On Sunday, I accompanied my wife to Tel Aviv so that we could sort out some
of the inheritance problems arising from my brother in law's will. We had to
go to an address in Yaffo (southern Tel Aviv), so unthinkingly we took the
train to Tel Aviv, got off at the first station and took a taxi to our
destination. It was a long ride. When we finished our business, I saw that
the Tel Aviv metro ran very close to where we were, so I checked the route
and saw that it would take us to the central train station. When the train
came, we alighted and looked for a device where we could clock our travel
cards, but we couldn't find one. As both of us can travel on public
transport for free, we weren't too bothered. After a stop or two, the train
went underground and after a few more stops we arrived at our destination: just like being abroad! There were automatic ticket machines there, but they wouldn't let us out. We
explained to the guard who came to check what was happening; she explained
that at overground stops, the machines are in the 'bus' shelters; we simply
hadn't looked there (this would be like in Italy). As we don't have to pay for the trip, there was no penalty, but
someone before us who also didn't 'stamp his card' was charged with a
fine.
Reading text messages on our phones, we discovered that there was a major
electicity blackout in our area after a pole had caught fire. There was an
urgent problem with Priority that had to be fixed so I had no choice but to
call the network manager and talk him through the correction that needed to
be made. Later I discovered that instead of writing an equals sign (=) in a
condition, I had written an unequals sign (<>)! A small difference
with a major effect!
The power came back on at around 16:30, which is when I discovered that my
XP computer refused to boot. I assumed that the power supply had gone. The
next evening, I took that computer along with my mobile to our local
repairman: the mobile worked fine, but its fan would frequently get stuck,
thus causing the computer to overheat. There was also a problem with the
lid. In the mean time, I used the computer that I have from work for my
daily activities: this is fine for working, but I don't have that many books
or much music on it.
After a few broken communications, the repairman told me that the XP
computer was completely dead; apart from the power supply, there were
several capacitors that had blown. "It's OK", I told him, "I have a reserve
computer here for exactly this contingency. Can you move the disks from the
old computer to this reserve one?" "Send me a photo of the computer's
board", he replied. I did so, only to be told that several of the capacitors
on this computer also were dubious. This morning I connected the computer to
the peripherals, but it too would not boot. It's a real problem to find a
board that is old enough to support XP these days. If the repairman doesn't
find one, maybe I'll use a more modern computer and try to build a virtual
machine that at least will support Delphi 7. I don't know what I'll do about
music.
I picked up the mobile an hour or so ago. It has a completely new case
which on one hand is good, but on the other hand, I've lost a USB port.
There are now only two which are on the left hand side, making life
problematic for the mouse. I'm using an extension cable at the moment.
The work computer could not access emails sent to my home computer, whereas
my mobile computer can. There were a few blog entries than needed to be
uploaded into the blog manager, but the HTML code that the modern version of
Outlook creates is not good for the blog manager. After a bit of experiment,
I discovered that I can input the HTML code: almost nothing gets entered
into the blog manager, but then I can copy the HTML code directly from
blogger and everything is fine.
I discovered during the week that I could not connect via Anydesk to the
OP's server; problematic as I had been sent an email about a problem whose
source was oblique. Eventually I swapped messages with someone there who has
a certain amount of technical nous: I saw that the clock on the server was
showing some date in 2040. After he corrected the date, I was able to
connect to that computer. There were several entries in one table that had
completely wrong dates - this was the source of the problem. I hand
corrected those entries and now everything more or less seems to be ok
there.
I don't think that there'll be a Prolog blog this week. I'll try and bring
the code up in Delphi 10 Seattle that I have on this mobile; it should be
fine, but there may be a required change in syntax here or there. Programs
created by this version are about 10 times larger than under Delphi 7 and I
find the programming environment to be very cluttered.
This day in blog history:
| Title | Tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 313 | Sumptuous Sunday 2 | Cooking | |
| 1094 | Research proposal accepted! | DBA | |
| 1188 | Executing a program and waiting for it to finish | Programming, Delphi |
