Mindy's Programming Journey

Today is my birthday.  And I began to wonder if my birthday has evenly fallen on each day of the week... If leap years didn't exist, your birthday would march through the week one day each year and given knowledge of which day of the week you were born, you could figure out which day of the week your birthday is on. For example ( yes, this lady is going to reveal her age! ), born on a Friday and today is birthday #58.  So 58 mod 7 is 2;  Friday + 2 = Sunday!   That's interesting, by the non-leap year calculation, I should have celebrated my birthday on 9 Saturdays, 9 Sundays, 8 Mondays, 8 Tuesdays, 8 Wednesdays, 8 Thursdays and 8 Fridays. <sarcastic news flash>   Leap Years do exist and 2000 was a leap year ( divisible by 400 ) My birthday falls before Leap Day (2/29) so my birthday has been affected by leap days 14 times. (next year, it will be 15). My early morning paper journal entry was doodling to figure out how many times my birthday has occurre...

  I missed a day...  Yesterday was busy with personal appointments.  However I did manage to get a couple hours in to add test data needed for overnight batch job testing so I could move forward today Today was just a slog through it day of testing. I did have to remember how to convert a string to uppercase in objectect   string = $ZCONVERT(string,"u") I did not learn much else today. Need to spend some time tonight (or first thing tomorrow) putting together a list of what I need from other team members to get this testing completed.

 ( I'm trying to really get in the habit of writing something each day - even when it's been a "quiet" day) Today was the day to set up the Task Schedule on the conversion server.  Not difficult, just 17 background job settings to copy from the current production server to the conversion server. Luckily for me, I have mastered the art of Windows snipping tool to create a working document. The more exciting part of my day was reading through (ok, skimming) 100 pages of handwritten notes (chronological "dairy") of my conversion journey.  The answer I was looking for was on page 84 (or there abouts - the pages aren't numbered). I can hear people asking, why didn't you document it digitally?  That way you could search for the procedure you need.  Well, my brain would have cleaned up the notes if I kept them digitally and then coming back to them  Gotta love the notebooks from the Intersystems Global conferences.  It's been my conversion diary.

 I decided to start off 2024 with some conversion testing while no one else was "in the office".  I work remotely but with most everyone relaxing on January 1st, I knew I would have the conversion server to myself. I decided to work on a time-consuming (but not difficult) testing task.  I have 16 pre-defined load scenarios.  Most generate one or more errors.  A few are actually meant to be successful data loads. First up, an empty file (no headers, no data).  Expected an error but I didn't think it was supposed to be this one:   System Error - Unable to open FILEOUT file  Maybe I remembered the error message incorrectly so I tried sample 2 - a file with just the headers and no data to load.  :(  Same error. Well, time to go digging and figure out what it going on.  FILEOUT is used by the loads and the reports.  All of the application reports have been tested so FILEOUT exists.  Maybe it's a permissions issue? Off to t...

Friday found me hunting and pecking around in manuals looking for functions and commands I needed to attempt previous Global Master code golf challenges. After a few hours, the hunting became tiring.  So my goal for this week became to read the Using ObjectScript manual  Today I began reading (a warm sunny day made reading a good choice).  The first five chapters are almost complete.  Lots of notes and highlights.  Tomorrow's goal is to run the manual examples to verify that I really understand what I read. There are a couple gotcha areas that I really need to test a few ways to make sure I see all the pitfalls. Feels like I'm back in school.  It's been a long time.

 Not all side roads lead to nowhere.  Sometimes the fun of an off the beaten track road leads you to new insights. While trying to decide which way to turn next in my quest to re-write the company application in Objectscript, an email from Global Masters arrived.  After guessing (incorrectly) on the Quiz (it was a health share related question I know nothing about but a chance for 15 points is worth a guess), I came across a new codeGolf challenge.  I've seen these before but since I didn't have the first clue about ObjectScript, I always skipped them. Today seemed like a good day to learn a little more ObjectScript and the challenge was interesting and not too complicated. Write a class method to accept two strings and determine if they are an anagram.  The challenge is to write it in the fewest number of characters - which usually leads to less than maintainable/human readable code.  I wasn't after the prize of fewest characters; I was on a quest to write...