings and re-establish them but trying that I had to provide a password and neither my old nor my new one was accepted.
A help desk call later I could log on to the network again. Nathalie, from the help desk, informed me that my password had become 'locked', she unlocked it. I don't speak NT-ish so she probably was right. Anyway I could connect again.
Later (after 17:00 so after the close of the help desk; of course) I noticed that I still couldn't reach the printer and that I couldn't reach the mail server. On the mail server I got a message indicating that the account was 'locked'.
I don't know what that locking is but somehow I got locked out on all the NT servers that I have to connect to. Nathalie obviously unlocked me on one of them (probably the Domain Server).

If anyone wants to help me, ... don't spend your time. Because I have all my mail forwarded to Venlo and I can't reach the mail server I will not receive the help in time to help me. And when I receive it that is prove that I don't need it anymore. <G>

 

Because there has been a bit of backchannel buzz about network trough-put on 100Mb Ethernet I timed the copying on my home network. I got a throughput of 1.2Mb. Something is not working as it should here. Well, maybe. I copied 96MB from a Zip disk on Oswal to the hard disk in Miona. The Zip drive is an external 250MB USB drive. USB has a theoretical maximum of 10Mb for fast devices and 2Mb for slow devices. It does seem that the Zip drive behaves itself as a slow device. So my measurement did not measure the network.
I then copied the same data back to Oswal but to the hard disk there. And I got 8.1Mb throughput. Sounds a lot better but not good enough. It is in fact quite good if you know that this is 96MB of HTML pages most of which are less than 10KB each. Copying the lot, on Oswal from one partition to another turned up a throughput of 15Mb. Now that 8Mp on the network looks a lot better.

This is the 300 ^th day of the year, and century (and millenium if you program in C). But don't ask where all those days went.

I hit the last of the rain on the road this morning. The weather does stays stable in its unsettled form with sun, clouds, rain, wind and what have you. Of course whenever the clouds move apart a bit, the sun, staying relative low in the sky, shines annoyingly in my screen.

This morning I couldn't log on to the server. Yesterday it worked but today my account was blocked again. I found the problem causing stuff.
I think.
The kicker was that an account gets blocked after 5 unsuccessful log-on attempts and I didn't try to log on more than once. So someone else was doing that. Then I remembered that I had the same problem yesterday. I had Natalie from the help desk, unlock my account, I logged on connecting to the network drives and I printed something. When I tried to print again about an hour later I couldn't because the account was blocked.
Today Natalie again unlocked my account but when I booted I got a message when opening my mail saying that my user was not recognised by the mail server. So I checked my Netscape Messenger setting and changed over from POP3 to IMAP. IMAP didn't work some time ago but now I got it working. While doing the change over I noticed that I had Messenger set to check for mail every 10 minutes. But the password was wrong so, after 50 minutes of doing nothing, I had logged 5 invalid log-on attempts and a locked account.
So, when you change your password you must make sure you change it everywhere, at the same time and you must make sure nothing else is accessing the network. Only then do you have a chance of successfully completing a password change.

Again a fairly low day. Someone from France came over for explaining (and listing to problems about) our data mirroring tool. Only Koen (and Theo as manager of course) is directly involved in this and things had to be installed and updated on his PC so we had a nice :( diversion.

I did some detective work on a problem in Australia. More than a month ago Peter there had mailed me a set of order numbers for which the logistic were handled completely but where no (or not all) invoices were made. I didn't have time at the moment so that mail slipped down the todo list. Last week I found some time (must have dropped it in the wrong drawer once) to look on their system. I did only find one of the reported orders on their test environment, but nothing on the production side. I mailed back then for a clarification but they are maintaining some sort of radio-silence.
Today I found other packed of unused time so I went back to Australia and dug out all the data about the one order that was available.
I somehow found the reason why there were was no invoice. On one partial order an order line was lost (database corruption), there was only one line on that partial order and we don't calculate an invoice when there are no lines. I put forward a recipe to solve the problem.

 

I need desk space for assembling and configuring a PC this weekend so I cleared some space on my side board (about 60x60 cm). By the time I finished off this daynote the whole free space was covered again.
Entropy rules !!

Again the same type of weather with the same temperature range. Missing out on the sun almost completely.

I demoed and explained the FTP and XML programs for Theo. And added a few corrections and tweaks afterwards. We actually ran the program on the German database. Our test environment is rather small, the XML collected at most data about 20 items so things always run smooth. The German database is a copy of the real database from a production environment (and you may guess from which country). The selection produced 3044 items resulting in an XML file of around 140000 lines. Technically you can put more than one element (tag+data+/tag) on one line but to keep things easily (human) readable I placed each element on a separate line. On test it ran about two or three seconds, now it ran several minutes. At one point I stopped the job because I thought it had hit an endless loop. In the end it turned out all normal.
So I probably have some complaints from Robby, who has to manage the receiving end, in my inbox on Monday.

And I spent the rest of the day writing documentation for it. I prefer coding over documenting but not too much. Not like Ronny, he almost changes colour when he has to write documentation. Typically, when I tell him to do some documentation he starts to explain things , verbally, to me. Then, at the end of the explanation, I say something like "right, now type all that in" and he looks as if I am making some dirty proposal <g>
He'll learn it. One day he'll learn it.
I like do write documentation if it is intended for other programmers. Actual user documentation is another beast entirely. I simply cannot switch my mind into user-mode. Maybe because that requires one to explain the obvious (but how do you explain that"F3=Exit" means that pressing function key-3 will get you out of the program and back on the menu) without sounding ridiculous.
Yeah, writing is not easy. (but then to who am I telling this?)

Future Note

Future Note