12-VIII-2016.
Nothing much at Firriver - just „ removed RegFN/CallFn, F#5319“ yesterday. Which is such rubbish - the RegFN/CallFn was a way for 16-bit versions of fox to call 32-bit system functions, which then didn't make any sense to still use after 1995. Yet it worked until the 64-bit systems, and now it's 2016 and I've found a few of those, in the document list handler of Feds's main form, somewhere in the freezer and a couple of other places, still there, now officially recognized as a bug. Just removed it and replaced with standard API function declaration.
Software archaeology should rank somewhere along them glorified shovel wielders.
Željko is in town. Called me on skype, then on phone, let's meet tonight in zanatlija. Hard sell for me, I'm in Čankovo then, making brandy, I'm done when I'm done, then if I manage to get there afterwards, okay. Where are you exactly, can we come sit with you? Sure, if you won't be bored, why not, here's the address.
And so they came - he, Marinko and Žorž, i.e. Zoran Žajski, the hardware and wiring expert of some local fame, whom I almost met a dozen times back in the nineties. I'm actually amazed that we never met, I guess the city was big enough, despite of our customers overlapping in several cases and us buzzing in the same computing circles.
We have already fired up the still under the apricot tree when they came. They sat at a table under the new roof, pulled out the beer they brought and then took it slowly. Chat for chat's sake. They look around, get into the ambient. At some point Žorž just utters „what a zen this is, fuckit...“. And we all agree, this silence (despite it being anything but - there's always some tractor or grinder or mower or chainsaw buzzing in the background, the storks clatter with their beaks, the church chimes in at 17:30...), this greenery, wonderful. Let your soul graze.
We stayed until ten, had two stills to do that day. But now we have proper floodlights, and we brought something to eat, we won't fall for industrial junk instead of dinner.
On thirteenth at Lena's we first visited the Chinatown, i.e. blok 70, which is some four lights up the Gagarinova. What a flea market... I made a few good shots (and in the background planned more for the next time). We got some groceries - a kilo of dry shiitake mushrooms, two liters of soy sauce, some shortgrain and yasmin rice, some more grain of which there's a photo but I can't read the label and don't recognize the contents either. We wanted to buy curry and some other spice, but it was all in vietnamese and the labels with translated declaration were sparse and all the same across the whole aisle. No clue what is what.
Then we went with Milan to a lunch on that white splav again (not this one - I picked this photo because I like how it's cozy and colorful).
On fifteenth, the initial phase of data import for some belgian university (stop right there! this already suffices for a disaster, go no further!) clinic (okay, now we're fucked). Found only the comment „this will require a lot of trimming...“ in the import routine, and that's just the small part of it, to import a list of doctors. Don't think of the rest yet.
On sixteenth we dined at Springfield because... no idea, I guess I had enough work for the day, and she was cooking tomato juice, so let's go have a pizza and a dark zaječarsko. Down in the glassbox, under a setting sun. Didn't even carry the eos40, made a couple of shots with nokla, just to remember the occasion.
On seventeenth, early in the morning, prob'ly 5:30 (the first shots I made downtown at 5:50) I met with Arpi at oma's nursing home, to take her to some checkup. He's trying to squeeze out some dole for other's help and care, on top of her retirement, which is quite close to minimum. He wasn't lucky with his either, he got a hollow dick up to [his] eyes, he should have been gettng 60000, but then he didn't fulfill the age requirement (he was 60, not 65), had just the staž (all 40), so they cut it down by some percentage, and then Vučić took another 10% (which he took from everyone) so his retirement was just 40000. And the severance package he used to pay out the debts (they were alternately under threat of losing electricity or gas) and put the rest to timed savings, which made his missus quite nervous, she could have pissed away that money. Where was I, ah, yes, he took her to that checkup, I buzzed around and made a few nice shots with the nokla, nice early summer morning, rare chance to see one. They were done in half an hour, I drove them back, done.
In the afternoon, a solid downpour. More messing with the GPTAL (gravidity, partial abortion, termination, abortion, live birth... at least one is wrong on this list). It's a combination of several fields plus answers to questionnaires with certain reporting codes, and these counts need to show up in several places, so this is a piece of code which determines how many of each outcome happened in patient's history. Complicated, screwed up, important and unreliable. The result often depends on whether clinic counts something or not, whether it counts as this or that, does it depend on the day when it happened... so it's not an exact science, it included clinic's whims, chaos. And my task was this time to find all the places where it's used, as much as possible, as the custom reports (and accompanying queries) made by clinics themselves are mostly proprietary and unreachable. The goal this time was to make it consistently display the same results everywhere - in patient header, which appears on the main page, questionnaire page, lab page and for CAAR and for SHET, both when entering answers into a questionnaire and when viewing it (and if it's an older one, then display the counts as they were then). And make sure it refreshes properly whenever some piece of information is updated, which may influence the counts... So a magnificent technicolor shit, and now go and untangle it.
On 18th they finally mortar the gonk, in some places all the way up.
At work, the enth episode of the Feds-to-portal messaging saga. Which was invented because, there, every company's portal has a way for visitors to talk to support, so we shouldn't miss out, a clinic should have that. So we added two more record types into the existing orders (yes, workorders!) and alerts (one-time, recurring, permanent, automatic, templated - some of these types by themselves, some subtypes of others), one for messages from staff to patient, one for the other direction. The fuckup was in the existing types which were somewhat similar to this, but behaved not quite the same, and Jan's code never relied on types properties - if any type would require the ability to reassign it to someone else, then just check for that property and display the reassign button or not. Nope, no such simplicity, it was list of types and subtypes in a dozen places on that almost simple little form, different lists everywhere, which meant you had to know what each ot fhese numbers meant (and subtype 5 meant a different thing for type 2 and type 3 and types 4 through 9 didn't have it, but then type 10 used subtype 3 to mean pretty much the same thing). That donkey carried more and more burden, and rarely would anyone stop to at least reshuffle the load to chafe less. A fountain of quirky bugs and endless entertainment.
Nina and I took turns to suffer this, whoever drew the shorter straw.
Having acquired a nonius already, I took the time to make a dubinomer (depth measurer) for brandy. I calculated for a cylinder of 322mm in diameter, what should the height be for a volume of one liter, two liters... to ten. I carved these notches in a chinese chopstick and used that to measure it thereafter... Except the actual diameter of the pot was 332mm, so I was off by about 6%. Didn't bother to redo, it was good enough as it were.
Mentions: 22-X-2023., Arpad Gunaroši (Arpi), CAAR, Čankovo, eos40, Feds, Firriver Fertility (Firriver), fox, gonk, Jan Brenkelen, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Marinko Protić, Milan Nastić, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), nokla, oma, SHET, splav, Springfield, staž, zanatlija, Željko Nikolović, in serbian