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It's drizzling in the morning. And apart from a few breaks it keeps drizzling all day. Half the breaks are for dry stuff, the other half are for heavy rain. Real heavy rain.
Current temp is 15.7°C in and 5.6°C out.
I am starting late because I get a replacement car first. But I am still nicely in time.
Work is getting tensioned up. With just a couple of easy support calls. But still tons of work to be finished before the big move. And there are a few surprises cropping up sending everybody into panic mode a couple of times. It's the choppiness before the storm.
The coming weekend is going to be the D-day weekend. All is planned and set to move. It's a bit like launching a ship. Once the hull starts moving down the ramp there is no stopping. Till it's down in the water. In or under. And, like most good ship-launches we are still paining as the hull slips by.
For the whole three-day weekend I have about 14 hours planned for sleep. That means That I will grab any unplanned hour for sleep as well. I'll probably be gone till next Monday or Tuesday.
Dinner is pizza. A ham-and-cheese pizza with a bottom that is a bit thin in places. Not bad though.
The best way to get old is by not dying.
Wednesday 2005-11-09 (Remarks about 235 words)
Variation is what drives our lives. Apparently it also drives the lives of the weather gods. What with a full blue morning after a rain day.
Current temp is 15.6°C in and 13.2°C out.
It's a late morning again to pick up my car before work. All repaired and ready to roll.
Work is going steady. That is after hacking the development tool. There is a method to use so called "user macros", an alternative to real procedures from the time RPG didn't know what procedures were. They are not very user friendly, rather user hostile really and they are not managed by the version control software. So any change in development must be redone in the test and again in the production environment.
So I hacked into the system to copy the user macros without having to re-edit them.And I finished the source-comparisons just in time. Last source compared at 17:01. ^_^
Once five o clock passed I kicked out the other developers. None resisted :) Well with a three day weekend starting that's not surprising.
I kick them out so I can start the big transfer. The first stage is estimated to take between 8 and ten hours so the sooner I begin the better.
_ - - -
Home at 01:00. It only takes 6 hours to complete. The estimate was based on the previous transfers. And there always were errors while tranfering. Now I chopped up the transfer into 16 separate moves and while it took more work to start I only got one, totally expected (and unavoidable) error. I always get nervous when things go like that. To good to be true.
Dinner was some bread and cheese and ham while sitting in the office.
A faster way is by getting a job.
Thursday 2005-11-10 ( Remarks about 312 words)
It's drizzling trough the night but that stops in the morning. It does however remain utterly grey and uncheerful.
Current temp is 14.4°C in and 10.2°C out, that's at 18:00 in stead of the usual 23:00.
So I get home at about 01:00 which gives me four hours more sleep than expected. And with laying in till well past 10:00 I actually get much more sleep than usual. Which won't hurt as I'll be busy all night.
While it's grey it also is relatively warm (for mid November it's hot) so I prepare the plant for taking in, cleaning the pots, removing old leaves etc. but leave them out.
It's another pizza for dinner. Just tomatoes and various sorts of cheese. With a glass of wine.
After the early dinner I am off to work for the second stage of the move. One of the halls is still working today even though it's a public holiday. They agreed to stop earlier than usual, some when between 20:00 and 22:00, to let me start. So I get in the office at eight and they stop at 21:40. *sigh*
Not that I have been idle all that time, there is still more than enough work to handle on the development machine. The issue is that I have to take a backup before I can actually start the transfers. Late start also means late finish.
Friday 2005-11-11 ( Remarks about 258 words)
OK. I am back home. After 22 hours in the office. And that were no slack hours either, I had my notebook with me but I didn't get time to take it out of the bag.
Most of the early work was a start-and-wait type of thing. But While each job ran on the production box I was busy handling the data-conversions on the development box. And I got to fix a bunch of files and programs that were transferred without using the version management system. Last minute action and even some post crash handling.
Yet, even with a coupe of problems like that I finish the transfer right on schedule. The next step, converting the data also goes smooth as butter in a pan. So all the fun work gets done before sunrise. Leaving the tedious and boring stuff for the day. Halfway trough the morning I do get some excitement from a support call from hall-7. As long as the move is not finished the computer system is not working. Well, not for the warehouses, there is of course the rest of the company that is working so we cannot shut down the whole box. Well, after the transfers and the data conversion the programs should theoretically work but none of the services is started and the settings and queries are still broken. So it's no wonder that I get a support call when people come in to work. That's why no one was supposed to come in. A couple of calls later I get the honor of kicking them out. Yep. The system is mine and mine alone!
Well till in the afternoon W comes in to help a bit with the queries. And later still R comes in as well for some assistance and some early testing. Which promptly turns up a couple of serious looking problems. But nothing is serious enough to cause panic.
I stop at around five. There is another day tomorrow for handling the rest of the queries and the general testing.
The weather has been just as grey as yesterday. But with more very light drizzle. Current temp is 13.7°C in and 4.2°C out.
Dinner is rice with egg and leeks.
Saturday 2005-11-12 ( Remarks about 374 words)
It's been grey a couple of days so another grey morning isn't surprising or remarkable. It does however clear up and in the afternoon there is a lot of blue. With a colour full sunset with lots or glowing red rimmed clouds.
Current temp is 13.2°C in and 2.6°C out.
For all practical purposes it's a normal day at work. Starting a bit earlier than expected (R had misunderstood the starting hour) and finishing a bit earlier as well.
Yep working on Sunday. Yesterday I installed all the software and to day we had to adapt all the user queries to work with the changed database. Most of the queries are simple to change so that's not a problem. Actually most of the queries don't need changes at all. The problem is that there are no tools to do bulk checking on them so we have to open each one for editing just to see whether it actually needs editing. Another problem is that there are a lot of linked queries where one query uses a work file build up by another query. Oh, the names are not significant, often just copied from another query that been changes, STOCK007C could well be about invoicing.
People were expected to come in in the afternoon for final testing. Of course some, the same that came in yesterday while I was still transferring stuff, com in in the morning and start working as if nothing happened. So I kick them out again.
At noon I let them in again and a bit later the first testers arrive as well. From then till about five there's always a telephone buzzing. With a few real problems.By six the last tester has gone, all satisfied.
The whole episode took 36 hours of work. Very close to my own estimate.
Dinner is asparagus soup.
Sunday 2005-11-13 ( Remarks about 322 words)
Hard to see with all the fog but I think there is some mist out there. Not surprising after a clear night and finally some lower temperatures. A bit more surprising is that the mist keeps hanging around all day, hardly getting thinner at noon. All that mist keeps nightly frost away but it also keeps the sun out so the day temperatures go down
Current temp is 12.8°C in and 2.4°C out. Hmm, I think I got to check the heating, it should kick in and keep the inside at 15°C.
I get in even earlier than usual (already at my desk at 7:00) in anticipation of a support tsunami. There are however no problems early on.
Oh boy. After some calm that tsunami came in. I almost didn't have time to get coffee (I need to walk about five meter to the machine, pout a cup and walk back) so forget about lunch or pee breaks. OK I took some of those (but not many as I wasn't drinking enough). 90% were just plain bad testing errors and problems not related to any of the changes I made. Most were actually caused by the limited capability of the version control tool. It is very bad at reliably reporting version inconsistencies, it shows tons of false positives (so many actually that it falls over backwards if the fix is too big). And what it shows is not helpful at all, it just gives a list of sources saying they all might contain difference based on change date. Then it moves all the objects to the new environment producing an unmanageable message log (unsearchable list with about fifteen messages per moved object, it doesn't move the objects in alphabetical or fifo order either).
Ho, well, we survived.
Dinner is rice with prawns and ginger.
Monday 2005-11-14 ( Remarks about 321 words)
Lots of mist again. But apparently only in our street. Once out there is none. I am a little bit earlier on the road which lets me enjoy a beautiful predawn sky. With the sky slightly lighting up showing silhouettes of clouds but still too dark to have any colour. Later we get an intensely red dawn. And it's all followed by a grey and drizzling day. Bha.
Current temp is 11.4°C in and 5.3°C out.
There are no phones early on but the system has a couple of regular background jobs that crash-landed and are in need for repairs. And repairing is what I do most of the day. Yesterday we got a bunch of easy immediate problems. It's not nice when a program crashes but a crashed program does not cause more damage and is usually easy to clean up. The phase we are now getting is finding problems that don't crash but still seed the database with errors. The users are still alert for problems so most 'unusual data' is still being reported. (Along with problems that existed for years but never got solved or reported in the first place. Users are strange animals.)
Most of the problems we are still having are caused by overwriting fixed programs with older, unfixed versions of the same programs. I actually repaired a couple of real new problems though. Yep, I introduced some new bugs. ^_^
Dinner is chinese spaghetti with a spicy japanese sauce, soy sauce with paprika, celery and ginger. Very good and not much work in it.
Tuesday 2005-11-15 ( Remarks about 270 words)
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