Twonyninth of october. Writing on sezam:
Local government in Zrenjanin was given to SPS by means of three guys voting against, and one (former president of local government) abstained from voting. The local radio was, btw, handed over a month ago, some ten days before the Regulation. Since overyester (two days ahead of this re-vote) they stopped broadcasting even B92 in the morning and evening, because they „can't be responsible for editorial policies of others; they stopped broadcasting everything else since under new boss. Every morning begins with a wave of narodnjaci... the darkness.
And on sezam there's the big regrouping over the new Information law, copies are sent, the management keeps mum and plays dead, just every now and then they delete some message (which may have started happening next year).
I see in the Kosta some doc file, with „part two“ in the name, and by directory name it belongs to Go, about 370K, must be her matricular paper. The directory nae begins with „c:\W97B\DESKTOP\“... oooowch. I still haven't settled upon any firm ordering on my disk, but rather stuck to m$'s advice to save files to ikonostas. Just like many other things they came up with, aimed at hiding the complexity of the filesystem from the users, this one works up to ten or twenty and then backfires, becomes an obstacle, and the user wastes more and more time trying to find his files. Pretty soon I'll begin seeing ikonostases with even two hundred icons...
And them windowses 97, it never existed. It's a 95 with second batch of patches, which someone dealt out as a 97, even printing floppy labels with exactly that number in the logo. It's entirely possible that it was m$ itself who did that, and later claimed it didn't, it wouldn't be the first time that their left doesn't know what their right does, or that they're simply lying.
There's a file somewhere on my disk, dated twonyninth, of which I only wrote down the date but not the location nor even name, in my notes, but it must have been an UA thing, as the note goes „UA navigator and how I worked around it“. And who knows whether I'll ever find it again... No matter, I clearly remember what this trick was: for us, the viewers with cheaper tickets (v. Alan Ford), Alphonse wrote an offline reader, something like what Sor was for sezam. Now he and the site make a living on subscribing, i.e. paying members, he saw to it that what the paying members get is not available to the non-paying. Of the few advantages of subscription, the only one that mattered to me was the ability to search through old messages. Which worked great online, but now what with these offline messages, anyone will have these on disk... He solved that problem by encrypting the tables, and decrypted it inside the app.
The procedure was like this: I dial sezam (or now post office or, rather, Beotel), then run this navigator app, in it I click the exchange button, it uploads what I wrote, downloads whatever was written since the last time, and then I hang up. And then browse through the messages at ease, reply at will. But then it'd delete messages older than a certain number of days, ummmm, what now, what if I wanted something that was in them, go search online, day by day? Well will not pass so... I thought of a trick.
Namely, the app (and the whole site as well, anyway) was written in fox, 5,0 at the time, and packed as an executable, an egze. But then, this being fox, the code is not compiled into raw machine code, it's pea code, which is practically a list of calls to routines in the runtime library, and when the exe is launched, it first loads this runtime... But then fox itself already has it loaded, all of that runtime, and then it can run the exe just like it would run any of its own scripts. So I could run some of my code before calling that app... and in that code I had set the F12 as a hotkey which should launch the debugger, and then let it run the navigator. And lo and behold, it worked - when the thing opens and decrypts everything, I press F12. Then while the code is suspended in the debugger, I see all those tables in decrypted state... and make a copy on the side, done.
Too bad that I can't find it anymore, at least that wrapper script - everything else I soon deleted, because it turned out that the messages are accumulating and taking up a sizable chunk of disk space, which was scarce, never had enough of it, so delete. For as much of this digital trove that I have from the nineties, there's even more of it that was gone, because I had to delete it, to have space for the daily work... So this is gone, except that one file which I can't find anymore.
On sixth I finally touched upon the vpm, seeing in its directory few libraries changed (and why are they all in its root directory, shouldn't that be somehow spread around?) and immediately after that I tried to redo the dijeta in it. Do the heavy stuff first, that one has a few really complicated forms. Not too logically convoluted (though the recipes are composed recursively, as mayonnaise may be an ingredient, and yet has an assembly list of its own), but with a rich set of fields. The first thing that bothered me right away was the four filenames restricted to just four characters - it stuck to the 8.3 scheme, and out of the eight, first one HAD to be an S, the next three was the app's prefix (wait a minute, what if I want to share a form across apps, e.g. zipcodes or the date interval dialog?), so the remaining four should be enough for anyone to remember what's what. Ummmm... the GenerAll somehow sounds more comfortable.
On seventh I tried to make something where those three characters were VSA, fuck me if I remember what was that supposed to be.
20-XII-2024 - 11-XI-2025