09-I-2009.
Morning ride, taking Lena to school, can't quite remember why. Ah, no, it's afternoon, went to pick her, because she stayed longer, the quiz team training. Though, she's still only in the preparations this year, she's in the reserve team, but that means that during this training they compete amongst themselves as if for real. Next year seriously.
The sky treated me with this incredible inky shade, and I knitted quite a series along the way. Fujica did a honest shift of work. For this scene, on the way back, I simply had to pull over and get out of the car. The then autopatch didn't quite do it right, as it tried to iron out the cloud line and bent the road and the coast. I could have fixed it, perhaps, but the then pStitch couldn't do it better, couldn't even find the connection points by itself, but one rather had to click around, for each pair of neighbors it required at least fisix points, and nope, it just didn't work. Then in 2013 I repeated that in Autostitch, which did it a bit better but still not quite right.
Did it in Hugin now and... well, one can see that fifteen years have passed, this is much more comfortable now, I see what I'll get, don't have to connect anything manually, and moving and bending I adjust on the screen, nudging the parts of the image this way or that way. And here it is.
At Nina's office it's still soft boiled. Unofficially she heard she's got the job until july, and then they plan to close that unit completely. Until then she's got the leeway to find another job. Her boss is in the same position, and it's possible that he may manage to find a place where they need two, and pull her along. And it's good, if this holds, she's got the time to gather up some reserves and find something while still salaried.
Dad is wondering why no word from Go. We talked with her yesterday, and it seems to me that she's still collecting her impressions, looks like her head is full. At least her job is stable, they say that even if the business goes bust, this unit where they make that game will always find investors interested in it, the game is a good concept and has a good chance to make decent money.
We're gradually readying ourselves for the spring and spring works. Looking at a motorka [chainsaw] to buy - in Undersville there will be a lot of it to cut down, there's barely any house without a chainsaw. If nothing else, we'd need to gather all the pines that a tornado felled. She says that in my mind I've already moved there... which I probably did. There's work to do there, we're finished here. Okay, the fence.
The plan in my head is to build a džakarta, džakara [džak=sack], ie a house made of sacks of tamped soil, where the rows are connected with barbed wire, and it needs only some smeared layer on the outside. It has to be all in arches, like an igloo, or to have a real roof. It needs a foundation too, but we already have one, it's chiseled into the slope behind the house and it's got a poured concrete frame. I imagine a terrace with a view down to the creek, and a dish antenna to project the signal down under that tree, to have a desk and a bench and laptop and to work there. That'd be a life.
The rest of sour cabbage is in the freezer, we also had sarma this week, and she made two jars of some other pickles, without vinegar, just in salt water. Lots of everything in it - peppers, cauliflower, carrots and onions, and it's really good.
Chu is somewhat ill, developed some stone - in kidney or bladder, wherever, and Nina even took her to an ex ray, and got the shot on a seedee. It must be a seedee, because the file is huge, it's in the dikom (dick-om or dye-kom, as they pronounce it here) format, which contains more information than can be displayed onscreen, so with it you also get a viewer application. The slider for the light intensity needs a lot of motion until you find the visible part of that humnogous file. We'll meet that format later again, but fortunately it won't be my job, it'll fall on Norman. If for a guinea pig you get such a shot, for various scanners - ultrasound and whatnot - it's the same, just even more so. How to extract a decent jpeg from it seems to be quite a hassle, and free solutions, which could be plugged into Feds, simply don't exist. As with all other such add-ons (in house patois nicknamed interfaces), it consumes a lot of time to try out and find which of them would cooperate nicely, which ones are studded with unnecessary gold plating to be more expensive, which ones are unstable (e.g. unresistant to changes between Windowses)... and then when one is picked, one needs to learn the ropes of their licencing scheme, add the files into the install... suffering nuisances to no end.
On top of this, Chu's talons grew, so this was a day to trim them, with, of course, a bunch of photos. In the nature the talons wear out as they grow, but here it doesn't scuttle over stones, it's all soft, nothing to grind them against. And for her stone she got some drops, to be administered two or three times a day, and these are no chemistry at all, it's something based on angelica, which I recognized as the mysterious ingredient I smelled in some curry ketchup we had in the summer 1973, and in the fragrance of that bangladeshian restaurant in Vienna (v. 06-X-1990.), just that I didn't know the name of the plant then. I do love that smell, it was also in that portorož curry back in 1977, and no other curry ever after. Actually found it recently, when the Kroger on Nimmo closed and that roman-asian grocery opened in that space, they had some tamarind chutney with that taste, but when they sold the initial stock, within a couple of months after opening, they suddenly reduced the assortment and that chutney never reappeared.
At the squad meeting in Firriver, Jan says the method which George introduce to keep user's settings in exemel format led to quite a slowdown, because accessing any piece of it executes lots of code, and debugging became near impossible (see who's talking, he doesn't ever use a debugger) in 5.3, while it was a snap in 5.2... and it can't be in exemel files, it must be stored in the database, that's per user, we can't store that on disk because it always raises problems about who has the rights to write and where. There George and Jan went into a lengthy technical debate, and it turned out that for debugging he uses the coverage log, which writes into a log each line as it's executed, which is already slow as it is... George didn't relent, said „there are at least a hundred things, out of which 95 you wrote, that need to be done clean, with priority higher than this“. David is in Brittany at some „tear meeting“, pulled a raincheck. For encryption we used something fom Zytek, which is going out of business, does that concern us, the code doesn't know that it's authorless now.
The settings thing was a great advantage for the app, and a big shit at the same time. A heap of things could be set this way or other, and some of those had their controls in the settings form, e.g. language, format of numbers, dates, times, and then there were those which we wrote manually into the one record in the s_settings table. On top of that, there were many things memorized for each user - positions and sizes of windows etc. Which is a mighty powerful thing on one side, and are expected that an app which costs so much should have them, and on the other side is done very badly in the code, it's not one object with hundred properties, these are public variables, whose names then have to be very long to avoid incidental overlapping with names of some other things, which would be a big trouble. I have added something similar to George's piece, just without exemel, switched back to the same old .ini format which was in use before, which is much faster and shorter than exemel, and thus avoided the check in hundred places whether a variable exists (which had to be checked), it would get a default value if not defined yet... and achieved that eventually we had that big object with settings... and a hundred global variables. It works, but the code didn't get any prettier nor neater than before. I gave up, you can't change the whole team's habits.
For upFeds I „added the #DEFINE hBuild line for automated builds“ - the line in start.prg which gets updated automagically, by overwriting the existing line (so it's a programmatic kneading of source code on the run, just like I did fifteen years ago, and that should appear in the bottom right corner of app's main form's status bar, so whenever we launch Feds anywhere, regardless of how we watch it, we immediately know which version is it running. The additional nicety is that the fourth part of the version number is increased automatically, and since it's actually just ordinary text, we can adjust it manually, from, say, 5.3.1.14 to 5.3.2.0 whenever we feel like it, without any specialized tool, simply edit the line, and the upFeds will mark the next build as 5.3.2.1 etc etc.
Mentions: 06-X-1990., Wienerschule, Chu, David Berton, Feds, Firriver Fertility (Firriver), Fujica, George Whiteley, Gorana Sredljević (Go), Jan Brenkelen, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), Nevena Sredljević (Nina), Norman Shen, sarma, Undersville, upFeds, in serbian
6-VIII-2024 - 7-VIII-2024