Doctoral thesis extension granted

Following the exchange of emails with my doctoral supervisor a few days ago, I received a formal note from the manager of the doctoral programme, saying that the [external] examiners have agreed to grant me an extension for a few months in order to collect additional data that should bolster my research findings. I now have to submit no later than early April, although I imagine that I won't wait until the final day. I also have to fork out for half a year's tuition fee, although I suppose that it's only fair.

Early this morning whilst walking the dog, I had the idea of updating the 'time line of events' table for the new case study with specific references to my proposed model. For example, the first entry was 'Letter explaining the general idea' - this has now been extended to 'Letter explaining the general idea, setting forth the mission statement', where 'phrasing the mission statement' is the first step in the model. It occurs to me as I write these words that this is yet another forward reference (as it is called in the formal definition of the Pascal programming language), as the time line appears in section 7.4 whereas the model appears in the following chapter, section 8.4.

I also expanded what I had written a few days ago in describing the new enhancement by referring to the Kanban model and even including a few academic references. There are many papers that I could have chosen from; I suppose that I should read more than a few lines of one of these papers in order to find the canonical reference.

On Wednesday I wrote most of the 'work order reporter' program that will take a 'kanban number' and optional quantity and report the production. I had a problem trying to figure out what the current quantity should be if there is only a partial report (i.e. not the entire quantity of the work orders). Fortunately my test work orders had an example where the quantity of the work order was not the same as the quantity of the work order for the kanban part, so I could test my program fully. I only solved the problem when I printed out the program and worked on it away from the computer.

I still have one program to write; this will be part of the general work order generator (not the kanban generator), where a kanban part will be substituted for a parallel part that the configurator has built. This probably won't mean much to anyone outside of my company, and I'm not sure that anyone inside will understand either. It's a hairy problem, but definitely feasible. I wrote something similar in our previous ERP program 20 years ago. I hope that I will have suitable data tomorrow so that I can work on this prior to the development committee's next meeting on Monday.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
21	17/12/2005	The Brief and The Book	TV series, Van der Graaf Generator
786	17/12/2014	Seasonal greetings	Jewish holidays
1567	17/12/2022	Doctoral thesis extension granted	DBA