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Another boringly good day with tons of sunshine and hazy red colouring skies in the morning and evening.
Current temp is 21.9°C in and 10.1°C out.
Work isn't boring. Not at all. R comes in for testing early. Well half past seven is early for most people. I usually get in some when between seven and quarter past seven so that's fine by me. He doesn't have a label scanner or printer though cause they are in the network room which is locked, so he cannot tests everything in sequence.
He is another one of the good testers -well, there are two good ones- because he does test everything. Which means he picks up a few errors I left in. One error in the inscan program, actually the first real error, and another problem in the conversion program.
Dinner is rice with leeks and eggs.
Thursday 2005-10-13 (Remarks about 157 words)
There's no mist and nice open skies. Once the sun is up however the mist comes up as well. Upside down weather. At around noon the gets normal again, as normal as summer weather is halfway trough October. Of course that provides us with a lively sunset with light and dark red coloured feather clouds all over the place.
Current temp is 21.4°C in and 9.1°C out.
During the sapification tests two problems cropped up.
One also exists on the production machine. It's a hard crash in the warehouse location maintenance. That is not used often and the crash happens in a rarely used function. So nobody ever bothered to call in for it, well probably someone called in somewhen cause L isn't surprised when I mention it it it's so rare that nobody ever got the time to investigate. I don't however think hard crashes are acceptable and while the tests are going on I am stuck with solving problems when they crop up. So I dive in. Of course it's not a simple case of look around, change two bytes and go. If a hard crash is as easy to solve as that it doesn't live long in code. A couple of hours late though I surface again with a working program.
The second problem is new to the development machine (only occurs in DEV/TST). So again I dive down into the murky depths of the code pool to stir up the mud and other auto-generated indicator crap. I eventually find what causes the crash but I am not sure I can solve it using the normal routines. One serious problem is that it is so deep down in the code that things react different when run with or without the debugger. Yeah, it's the display overlay stuff that they don't even dare use in the weirdest programmers nightmares.
Dinner is spaghetti. Classic Italian with an also classic Bolognese sauce. Pretty good but not even in the same league as the Chinese stuff so I suppose I won't be buying new once I get trough my stock. If I want Italian pasta I can still go for the other types, like lasagne or canelloni.
Friday 2005-10-14 ( Remarks about 383 words)
Again clear and without mist in the morning but this time it stays that way. Nothing up apart from a couple of small clouds that lost their way. Probably a malfunction in their GPS. Now the stars have no such problems with their GPS (Galactic in this case) as they go twinkling by.
Current temp is 22.1°C in and 9.0°C out.
Shopping. As usual. Well, not really, cause I don't get groceries. With the annual company party planned for this evening I don't need anything for today. And Tomorrow I go to my uncle which usually result in eating pies and no appetite left for dinner.
I spend the best part of the afternoon helping Peter with breaking down and storing the tomato green house.
He has ADSL at home and his wife uses that mainly for chatting and IMing and stuff. A few of her friends have started using a web cam so now she wants one too. I do give advise and help with computers and printers and scanners and software but I know nothing about web cams. Well, nothing recent. I have an older cheap web cam thing that I don't really use ~web cams and PSTN lines don't make happy mates~ so I give that for trying. Of course the thing doesn't work. It's an old Win98 era thing with no drivers included for XP. And the XP drivers available on the web are not "signed" which means they show a spate of dire warnings while attempting to install. My brother decides to get a new one, with the right ~MS approved drivers~ later.
Later I use that web cam stuff as an excuse for not going to the company party ~I don't like crowded parties anyway~ and fiddle with it at home. I do get it to work on XP and Win2000 but only in snapshot mode, it doesn't do continuous capture. On Win98, for which it was build, it works fine for a while but after about 15 minutes it goes in sleep mode and refuses to wake up. The only way to get it working again is rebooting.
Stoopid Windows drivers.
Saturday 2005-10-15 ( Remarks about 370 words)
I really like the weather but it's hard to say something about it when it just keeps being the same nice and clear stuff.
Current temp is 18.7°C in and 7.2°C out.
The weather may be good and summery still but we are halfway trough November so I prepare the in house window sills and tables to get the flowers in. I leave the flowers out but everything is ready now.
The afternoon is spent at my uncles place.
Dinner is just a small bowl of plain rice.
Sunday 2005-10-16 ( Remarks about 100 words)
Clear and mist less again. Boringly beautiful again. The only difference is a serious drop in temperature at last. And a full moon that out shines all but the brightest stars while is rises like a glowing copper ball.
Current temp is 17.2°C in and 4.2°C out.
Work is boring too. I still don't know why the display buffer problem (see Fridays second problem) occurs in this one program and not in others. The setting where it occurs in in the standard skeleton. I do find a way around the problem though so that's OK. Next I spend some time looking at a problem for R. That is a serious problem that we don't know the cause off either. But there is a work around. Some users however refuse to use that work around.
After work we go running again, W really has started to run again and he is improving seriously. So much so that I have to strain just to keep up. At least it is the perfect temperature for running again, seeing as everybody else is running with double training vests and long trousers and leggings. Me? Just a T and shorts are plenty enough till it starts freezing :)
Dinner is rice with ham and carrots.
Monday 2005-10-17 ( Remarks about 219 words)
Nice and clear and cool in the morning. With lots of sun all day. There is a bit of a cold bite to the wind though. I call it nice and perfect, everyone else comes in with thick coats and jumps to turn the heating on max. Pffft
Current temp is 16.2°C in and 4.1°C out.
L came in for his second test session and he didn't find any ~new~ problem. I did solve some old problems as they cropped up but they're hardly worth mentioning>
We plan to throw everything to production in three weeks time. With that Friday being Armistice Day we have two full days that we can take the system down with one spare day for extra tests and setups. K wants to do it on the first of November. K may be the boss here but my estimate is that we need a minimum of over 20 hours to just transfer and install the programs. Between the end of the backup and the start of the next backup we have at best 20 hours (best means we stop communication jobs before the backup) That leaves insufficient time for emergencies, no time for data conversions, no time for query updates. No time to restore the old situation if something fatally breaks.
K is boss but in this he can't rule.
I usually make easy simple things for dinner but that doesn't mean I am limited to those. Take for example todays dinner. Scallops with a tomato and onion sauce. Nothing rough and simple about it. Not overly complicated either mind you, I don't really have the time to do that during the week. Scallops are very tender and delicate meat, even more so then squid or prawns. You got to bake and cook them a bit but let them sit one minute too long and you end up with white gummy balls, tasteless tools for jaw exercise. Cooked just right you get that nice mollusk taste, with just enough initial resistance to your teeth to appreciate the texture yet melting on your tongue. With a tomato sauce that is slightly sweet and tangy as if there is some whine in it and yet soft and fruity. Hmmmm
Pulling heaven from the oven.
Tuesday 2005-10-18 ( Remarks about 390 words)
It rains in the morning, OK just drizzle but still wet and slick. Along with the rain comes a grey cloud cover that hangs about most of the day. It does get thin by evening so that even the moon becomes locatable as trough multiple layers of gauze curtains.
Current temp is 15.6°C in and 8.4°C out.
The meeting goes well. The actual sapification part is just pretty small. No resistance. The positive thing is that we are ready to go and the client who pushed for the conversion keeps pushing back it's own part of the picture. Typical hight stakes business poker game.
R is back for testing. All but one of his problems was solved and the new testing he does only shows a few setup problems like unfilled conversion tables and range checking settings. He also comes up with some 'new' problems, all of which are also 'problem' on the production version. I solve some of those as a bonus.
His one remaining problem though is a bitch. I slug on bit-fucking the source till well past regular hours. I think I finally locate the actual bug but I am not sure about it. If it is then the bug lives in the production version as well but they never reported that and they should have. It could be a nasty source change that never got ported to production. (We only move objects to production, the sources remain on the development machine. In principle the source in PRD is used to generate the object that gets copied to production. In practice there is no safeguard against changing a source in PRD and not moving the object. ) The saga will continue tomorrow, so come back to read how I slay that dragon, suffering mortal wounds in the process. ...
Oh, by the way, support is picking up again after a couple of calm days.
Dinner is onion soup with a twist. I add a serious amount of garlic to it. It's not the same as the pure garlic soup I once copied from some Portuguese dinner but it is definitely not you average onion soup.
Wednesday 2005-10-19 ( Remarks about 364 words)
It is raining in the morning but slowing down from a heavy rain at 05:00 to a drizzle at 09:00. By noon all traces of rain and even clouds are gone so the afternoon looks good. shiny and blue. With a hazy moon rising late in the evening.
Current temp is 16.9°C in and 4.4°C out.
Sapification testing is now in it's second phase. In the first round we checked that nothing got broken in the old way of working. Now we are testing the new way of working. Both ways must coexist.
The old stuff works so I didn't break anything ~that wasn't broken already~ and even fixed some old problems. And most of the new stuff is working as well. Just a few nagging exceptions to be checked out. And a whole chapter of stuff that was not done at all. High drama for sure but it actually isn't half bad. I bet I can fix it in time for moving.
One nasty thorn did show up though. I have been working on this fix in the DEV environment for just over six months. During that time the others had to program in the PRD environment and copy every change back to DEV. Of course some changes didn't make it in both places. The missing change I hit was a fix in a change made in both environments. Just a test against '0' swapped for a test against '1'. Very easy to overlook, especially if you are staring at a source for hours on end.
The problem is that running an automatic comparison doesn't work because the sources in DEV and PRD are different because I changed them ~if I find an unchanged source I can delete the DEV version~. So a comparison pops up on average so far about three pages of code differences in every program. And I have to check every changed line. I practically have to recognise every change I made during the last six months and filter them out and I have to recognise every change the program generator has made during that period and filter that out as well. Then I have to decide whether the remaining differences still apply in the new situation. And there are only about 1078 programs to go. Pfft, piece of cake.
I don't know how it's called, or even if it has a name. The closest I know is a Gratin Dauphinois.
It basically is sliced potatoes and onion rings, layered in an oven dish an cooked in milk or cream. But I add a couple of celery stems for taste and I spice up the lot with coarsely ground coriander and fennel seeds (and nutmeg, never forget the nutmeg with oven-potatoes). I planned on cooking some fish with it but at the last minute I decided against it, going vegetarian. A good decision cause with the fish it would have been double to much, now it was just a little bit to much. So now I am only a little bit over-stuffed.
If the fish is still good tomorrow ~and I am very critical about that~ I might use it then.
Thursday 2005-10-20 ( Remarks about 531 words)
It just stopped rain-drizzling as I get up. And by the time the sun gets up -she's getting lazy, sleeping in these days- the clouds are breaking up. But they regroup for another rain offensive. At noon the clouds take a lunch-break. But they come back with more rain, Which gets interrupted frequently.
Current temp is 16.6°C in and 9.2°C out.
Because I have to much time and to little to do (ahum) I spend some of it checking out an old problem that nobody has been able to solve yet. I think I found the cause. A typical belt and suspenders problem.
Problem : Pants slipping.
Analysis: Pants too wide.
Solution: apply belt around belly and tighten it well.
Problem : (after a diet) pants slipping.
Analysis: Belt is not working well (but we don't dare remove it)
Solution: then you add suspenders (pulling up the belt over chest)
Problem : Can't breath
So, now I know what and where the problem is but I don't know whether to remove the belt or the suspenders.
Dinner is onion soup, the last labeled pack from the freezer. (nope, the fish wasn't good anymore)
Friday 2005-10-21 ( Remarks about 200 words)
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