Reply to: test please delete

[NickFitz]

Shopping done!

I had a personal Nectar Price on Pukka steak slices but they didn’t have any

In fact, they never do have any at Not-as-Big. There’s an empty box on the shelf, but I’m starting to think it’s the same one every week. They just dust it occasionally and leave it there to make customers think it’s their own fault and they should have got there earlier

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

There’s some bands of cloud towards parts of the horizon but it’s generally a blue sky out there. There’s a bit of a breeze though, so the current 8°C “feels like” 2°; and the 11° due later is expected to accompany “rainy conditions” before teatime. The barometers are down a touch at 997/1005mB

I don’t need much shopping and could get away without going for any at all. But popping down the road to Not-as-Big Sainsbury’s will give the car a chance to get warm, and help keep the battery topped up after a fairly chilly week, so I’ll do that in a bit

[DoctorStrangelove]

Morning.

Friday.

Damp.

Grey.

Dreary.

Sunless.

Saw a small patch of blue sky.

Chilly in here at 14.3 deg, 12.5 in the kitchen, 11.5 in the leanto.

1006.5 mBar, 29.722 in Hg, 754.9 Torr, 14.598 psi, (down from 1008 last night), 61% RH (Lidl electric).

Meanwhile on the 3rd of March 2020 there was much discussion of Irish forebears, birth certificates, and passports from LM & NF, whilst Brillo popped in to contribute another grandfather.

[WTFH]

Morning all
Overcast but warm out, the clouds are thinning. Could be pleasant day - I'd almost suggest temperatures in the teens later.

[NickFitz]

Tonight’s only telly was the rest of the Traffic Cops I started yesterday, with more lorries coming to grief. I think there was a Crouch Recovery wrecker there for one of them, in the more recent white livery with orange trim, but they didn’t show it clearly

And in The Forgotten Soldier, they’ve gone from Kharkiv to the Eastern Front - and then all the way back to Kharkiv, with the Front coming along for the ride and frequently almost catching up with them

Goodnight all

[WTFH]

Major discussion with the powers that be this evening, resulting in permission being granted for a change of car. Now waiting for a few dealer prices. One slight delay may be that I wait until April when the “luxury car threshold” goes up to £50k, but I’ll wait to see what offers they come back with.

[NickFitz]

Tea: spag bol. Very nice

[NickFitz]

Another week done! Only two more working weeks this year!

Today was quite interesting, though it didn’t involve any progress on the thing we’re working on. The service we tend to has a view which displays large tables of data about stuff, and also allows the data on display to be downloaded as an Excel spreadsheet. I’d assumed up till now that this was the usual "spit out a CSV” thing, but no, it actually constructs a proper spreadsheet, with formulae in it and so on!

Anyway, the problem is that for certain datasets, the data in the download had an extra row which didn’t appear on the screen. The important values in these extra rows (we’ve identified two different sets of data it happens with so far) are all zero, so no calculations are getting messed up. But obviously it’s an undesirable state of affairs, particularly as nobody is sure if the row in question should also be seen on screen, or shouldn’t be in the spreadsheet

So I went digging into what it was up to… and discovered, to my great dismay, that the code to build the dataset shown on screen and that to build the dataset in the spreadsheet don’t seem to share a single line! There are two completely separate chunks of code, each of which is supposed to be presenting the same representation of the underlying data; and now they aren’t

Also, one of these chunks is the horrendous piece of spaghetti we had to look at for other purposes recently, which is almost completely incomprehensible and was written by people who left years ago

And, of course, we aren’t allowed to download the entire database to work with locally or connect directly to the database server because it’s Official Sensitive, so the only way to investigate is to shell into the hotfix web server and poke at things from the command line there

I managed to get down to a level where I could grab a copy of the SQL that’s generated in each case, and confirm the disparity in results. But as one case also relies on three chained DB views, rather than going to the source table directly, and both of them do loads of aggregation involving other tables, it’s still a bit of a nightmare to work through; and then one has to understand how the high level ORM code caused it to generate that SQL. But I’ve left that info for my colleague, and I wish her luck in trying to solve it tomorrow - if only because she’s off on Monday so if she doesn’t, I’ll have to try to work it out then!

[ladymuck]

Afternoon all

Dull, overcast, damp. Currently 14 degrees ('feels like' 12) and that's the high for the day. Might be some rain later. Barometer at 1013 mBar.

Sunrise 07:39; Sunset 15:58 GMT

Busy morning. Meetings, emails, etc.

HWMBO is off out this evening which leaves me opportunity to catch up on the TV I like.

[NickFitz]

Lunch: one of the mildly spicy chicken thighs from the other night, cold, and a bag of plain crisps

The day continues grey with a bit of a breeze

[sadkingbilly]

Oh! Way before my time

I'll add a and a for my general cluelessness

[DoctorStrangelove]

Morning.

Thursday.

Grey.

Dark.

Dank.

Dreary.

Drizzly.

Misty.

Can't see across the valley.

Chilly in here at 13.9 deg, 12 in the kitchen, 11.5 in the leanto.

1009 mBar, 29.79 in Hg, 756.8 Torr, 14.63 psi, (down from 1011 last night), 57% RH (Lidl electric).

Meanwhile on the 3rd of March 2020 NF made the mistake of only buying one replacement lightbulb from the shop across the way, I related the tale of the exploding EveryReady el cheapo tungsten lightbulbs, LM popped in with a link to the building of the old Severn Bridge on Timewatch, scruff popped in, AndyGarbs popped in.

Lunch: brunch. Entertainment: The Infinite Monkey Cage: Eels. No mention was made of hovercraft. .

Word of the day: "prolicide". Sadly it doesn't mean offing proles. .

Tea: beans on toast etc.

Entertainment: PM <click>

Freecell. Lost the last game & gave up.

Mindscape (2013) with Mark Strong and Brian Cox. It was rather good.

[WTFH]

Morning all
Light cloud, although I could still see stars through it when we went out earlier and the temp was 11C. Phew, what a scorcher.

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

It’s a grey start out, though with some gaps in the overcast hither and yon and no sign of the drizzle mentioned by the weather app. Positively boiling too, being 11°C with a goal of 13° - though it’s also breezy so only “feels like” 5°. The barometers have calmed down a little and settled back to 999/1007mB

[NickFitz]

Tonight’s reading was more of The Forgotten Soldier, in which he’s had a thoroughly miserable time on a supply convoy to Minsk and then another to Kharkiv in the middle of winter. But now they’ve been told they’re carrying on to the Russian Front, so I daresay that’ll seem like the days of wine and roses soon enough

Thursday tomorrow!

Goodnight all