January 17, 1996
Dear Everyone:
Just got my first
official electronic
junk mail on the
Internet last night.
When I saw that I had mail, I naturally assumed that it was a Note from
my friend, PSU00012@ODIN.CC.PDX.EDU.
(Translation, my old high school buddy who’s taking classes at
Portland State University.
Students are required to have E-mail ID’s so the teachers can
communicate with them easily.
Things have changed since I lugged two dictionaries in a backpack
all over PSU.)
This, however, was
from some business looking for people wanting to make extra money in
their spare time. Query:
What exactly is “spare time”?
Things have been
fairly q-u-i-e-t at work this week, the “Livermore” Server crashing
Sunday night notwithstanding; and I’ve been able to spend a little bit
of time working on some
Versatile
Report Formats that RACS wants.
Specifically, a report that lists all Departments with all the
Record Series each Department has.
Also, all Record Series showing the Departments that use them.
I
thought this would be fairly easy.
You tell Versatile,
“If the Series ID is less than, or greater than, “blank”, print
the information here. If the
Entry is less than, or greater than, “End of Report”, go back up to the
top and read the instructions there.
Otherwise, make a page break and end.”
Now, you could
follow directions like those, couldn’t you?
If this, do this, if not, do that.
Versatile, however, has
other ideas. Depending on
exactly how I wrote out the instructions (the technical term for this is
“program”), it would either generate the report and then go wandering
off into limbo; or, it would
generate the report and then merrily spit out additional blank pages
until whole forests were devoured or I stopped it, whichever came first.
The danged reports would not
end!
After about ten
different tries, I decided, “Oh, %&$* it!
I’ll do it another way.”
I created a report that would generate a flat file, without any
“if statements” for Versatile
to get lost in. Then I
imported the flat file into
Paradox,
which is a database software.
However, Paradox
didn’t want to import. It
gave a message that “an error has occurred” with further information
that something was wrong with line #354.
Now, here’s the “paradox”.
The file is so big that I can’t look at it in plain, old
DOS Edit.
The only way I can look at it, is if I import it into Paradox.
Only I can’t import it into Paradox because I can’t see what’s
wrong with line #354 and fix it.
So we try something
else. I went into
Versatile and scrolled through the Record Series until I got near
#354 and there it was.
Someone had entered a description of PORTFOLIO “B”.
When importing a file, Paradox regards a quote mark (“) as the
word of God. That “B” was
what threw it. And you could
bet this wasn’t the only Series with “quote” something in it.
Problem is, there’s
more than 21,000 Series in
Versatile, which is one reason why RACS wants the reports.
A lot of them are duplicates.
So I did another end run to find the Record Series that had those
pesky little quote marks in them and got them cleared up.
By this time, it was near closing at “Livermore”, so I still
haven’t got the reports done, but isn’t it great that I have the time
for all this?
Movies...
Last week “Jeannie”
and I went down to Blackhawk to see
Sense and
Sensibility, starring
Emma Thompson
and everybody you’ve seen on
Masterpiece
Theatre in the last five years.
This is a fine film, based on one of
Jane Austen’s
novels. The production
values, sets, costumes are all first rate, as is the acting.
The producers seem bent on out Merchant-and-Ivory-ing
Merchant and
Ivory. And it’s nice to
see Alan Rickman,
who has played so many great villains (Die
Hard, Robin Hood, Prince of
Thieves), portray a noble hero-type without being a complete
wimp.
By the way, I see on
the Internet that
Sir Ian McKellan is coming out with a film version of Shakespeare’s
Richard
III. It’s set in
1930’s London, so it looks like it will be similar to the production we
saw him in here in San Francisco a couple of years ago.
Annette
Bening,
Robert Downey, Jr., and
Maggie Smith
co-star. Can’t wait.
Love, as always,
Pete
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