10-IV-2007.
The Janome embroidery machine arrived. It's actually a robot disguised as a sewing machine, fully programmable. Basically a plotter, except it uses thread to make lines and fill the areas. The logic is, hence, somewhat different, it has to cut any curves into a sufficient number of straight lines, and the line should be uninterrupted, it's a sign of weak programming if the user has to clip the ends afterwards.
That part seems to have been resolved long ago. It's the GUI of the accompanying app (which we got bundled with it for bare 2000$ or so - the app itself would have cost 1200 separately) was somewhat confusing, unclear in places, prone to get unresponsive and seemingly stuck while it recalculates the next preview, but it got the job done. The app developed interestingly in the following years - the owner changed, merged it with another similar app, went on with programming and gradually made it faster, more nimble, and easier to use, while keeping the updates free. The app will eventually be the only reason we kept her Toshiba running, despite it having just a windows extea.
A week later she started experimenting and drew an image of a bird for a small pillow case. This pillow became a synonym for my afternoon catnap, I'd simply park it anywhere on the carpet and doze off my 10 or 15 minutes. A real conditioning, I feel sleepy as soon as I see it.
I see I got a version of my temp table closing class in the directory for Paige, so there was still some work for him going on.
On UA, someone from Philippines was asking about how to get an H-1B. Well, too late, pal, the quota for 2007 was filled a week ago. In another thread, about C#:
I see increased complexity in .NET. m$ thinks they should take the bloatware idea from Office and apply it to programming. When you try to put everything under the sun in one package, the complexity will, by default, increase.
A colleague of mine, who did take a longer look at dot net, commented something along the lines of "so we're what, supposed to go back to Cobol days? It takes you two pages to say 'good morning' again!"
(that colleague would be Marinko)
At Firriver, Fred, the current project manager, says „ If you have some down time with regards to CAAR/SHET we may have something for you to do. James was working on a few SFBC forms that were to be generated in HTML format. He's done most of them but had some questions for them with regards to some of the data, ie. where should it be pulled from, but then he left. You're familiar with HTML, would this be something you can polish up?“. The point here is that I absolutely don't remember this, or anything that would look like „html forms“. Whatever it was, it must have been one of the early attempts by SFBC to offload filling their endless forms to the patients. Their staff being too expensive to do that, and their forms being really huge - later I saw one with 700 questions. Even later I found out that there's never 700 answers, there's a lot of conditionals, e.g. if the reply to 34th question is positive, then answer questions 35 through 42, else go straight to 43, and the like.
This is, more or less, where I got into the magical world of medical records aka progress notes, both misnomers but handy, because the word ’questionnaire‘ doesn't sit right in english.
I see I was checking some drivers on nezavisni, after having already installed bbLean and TotalCmd on it. The drivers all require softpaq.exe, whatever that may be. The spelling may indicate that there may be some of the Compaq's tech inside, those guys were weird. And I'm viewing this text file still using Dave Buerg's Lister from 1988 :).
Mentions: CAAR, Firriver Fertility (Firriver), James Olsen, Majkrosoft (m$), Marinko Protić, nezavisni, Paige S Stevenson, SFBC, SHET, TotalCmd, UbiquAgora (UA), in serbian