Around twentieth, dad's suffering trabant trouble, the belt is new but craps out somewhat. It turned that I „didn't properly memorize the dimensions when I bought it, and didn't replace it but bought another one and kept that one as a spare. The trouble is that Etveš (or whatever was the name of the guy who sold the trabant) has put a longer belt than needed, then spanned it; then I read the dimensions from that frayed belt and bought that even somewhat larger one (I think it should be 850mm, his was 900, and this one was also 900 or 950). I know it was a nice confusion, back in the time when Saša worked on it, which complicated the matters even better. And it clearly says in the book...“.
Overyester Paige came by, and we agreed on the baselines about the tezga. He needs few things done, and he came to tell me what, when how and how much. I know him from before, and this was the first time we saw each other :). He's a local programmer, works some small stuff, has a small firm of sorts or is (more likely) a solo player, has a few customers in the end and serves them for years. He's no big brand, and the deal is that he'll take no percentage off my fee, but I should teach him tricks along the way.
Go and the gang were supposed to come for the weekend, but gave up. Lena disappointed. A bit bored too, she had dry cough first and with slime later, but okay, we all had it. Eventually let her go to school today. No need for doctor's justification, just write a note or call the school.
And she insisted on sleeping with mom while this lasted, because the window in our room is kept slightly open overnight. Here luckily the windows aren't of the guillotine type, but instead one half is shifted sideways, the frames are metal and slide well. The glass is like vacuumed double, but the seals failed long ago, and the unmovable pane is dull, there's something on the inner surfaces of the glass.
I slept on the couch while that lasted, but the couch is overstuffed (the one handed down to us by Rick), the sponge pillows are like on that one of ours but even softer, I sink in and then get too hot. I discovered it felt much better to sleep on the carpet. The carpets here aren't any prime league and aren't noticeably thick either, but there's a twolayered plastic mat underneath, which protects the warp from fracturing and provides a layer of air, whatever. It just gives slightly as you walk over it, and feels pleasant to sleep on :). Now that I think of it, I loved to stretch on a rug before, but since we moved to live on tiles I had to make the practice scarce. This saved me a month later, when my hemorrhoids started acting up, and only when lying on the rug, with a folded buttmat for a pillow, I'd manage to find a position where the pain would be weak enough to allow me to sleep.
The weather dried up again - there's dew on the car in the morning, but as soon as the sun warms it up, the relative humidity strongly falls. This brings the trouble - static electricity. Sometimes it suffices to just get into the car to take something, and you get sparked against the door handle. The humidity in the air usually disperses and discharges it, but at his kind of winter dry weather, it's a whole trouble. My techinque is to hold to the door frame while leaving the car, so to discharge through the sole and not fingers.
Nina's teacher of german ivented some exchange, a dozen of their yearmates from Germany would be coming, so she, as any lecturer of a side course, she saw to engaging her best students, and tried to usher her into the welcoming committee. But Nina wiggled her way out, because she was too tired and stayed at home to sleep it off. Last few weeks she took to sleeping two shifts. She'd come from school at around 4, sleep until 8-9, then sit at the computer, chat, do homework, read, go to sleep anytime between 4 and 5, get up around 8. Friday afternoon, the booster dose of sleep, no airport nonsense.
Talks with Berix progress well, we're already thinking of moving u north, just waiting for the eHosp management to move their asses and decide when and what they want to do, then we can go. For that purpose, she told me to acquire the book „Design patterns“, which I can't translate better than „krojevi“ (taylor's cut sheets), by the so-called gang of four. There are four authors, one if which is a Gamma, but the other three are not Alpha, Beta and Delta, so I never succeede memorizing their names. It arrived today, on a seedee - it would cost more on paper, and the text wouldn't be searchable, and couldn't copy examples and try them out.
Actually, it's unusable like this as well. The idea that these programming cut sheets should be recognized, known and then used when the situation arrives, but it's not any grand solution for all your problems. It's more... to have majstors on a larger job use the same words for hammer, pliers and trowel, i.e. for some common set of known tools to exist, and (which is specific to programming) to stop inventing those tools every time they're needed, but to reuse them from the last time.
But it's still unusable, because no matter how much the gang tried to raise above their compiler, it still turned out that most of the cutting patterns are specific to C++, in which they worked. In fox some of them are a net loss, because fox doesn't have the problem these are solving, or what's complicated in C++ is trivial in fox and no tool is needed.
Later it will turn out that only two of these are used in eHosp, okay three but the third one was more to brag how „here we also have an object factory“ than it was really necessary. Three possible function calls are replaced with one overly complicated class. Which is still more complicated in C++, because the class in this case has to cover three possible cases (new object is a member or a property of its parent, or is independent and has no parent), and there for any possible class it has to have a separate factory, i.e. it lacks that level of abstraction where one factory would make everything. All in all, the tare costs more than the butter (which is a proverb in serbian).
And of the two, both were used not as the book purposed them. The „visitor“ pattern was the beast of burden throughout the app, and each page had one - so opposite from the idea that it'd be one class which would visit each object and do its work on each one. The other was the „responsibility chain“, which did look like the usual idea, to pass the job down the chain of processing, whereby each step would do its part. Which made sense, the text was processed from initial meta-text, with a heap of tags, even didaskalia, which were to be found and replaced with their html versions. The code which would do that would be fucked up and heaped up.
And maybe it wouldn't - it could be done by consecutive function calls, some of which could even be optional, skipped when needed, could be configurable. At least the value wouldn't be carried en times deep into the call chain and then returned up it. It would be surely faster and would consume less.
The reason for their use was, seemed so to me, that George and Berix thought they'd sound more serious with it, and would get their programmers somewhat in line (e.g. me, and turned out that Chinese too), and to leave a better impression on the eHosp management (who were partly eye tea entrepreneurs, partly medical publishers) and to leave an even better impression on themselves, „look at us riding the latest technology“. Those latest technologies are, as I learned later, partly the good tricks of the trade, partly the vehicle to sell fog, ratings and gaining glory.
31-I-2026 - 5-VII-2026