2022. We had a game of HIDDEN that sighted two albino or white foxes, for the first time since automatic prize awards were implemented in Gerian. Awarding the Rewardicals for the second fox crashed Gerian so we had to quickly correct the error before resuming the game.
2055. We added more HIDDEN enhancements to Gerian, doubling the size of notes from 40 to 80 characters, highlighting when several matching words for a clue and pattern were found and not just one of them that had appeared most often, allowing the stop time to be deleted to make it possible to resume data entry for a game still in progress.
2081. We added “Automatic Row Retrieve” to the Option menu in Gerian, to allow temporarily setting the data refresh status for the active window, but doing it at an ancestor menu level so it would also apply to other applications using the same library when they got recompiled.
2092. Did a couple of revisions to Gerian, moving the new Automatic Row Retrieve from the Option menu to Edit menu where it was more appropriate, later revising the assignment of column tab sequencing during querying to be more orderly and according to how the columns appeared on the screen, another global change that will also be effective for other applications when recompiled.
2103. We rebuilt MBDM to take advantage of the new Automatic Row Retrieve option, and better column tab sequencing during querying. The next day we revised the GL and Time Manager modules of MoneyBooks mainly for the same purpose. We also corrected issues with GL transaction copying, and in Time Manager the Todo form and project invoice generation.
2206. We began the next EPPMS revision, including a missing ‘%’ in the progress message displayed during IPPIS nominal and payroll import, including IPPIS ID grouping and range selection on the payroll register report generation window and introducing IPPIS ID to the employee/IPPIS id formats of the payroll register. The next day, the revision was finalized as version 5.06 due to the many changes, which included IPPIS ID in the district, pay group (large font), pay point (large font) formats of payroll register report and also updating the nominal roll and historical nominal roll reports.
2232. Made the last of four technical support visits to NRC this month. In these visits we investigated EPPMS client connection to server database issues and adjusted the ODBC connection settings to identify the name of the server computer, once we saw that the server could be pinged, before connection could quickly be established. Nominal roll and payroll for January 2021 were imported from IPPIS and updated payroll reports were generated. Today, while testing the updated EPPMS the application crashed with a system error on attempt to generate a payslip, and the client’s request that IPPIS ID should be included in more reports meant more revision work to be done before the next visit.
2265. Impressed some weeks back by its video downloading abilities, we thought recently that VideoProc would do a great job at screen recording. But we were disappointed as the rather erratic result it created was no match for what CamStudio produced some months back. However using CamStudio to record videos demonstrating Printwiser use, we quickly encountered a serious issue. After the stress of audio and video recording sometimes lasting over 30 minutes, during saving of the video it would produce an error message and halt: “File Creation Error. Unable to rename/copy audio file.” This continued even after we freed hundreds of GBs on the drive, and each time two temporary WAV files would be left behind, one just playing the audio.
Today we did troubleshooting on the situation, confirming from forum posts at their website it had to do with the size of the video file being created itself, and from watching a video linked there we saw a way to drastically reduce the file size, by adjusting frame capture and playback values from every 50 milliseconds and 20 per second, to 500 and 2. At the default settings it was saving the screen 20 times every second! As no movie was running this wasn’t necessary at all, which was why we cut it down drastically. Afterward recordings we did saved successfully and none produced a file that went as high as 1 GB that we’d seen before.
In EPPMS, we included IPPIS id grouping and range selection for payslip, to resolve the system error that occurred, then went on to do same for the current item and item history reports, changing three formats to have IPPIS id.