Silvija's first birthday, of which I had to be reminded. Not that I don't remember when or where, I don't even remember that we were present(... 6 words...) in those weird streets between Groš and Gradnulica, behind the smaller cemetery (which now also includes the transfered jewish cemetery). I guess Višnja's son was with them all the time, probably almost school age.
Around then it occurred that in some metal works firm a machine was getting really slow... I think that was the shop where Marinko worked then. Met him almost by accident, and didn't quite memorize too well, because he was in the engineer bureau in the back of the yard, some 20m beyond the HQ building. We didn't have anything to do with engineers, our applications were for accounting, but they invited us to help a bit, so Grgi and I dropped by some two-three times and explained stuff. Because they were engineers, but of machine kind, and the computers were quite a novelty to them, and they were eager to learn and really pressed on with it. I almost forgot that episode.
The slow machine. Turned out the cause was threefold. First, it was an ordinary ex tea, running at 10 or 12 megahertz. Second, the disk compression (later renamed to a correct term, defragmentation, but then we used PičiTulz [PC Tools] which called it so) was never done at all. We ran it for a few hours. The speed gain wasn't much... because Sale's generator had created, for each mask, several files - one to draw the frames and labels, one to show the current record, one to draw the fields for entry/editing, one to open tables, one for each validation, one to check the record before saving, one to check the whole document (if group entry), ditto for deletions... with bunch of other stuff. One file for each level and branch of the menu, two per report (one to prepare the data, the other the report itself in some fox's internal format)... Here, three days ago I poked a few things in that gas meter readout app, and with its 14 quite simple masks that it had, it totaled 284 files in the archive... And we didn't archive everything, there were scrap files, report results and whatnot too. Well in this case the app was the materials accounting, with lots of logic in it, and its directory contained some fifteen hundred files. The fuckup is that the machine ran Dos 3.1, which reads the directories sequentially. Now while a mask is being drawn, fox opens each of the files for it, one by one, and doesn't build a list of seen files, because that's not its job, Dos opens the files, which then finds them by reading, on the average, some 750 filenames until finding the file it needs, times ten or fifteen files per mask. Of course it was slow.
There I got myself thinking to rework the generator so that all those routines which make a mask be in one file per mask. Which I did get done, some time during winter, but then there was a problem that Sale kept on using the old version (and so did Brata, Blaža, Grgi). Because we didn't have any central server in the firm where to keep the meritory versions, all the machines were temporarily present until sold. Which meant we had spanking new and fresh machines at all times, and stayed out of sync. The mind of the firm was on floppies, and everyone carried his own set.
22-V-2023 - 31-X-2025