Mindy's Programming Journey

  Back at it today, Tuesday 9th of January  (yesterday was a personal day - in which [amongst other errands] I paid off our mortgage!) The afternoon of testing was mostly good.  I was able to knock out several stories that remained on the testing list leaving one for my co-worker.  Tonight I received two emails of errors/questions that just about sent me over the edge.  Lesson 1:  never reply in the heat of the moment.  Put your head down, evaluate the question regarding functionality and reply in a professional manner to the question.  Ignore any tendencies to comment on lack of screenshots and testing detail. Lesson 2:  keep a paper journal where you can rant away!  And RANT, Rant, rant!  Maybe tomorrow you can compose a professional reminder after testing methodology.  Or maybe not.  Maybe you just "Let it go" Before I started writing this post, I had a few moments to decide if I was going to document my rant in a googl...

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...