03-VII-2013.
Around 11:30, Lena skyped me a question: how fast could she learn programming? And if so, where to start?
After thinking a while I opted for javascript, because you can get some results within minutes, and you don't need any tools apart from what you already have - a text editor and a browser. I ftp'd her (using, probably, sGradlj.com as the repository for the day) the js bible (the old one which mentions Netscape 4 a lot), plus some other stuff I had accumulated over the years (hamster I am).
Most of the photos for the day are the four kittens (Vanilla, Šanta, and I forgot the two other names) lazing or climbing the stack of planks on the terrace, or Donald with the seasonal wounds. This time he had a gash on top of the cheek near the right eye, and his left eye was almost fully covered in transparent goo (made a good shot but it's ugly to see). The eye healed in a couple of weeks. He's so thin and sleek, yet his tail is bushy as a squirrel's.
On the job, did some special handler for an interface in cryogenics, when a foreign machine would detect a RFID of a vial/straw/whatever and would serve us a xml file somewhere. Haven't heard about it later (writing this in may the year after). The guy did brag how this is a REST technology, i.e. we don't give a fuck about any sleazy database, we'll just scan the whole tank each time you ask for something, you get current data each time. Now if you want to make sense of that, or track the items, you may need to have a database on your side, we don't mind.
The next day, an attempt to install a spellchecker in Feds... which eventually worked. Or was it somewhere else? Eh, no, this is where we called Word's dialog. In the background we'd create a temporary document, fill it with the current text, and submit that to check the spells (did your magic wand misfire? funny language the english), and the dialog which would appear would be made visible. It worked somehow, not the only place where we used Word, but was more trouble than it was worth, it's the m$. So we soon started rolling our own, in pure fox. Okay, not completely our own, I found a ready made, by one of the three Czech guys from UA, don't remember which one, maybe the one who became a she meanwhile.
That was even less easy, because the dialog would appear in a loop (!), i.e. whenever it would spot a suspect word, and would then do whatever the user decided to do (pick a replacement from a list, accept a typed correction, optionally accept the word into its dictionary), then find the next one. The hard part was to abandon that loop and do it in a simpler manner, and also to migrate the internal dictionary into a table in our database... um, there was loads of work to do. But in the end it worked, though I seriously doubt it saw much use. Either it was perfect or nobody used it - regardless, we had no bugs reported on it.
And the guys from the AC repair shop called, just when the warranty for the AC was expiring. Except... they called to tell me it was expiring, and to offer me to switch to them for maintenance. Yup, how do you know that it's now, I had no dealings with you, didn't even take your calling card (but the guy from Alo-alo stapled it to the receipt nevertheless, to make it look official like). I greeted them with a fuckoff note, and to tell the guy who gave them my number that this is not the way to do it, and whatever money I spent in his shop he can just frame and hang on the wall to remember, it's the last he'll ever get from me.
Mentions: Donald, Feds, fox, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Majkrosoft (m$), sGradlj.com, UbiquAgora (UA), in serbian
18-V-2014 - 22-II-2026