[ct-user] b2r9 - r2b9 problem

[Steve Dove]

Greetings All,

Firstly, my gratitude to all who have responded either via the group or
directly.  Thank You!

After frantically grovelling and finding a way around my problem and
rescuing my log, I set about figuring out what the problem actually was, in
the event it may help someone else down the line.  Unlikely, however, since
nobody would consciously do this to themselves . . .

The root problem  -  both causing the bizarre time offsets in the logs and
the inability to B2R/R2B the logs succesfully to perform correction  -  was
that I did not realise that the two 'puters were running different versions
of CT (9.27 and 9.37).  The BAT file in one of them had been re-pointed to
the earlier version's directory for some reason.  Oh, well, lesson learnt.
Thanks to Chas 'WW for highlighting that possibility.

This combination created what I can only describe as 'mish-mash' logs;  the
logs from the 'run and 'mult' 'puters were identical, only despite them
being both set to the same time their relative contributions were 7 hours
adrift.  Imagine the mess . . . anyway it only took a little bit of 'C' to
straighten out the RES file, saner than doing it by hand.

Then, to my agony, CT barfed on the re-BINned file.  The nightmare
continued.

The B2R9 (Apr. 22 '94) and R2B9 (July 20 '94) conversion utilities current
on the web site work perfectly well with:

clean 9.27 logs
clean 9.37 logs
mish-mash 9.27 / 9.37 logs generated from the 9.37 machine,

but NOT on
mish-mash 9.27 / 9.37 logs made on the 9.27 machine.

Go figure. This morning I went back over to Dale's and made a bunch of test
BINs on the machines to verify this, in addition to last weekend's files.
So I wasn't mad after all.

Software notoriously has ill- or undefined affordances and constraints
making 'user error' a lurking likelyhood;  throw in 'Version Roulette' and
it's virtually guaranteed.  Add in inattentiveness and it's certain.

Again, many thanks for all your help,

        73        Steve        W3EEE  /  G3YDV


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