11033. Some days ago, an EPPMS managerial user requested for an update to produce a report of retirees in a designated PENCOM format. On checking EPPMS we saw that a similar PENCOM report was implemented in 2016 so today we revised the code to add more years in the output, tested it against an office copy of NRC’s database, ready for running at NRC with or without modifications.
11044. At NRC we generated the report of retirees for 2021 and 2022 in the PENCOM format, using the Interactive SQL utility to execute the report generation code in the database. This utility version could output in Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet format, and we converted these to Microsoft Excel versions.
11066. Performed the first of several enhancements to Gerian Assistant, showing the number of red, silver and white foxes on the title bar of the Game summary section of the HIDDEN Form while a new HIDDEN game was in progress, as shown in the image above. Other enhancements later in the month include:
- Beeping when more than one words were found for a clue, to further draw attention to this.
- Displaying the word copied with newlines in full instead of a marker.
- Sorting the summary section of the the Rewardicals summary report in descending order of Rewardicals (instead of category ascending order).
- Disabling automatic retrieve for the HIDDEN Word List, now that there are over four thousand words.
- Automatically resizing the Gerian window when adding a new game so the HIDDEN form could be visible with the TripleClicks HIDDEN webpage at the same time.
- Automatically converting the slash (/) in the word pattern, resulting from failure to press shift key properly, to ? to save on re-entry time due to no match being found.
- Automatically copying the word that matched the given pattern, removing the need to first press the Copy button before pasting on the webpage.
11114. During the support visit to NRC today, October payroll from IPPIS was imported, backed up and posted in EPPMS, a comparative report was generated for July to September, and we investigated discrepancies a supervisor reported between EPPMS payroll totals for gross and deductions and those in the extracted IPPIS spreadsheet for January and February.
11221. On EPPMS we finalized the database admin work begun days earlier—ensuring that the gross produced from posted records for all the months this year was the same with the monthly backups—then upgraded EPPMS to version 5.23 that allowed for aborting IPPIS payroll import as well as specifying the columns in the spreadsheet that should be ignored, like those for gross pay and net pay that were not individual allowance and deduction items.
11243. Every time HIDDEN is played on a laptop or desktop computer since the HIDDEN feature was implemented in Gerian in August 2020, the user would usually first reduce the Gerian window to a narrow one by the left so that the TripleClicks HIDDEN webpage would be visible on the right size of the screen as well, for easier copying and pasting of text between them. Today we automated this process by implementing two new features on the Option menu, being able to save the desired Gerian window position and size, and then automatically resizing and positioning the window when adding a new HIDDEN game.
11254. During the last visit to NRC this month, we updated both the EPPMS application and database files on the computer then transferred six February backups from different years to a flash drive.
11276. When typing the word pattern on the HIDDEN form the user sometimes failed to press the shift key properly, resulting in / instead of ?, and a no-match, so today we revised Gerian to automatically convert the / to ? to save on entry time.
11291. We made the final speed boost change on the HIDDEN game form in Gerian this month, automatically copying the word that matched the given pattern and clue, when it was just one word, which was most of the time. No need to click the Copy button before moving to and pasting the word on the HIDDEN webpage like has been the practice for so many months.