Perceptions

Solving the unflushed inventory problem

2012-02-16T12:53:00.000+02:00

Just over a year ago, I wrote at length about unflushed inventory. In the year that has passed since then, I have been fighting a mainly unsuccessful battle in order to raise public awareness of the problem. Suddenly, a solution appeared about a month ago.

I was talking with our company's ERP consultant about one of the problems inherent with bills of material (BOM): the BOM tells us how much it costs to make a part and whilst also providing the raw input into the manufacturing process. There have been times when I have needed to divorce these two functions. Even though we have discussed this before, the consultant hadn't provided any kind of solution, but this time he mentioned, off the cuff, that if I mark a certain flag in the parts table, then the part will not be sent to the production floor as a result of a production order.

There are parts whose BOM contains virtual parts such as royalties. We need the BOM to contain the royalty because this contributes a certain amount to the cost of the final product. On the other hand, negative inventory of this 'part' builds up every month which only serves to confuse the inventory system. Once I marked this royalty part with the special flag, it carried out its costing function without interfering with manufacturing.

Such a small change can produce large gains.

Thinking about this a few weeks later, I realised that this flag held the key to solving the unflushed inventory problem. To recap: ERP's work order (based on the BOM) says to use a certain amount of raw material (wood), but via the use of an external optimiser, the workers are able to produce the same amount of finished product with less than the dictated amount of raw material. This causes problems with stock keeping and creates what Priority calls unflushed inventory.

For a while it seemed as if Priority was ignorant of the output from the optimiser, but then I realised that there was a 'warehouse transfer order' entered into Priority which transferred the required amount of wood planks from the raw materials store to the factory floor - this order is the optimiser's output. After some more cogitation, I realised that I could utilise this order: I could convert it into the list of parts which had been removed from the factory floor, consumed by the production process. In other words: the optimiser would cause X amount of planks to be sent to the factory floor, then my program which would remove those X planks as if they had been consumed normally. As the plank parts had been marked with the special flag in Priority, the fact that the default BOMs required Y planks became totally irrelevant.

The required program took a few iterations to write correctly, but after a few days it was working perfectly (it is now run automatically every evening). Every day I check the inventory of the shop floor in order to ensure that no wood planks are listed; if there are, then I correct the faulty definition of the plank in the computer in the knowledge that the plank will be removed from inventory the next time that my program runs.

Thus the unflushed inventory problem has been solved ... at least, as far as wood is concerned. There are still far too many parts to be found in the unflushed inventory, but as most of those parts seem to be screws or similarly small and insignificant parts, I can't get anyone interested in the problem.

Maslow's hammer beats again

2012-02-15T09:35:00.001+02:00

The design and engineering departments at work have started to use the SolidWorks (SW) program; it is intended that this program will replace AutoCAD in a few years. Presumably because SW creates more files than AutoCAD, the person running the project is considering using a Product Data Management (PDM) system which integrates with SW (good idea). Unfortunately, the PDM costs a lot of money and the powers that be wish to delay the purchase of a PDM until they see that SW is integrated properly into our work practices (another good idea).

What to do in the interim? The same project manager sent off an email a few weeks ago saying that "a jointly managed Excel file saved on a network drive would maintain the SW file list". I almost had an apoplexy when I read this! I immediately sent back an email stating that Excel files might be fine as long as they are personal, but multi-user Excel files suffer from a multitude of problems, mainly due to file locking. They are also unsophisticated. What we need (I wrote) is to appropriate the database functions of Priority in order to maintain such a list; automatically we will get such advantages as proper multi-user handling, numerators, indices, auditing and text handling (an optional text screen in which users can write comments).

We had a meeting about this on Sunday, attended by several grey Russians who tend to the inflexible. At least one was horrified by the suggestion that we maintain this database in Priority; he calmed down somewhat when I explained to him that this 'database' would be maintained in a corner of the program and would neither impinge on the rest of the program nor would require the user to be conversant with the rest of the program (although one of the huge benefits of Priority and other ERP programs is that once one has learnt how to manipulate one screen, that person can then manipulate all the other screens in the program with little additional effort, otherwise known as leveraging). Presumably this gentleman is fearful of Priority; I wonder how he is managing to learn SW. It took me about an hour to set up the database tables, screens and triggers necessary to implement what was agreed.

This discussion demonstrated a point which is very close to my heart: unsophisticated people will use a given tool, not because it is the best tool for the job but because it is familiar to them. In other words, this is a case of Maslow's hammer: when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. In this case, the hammer is of course Excel.

This is the sort of behaviour which I intend to examine once I start my DBA.

Gateway

2012-02-13T12:51:00.000+02:00

I've been traveling frequently in the past few weeks, during which I've been rereading Frederik Pohl's Gateway novels. I very much enjoy these books, as much for the hard science (cosmology) as for the humour (eg "When I was a child, there was a 128 page book sold called "Things we known about the Heechee. All the pages in the book were blank").

Today, I came across this statement on a discussion list:

... some things that look like sci-fi are really fantasy. The latter Star Wars movies (episodes 1-3) are like this: their focus on midi-chlorians is no different from a wizard with magic dust. Frederik Pohl's Gateway novels are similar: the blind use of alien artifacts is no different from Bilbo Baggins finding that the ring makes him invisible. This is why the setting for so many fantasy stories is a decaying, once-great society: in ages past the people understood their creation, but the knowledge has been lost.

I beg to differ as regarding Gateway: it's true that the humans initially use the Heechee artifacts without understanding how they work, but they constantly try (during the first two books) to understand how those artifacts do work. Of course, once they find out how the artifacts work, new and surprising uses are found for those artifacts, uses which the Heechee never dreamed of. So this is fantasy?

I own a copy of Pohl's autobiography, "The way the future was", which contains all manner of interesting material. I paraphrase Pohl in writing that every experience is grist to the writer's mill: there's a paragraph about Pohl learning to play the guitar, which seems to be a dead end until one reads the first Gateway book in which Robin Broadhead thinks about an upcoming guitar lesson and how one makes the transition between D7 and C.

A change is gonna come

2012-02-11T08:33:00.001+02:00

I saw most of a film called 'Talk to me' on television the other night, an adapted true story of Washington D.C. radio personality Ralph "Petey" Greene, an ex-con who became a popular talk show host and community activist in the 1960s. I wasn't too sure at the beginning whether this was supposed to be a comedy or a drama, and towards the end I got fed up with the film (which is why I didn't see it all).

For my money, the best and most moving part was a scene which took place in 1968, when Greene had to announce the death by assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Greene was almost crying when he delivered the news, and the people reacted by setting fire to parts of Washington. It was Greene's job to calm the people down.

As he finished his midnight - 2am shift, he played a final record, which started off with syrupy strings ("It's Nat King Cole", I thought), then moved into a vocal which sounded as it were sung by Rod Stewart (in other words, Rod Stewart styled his vocals on this singer): "It's been a long time coming, but a change is gonna come". Prophetic words sung beautifully by Sam Cooke.

I have always wondered what the attraction was for young white British youths in the mid 60s for black blues and soul music, and hearing this sad and dramatic song, I finally realised what it was all about. Those post -war youths were looking for direction and found it in this song. True, the arrangement sounds saccharine to my ears and it could easily be improved, but there is no doubting the strength of the song's words and of its delivery.

A Change Is Gonna Come
(Sam Cooke)

I was born by the river in a little tent
And just like the river, I've been running ever since
It's been a long time coming
But I know a change is gonna come

It's been too hard living, but I'm afraid to die
I don't know what's up there beyond the sky
It's been a long time coming
But I know a change is gonna come

I go to the movie, and I go downtown
Somebody keep telling me "Don't hang around"
It's been a long time coming
But I know a change is gonna come

Then I go to my brother and I say, "Brother, help me please"
But he winds up knocking me back down on my knees

There've been times that I've thought I couldn't last for long
But now I think I'm able to carry on
It's been a long time coming
But I know a change is gonna come

House with no door

2012-02-09T12:14:00.001+02:00

I wrote the other day about receiving the live cd boxset of Peter Hammill. Last night I had the opportunity of listening to one of the discs closely - I chose the disc which I have subtitled "Peter Hammill murders songs by VdGG".

First of all, I doff my hat to someone who is prepared to even try and play these complicated songs on his own. Some of them come off quite well whereas some don't. Hammill has never been known as a particularly good guitarist (he admits as much himself), so the songs which he plays on guitar start with a handicap which he never manages to beat. Some of these guitar songs - especially 'Masks' and 'When she comes' - sound like a 16 year old playing them on guitar. To be modest, I think that I would have played them better than Hammill when I was 16 - except for the fact that the songs had yet to be written. On the other hand, I would never have attempted to play the apocalyptic "After the flood", which actually comes out reasonably well (of course, there's no twelve tone dirge passages in this solo version).

Hammill plays piano much better than he plays guitar, so the piano songs should theoretically sound better, even approaching their original versions. Again, I admire the chutzpa of Hammill to play 'Scorched earth' on his own; whilst certain parts bear almost no resemblance to the original, the majority of the song shows a high accuracy (including the metric irregularities).

The one song which I want to write about most is a song which has been close to my heart since its release in 1971: "House with no door". I even performed this a few times in public around the time of its release (when I was indeed 16 years old) so I have a deep knowledge of it. Hammill played piano on the recording so he too should be more than familiar with the chord sequence.

I note that the song is credited to Hammill/Jackson, but I have never been able to ascertain what David Jackson's credit is for. Did he write all the music? Maybe the credit was for his multiple flute/sax solo?

Anyway, in the key of C, the chords to the verse are

C G Dm6 C F Em Bb F

C G Dm6 C F Em Bb Fm

The chords show a beautiful movement; the change from Em to Bb creates a very strong cross- relation and is most distinctive - to my ears, it makes the verse. Similarly, the F at the end of the first line (there is a double plagal cadence here, Bb -> F -> C) is mirrored and saddened by the Fm in the same place in the second line: another brilliant chord change.

Unfortunately, Hammill almost ignores this sequence: I'm not sure what chord he played after the Dm6, but the Bb chord is replaced by Dm (a weak if possible replacement) and the F is replaced by G, which totally ruins the harmony as well as wrecking the double plagal cadence. To make matters worse, the Fm in the second line is also replaced by G!

Why sabotage one's own song deliberately?

As it happens, I read an interview with Hammill from 2005 the other day which was very illuminating. It goes with great depth into subjects such as Hammill's guitars, his guitar style, his effects pedals, his keyboards, etc - subjects which interest me greatly. For some reason, Hammill comes across as slightly inarticulate regarding these subjects, and it's quite difficult to understand what he really means. He disparages his guitar playing (quite rightly) but also claims that he knows nothing of chords, possibly disingenuously. I find this last statement very hard to believe; maybe he doesn't know about diminished fifths and sharpened ninths, but he should know chords and standard chord sequences.

Maybe this lack of knowledge about chords is what caused him to murder the lovely piano ballad, 'House'?

A day in the life

2012-02-06T13:28:00.000+02:00

I spent yesterday working in Tel Aviv. After a moderately successful day, I left the offices at 4pm, walked to the nearby train station (arrived 16:15) and took a connecting train from the branch stop (16:20) to the main Tel Aviv station (arriving 16:30). At 16:45, the train to Bet Shemesh (and thence to Jerusalem) pulled into the station; it is due to leave at 16:55.

There was a slight delay in leaving the main station, an unusual occurrence. After a few minutes, the train pulled into the next station then started on its way to the third Tel Aviv station. The train never got there: it stopped midway between two stations ... and stayed that way for about two hours!

The information that we passengers received was minimal, possibly because the railway workers trying to fix the problem didn't know what the exact problem was. We were told that it was an electrical fault and that it should be fixed in a few minutes; after a few minutes, we were told that it would take a bit longer ... and a bit longer ... and eventually they gave up giving us updates. Of course, we couldn't get off the train because we were between stations, and as modern trains don't seem to have any windows which can be opened, the air got hot and stale.

Eventually, the powers that be sent a replacement train which connected up to the far end of my train; the passengers walked through seemingly endless carriages until we all had a seat (and air!), and then the new train set off backwards, to the previous station. Here we all disembarked, at about 19:10. Everyone was worried that we would have to wait for the next scheduled train to Bet Shemesh, due to leave at 20:00, but fortunately a special train was laid on which left at 19:30, meaning that I arrived home at about 20:25.

All the passengers will get a refund (the office in Bet Shemesh had already photocopied multiple copies of the required form) but of course this won't return the two unpleasant hours that we suffered. It's not clear what kind of refund will be received by those who hold a monthly ticket.

Fortunately, no one panicked nor started shouting loudly. Such behaviour has a tendency to spread quickly and is to no one's advantage. I wouldn't say that anyone was pleased by what happened, but at least we all got through it with a minimum of discomfort. I had my Kindle with me, so I could carry on reading without too much problem (except when the lights went out a few times).

An untypical Thursday

2012-02-04T18:31:00.000+02:00

The day started without eating: I was due to have a blood test, in order to establish a base level for cholesterol in my blood. For the next few months, I'll drink a bottle of Danacol every day, and then when I next have my blood tested, we'll be able to see how effective the Danacol actually is. The health system has joined the Internet revolution, so I was able to see the results that same evening, instead of having to wait for as much as a week.

Cholesterol - 188 mg/dL
Triglycerides - 135 mg/dL
Cholesterol HDL - 44 mg/dL
Cholesterol LDL (calculated) - 117 mg/dL
Cholesterol/HDL ratio - 4.27

I get the feeling that the dietary changes which I've made in the past few months (ground flax seed and walnuts) have already had an effect on my blood cholesterol level as the above results are better than the last set from six months ago:

Cholesterol - 205 mg/dL
Triglycerides - 149 mg/dL
Cholesterol HDL - 39 mg/dL
Cholesterol LDL (calculated) - 137 mg/dL
Cholesterol/HDL ratio - 5.26

Apparently the LDL is calculated by the Freidewald method, where LDL = total cholesterol - HDL - (triglycerides / 5), when the concentrations are expressed as mg/dL. Thus LDL = 205 - 39 - (149/5) = 136. Using Thursday's example, LDL = 188 - 44 - (135/5) = 117. Right on!

During the day, I implemented a procedure for our ERP program at work which corrects for the usage of 'continuous goods'. Items within a product's bill of materials (BOM) can either be discrete or continuous; an example of the first kind of item is a cupboard handle, whereas an example of the second kind is a sheet of wood. ERP handles discrete items very well but has problems with continuous items, especially as there is normally some form of optimisation applied to the quantities needed. In theory, the BOM will say that X square metres of wood are needed whereas in practice, only X - 0.4 square metres were actually used. This optimisation changes from day to day, making reporting more complicated. I thought about this problem once again the other day and this time I came up with a practical plan for handling it. I wrote the procedure (which worked 99% correctly the first time I tried it) and used it on two test items. If the test works as I predict, then I will widen the procedure's scope to handle more items, which will improve our reporting capabilities.

When I came home, I had two packages awaiting me. The first was the book 'Sandy Denny: Reflections on her music', by Philip Ward. Most of the book's contents were not new to me as they had previously appeared on Philip's website, but since the book's publication, those contents have been removed from the site. I was chuffed to notice that I amongst the people named in the book's acknowledgements: whilst I know that I had helped Philip here and there, I wasn't expecting this.

Since buying my Kindle, I've hardly bought any paper books, so it's always a pleasure to order from the Book Depository and receive a book within a few days at a cheaper price than Amazon (whilst Amazon may sell the book for slightly less, they charge an arm and a leg for postage; the Book Depository does not charge for postage which means a big saving for me).

The second package was the seven cd package from Peter Hammill, entitled 'Pno Gtr Vox Box'. To quote the man himself, "[T]his represents a version of the guitar only, piano only shows with which I began my residence in Tokyo in 2010, with performances taken from the Japanese shows and also from the UK shows in the same year. A double CD is, I think, a decent artefact to leave out there as a (semi-) permanent exemplar of Performance. But while compiling the discs from all the available material it came to me that a specific, bigger, thing could also come out of the various shows. Hence, as the first Fie! release of 2012, we have “Pno, Gtr, Vox Box”: a seven cd box set of live songs from the same sources.

This one’s going to be strictly limited in edition. Although the Boxes are not individually numbered, I’ve taken the decision that the run will be restricted to the 2,000 which have been manufactured."

My copy came with a signature in green ink on the back of the box; after asking on the PH discussion group, I have come to the conclusion that PH signed this himself. It's not unique, though, as several other have signed copies too. One has to be careful as the ink runs should it get wet!

I haven't had much of a chance to listen to it yet. I've never been a great fan of live Peter Hammill, especially when he is playing the guitar (and one of the discs is entitled "What if there were no guitar?), but the little which I have heard seems reasonable. There is even one disc devoted to solo performances of Van der Graaf Generator songs - hearing Hammill play 'Scorched earth' with all its time changes is fascinating!

I wish every Thursday were as good as this one was!

Watching the weight / 4

2012-01-29T17:36:00.002+02:00

It's been some time since I last wrote about my weight and accompanying issues. I am pleased to note that I have been maintaining a body weight of 79.5 kg during that time. I would of course be even more pleased if I could reduce it, but we have been having a spell of cold weather which causes one to eat more, especially over the weekend (excuses, excuses). Also, before I was managing to walk six (if not seven) nights a week, whereas lately I've been lucky to walk four nights a week (one night is lost to MBA studies - Negotiation was on Thursday evenings and Strategic Management will be on Wednesday evenings).

One of the Israeli dairy companies (Strauss, via their strategic alliance with Danone) has introduced a new dairy drink called Danacol. Its claim to fame is that each 100ml bottle of drink (three swallows and it's over) contains 1.6g plant sterols, which have been shown to reduce blood cholesterol by up to 10% in 2 to 3 weeks (quoting their Irish website). The Israeli website is slightly more technical, mentioning that the drink contains phytosterols (as opposed to 'plant sterols'), and a quick look at Wikipedia reveals that phytosterol-supplemented functional foods have been shown to reduce total and LDL-cholesterol levels in hundreds of clinical trials. LDL cholesterol is otherwise known as 'bad' cholesterol; what is important is not so much the absolute amount of LDL cholesterol but rather the ratio between HDL ('good') and total cholesterol.

If I remember correctly, the ratio in my blood is somewhere between 4-5 (total cholesterol to HDL), which is too low. Hopefully, using Danacol will help improve this ratio (the ground flax seeds and walnuts are also supposed to help). To perform this test correctly, I should have a blood test taken this week in order to set a base line, and then compare the current value with a future blood test.

Again, according to the Wiki, the phytosterols complement the statin pill which I (and millions of others) take every day: statins reduce cholesterol synthesis by inhibiting the rate-limiting HMG-CoA reductase enzyme, [whereas] phytosterols reduce cholesterol levels by competing with cholesterol absorption in the gut, a mechanism which complements statins.

At first glance, the drink is slightly expensive: each bottle costs 3.75 NIS, which is about $1. Danone is running a promotional campaign in every country which allows one to purchase a six-pack with a 25% discount, so really the drink will only cost 2.82 NIS/day. I note that the Irish site has an offer for a 2 EU discount; if this is equivalent to the Israeli 25% offer, then danacol in Ireland costs the equivalent of about 6.6 NIS, which makes it nearly 75% more expensive than in Israel. A recent survey showed that food prices are more expensive here than in Europe, so this seems to be a welcome exception.

Disappointment - Finance exam results

2012-01-29T07:35:00.000+02:00

Supposedly I am to be notified when the results of each MBA exam are posted; I haven't received such notification yet regarding the Finance exam which I took at the beginning of December, but last night I checked once again and noticed that the results have been posted.

There is a saying in Hebrew (I can't remember the equivalent in English) that 'the greater the expectation, the greater the disappointment'. I had expectations of doing very well in this exam and so was greatly disappointed to discover that my mark was only 69%. This is a comfortable pass, of course, even grade A, but I was expecting a higher score.

As I wrote before, the exam was split into two sections: twenty five multiple choice questions (MCQs), each carrying two marks, and two 'open' questions. I expected to get 20 out of the 25 MCQs correct, but my mark shows that I was correct in only 16. Those marks which I thought I had in the bag made quite a difference to my final score.

Oh well. I haven't failed the exam but I have failed myself and so the disappointment is greater. I am now revising for the Negotiation exam (first week of March) and next week I will start my final course, Strategic Management. I have no expectations as regarding Negotiation, so I'll probably surprise myself.

Displaying a database table as a tree

2012-01-26T10:15:00.001+02:00

A few months ago, I added to the Occupational Psychologist's management program a module which tracks calls to various clients. This is a simplified version of a Customer Management System (CMS) and became necessary when two of the OP's staff left without leaving proper documentation of their work. A single call holds the customer's name (well, the customer's id number), the subject of the call, the contact person, the text of the call and the date on which the call was made. There then arose the need to create a followup call which is based on a previously existing call; such followup calls would be stored in the same table as the original call, but obviously there need be a way of showing the connection between the two.

The logical way of doing this would be to add a 'predecessor' field to the calls table; a new call would store 0 in this field whereas a followup call would store the id of the predecessor call. For reasons which escape me now, I elected not to do this. Despite this, I will write here as if there is a 'predecessor' field in the calls table.

Use of this field is the basis of the threaded view of calls. A thread will start with one call (which has been termed the 'original' call above), then continue to a second call (the 'followup' call) and so on. The original call may have two threads arising from it, and a followup call may have its own followup call. In order to show the call hierarchy correctly, the calls have to be displayed in a tree view.

Let us assume that there are the following calls: A0 is the first call in a thread. From this call, two successor calls were made, A1 and A2. There is a successor call from A1 denoted as call A11. A separate thread was opened for the same customer, with calls B0, B1 and B11. Crudely drawn in an HTML table, the hierarchy looks like this:

A0	A1	A11
	A2
B0	B1	B11

Here is a partial view of how the calls table might look:

# node	subject	predecessor
1	A0	0
2	B0	0
3	B1	2
4	A1	1
5	A2	1
6	B11	3
7	A11	4

Originally I used a fairly complicated algorithm, but looking at the problem now, I see that I can draw the tree with a much simpler algorithm which requires only one access to the database.

select id, curdate, predecessor
from calls
where customer = :p1
order by id

The resulting dataset will be the same as the table drawn above (except for the fact that I am retrieving each call's date and not its subject). Here is suitable code to draw the tree based on this dataset:

with qGetCalls do
begin
  close;
  params[0].asinteger:= custnum;
  open;
  try;
   tv.items.BeginUpdate;
   while not eof do
    begin
     anchor:= fieldbyname ('predecessor').asinteger;
     if anchor = 0
      then node:= nil
      else node:= FindFatherNode (anchor);
     AddChildObject (node, fieldbyname ('curdate').asstring, pointer (fieldbyname ('id').asinteger))
     next
    end;
  finally;
   tv.items.EndUpdate;
  end;
end;

Function TShowCallsTree.FindParentNode (father: longint): ttreenode;
var
node: ttreenode;

begin
node:= tv.nodes[0];
while (node <> nil) and (longint (node.data) <> father) do node:= node.GetNext;
result:= node;
end;

The above code is unchecked but looks as if it should do the work correctly. The hack part of this code uses the data property of each tree node. Nominally, this is a pointer which points to a dynamically created record holding some form of data connected with the node (indeed, I saw code a few days ago which worked this way, creating a pointer to a record with new and then saving the pointer in the data property), but when the data to be stored is an integer, it can be stored directly in the data property, via a type cast, and of course can be retrieved directly.

The FindParentNode code as written is very simple - and possibly very slow, as every time it is called, it has to start from the first node in the tree. At the moment, I think that each customer has less than ten calls (meaning ten nodes in the tree), but in a year's time, this code is going to be slow and will probably need some form of optimisation. It turns out that there is a GetPrev method, which returns the previous node in the tree; it should be quicker to start always at the end of the tree and move backwards. The final node in the tree is always known as this is returned by the AddChildObject method (I neglected to save this value in the code above). This assumes, though, that the speed of GetNext/GetPrev are similar; even so, a 'backwards' approach would require checking fewer nodes.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

2012-01-15T08:11:00.006+02:00

I wrote a few months ago that I had heard that John Le Carre's classic 1974 book had been converted into a film, this thirty years after the BBC made a seven part television series. I had the pleasure of watching the film yesterday; I'm not sure of my response.

The book shown on the left of course is not the same as my copy, but rather a new printing which ties in with the film - that's Gary Oldman as George Smiley on the cover. I think that Sir Alec Guiness made a better Smiley.

I think that I know the book so well that I am unable to appreciate someone else's version of the story. Instead I nitpick:

Operation Testify now takes place in Budapest, Hungary instead of Brno, Czechoslovakia (as it was then) - because it was 20% cheaper to film there! The book version of Testify is completely different to the filmed version, which actually begins with this. Whilst this is chronologically correct, the operation is revealed only about two thirds of the way during the book, in order to maintain the reader's curiosity (and also because George Smiley has to find out on his own what happened).
Some of the scenes with Jim Prideaux and the boarding school are shown (doesn't Bill Roach look like Peter Griffin from 'Family Guy'!) but appear in the wrong place as per the book. The episode where Jim Prideaux strangles the owl (or whatever it was that flew out of the fireplace) is shown but misses its resolution: the whole point of this was to hint at who killed Bill Haydon at the end (his neck was broken, where in the film he is shown being shot). This is called foreshadowing and is an example of the Chekhov's gun trope. The film bungles this.
George Smiley's house has moved inexplicably from Chelsea to Islington, and Ricki Tarr has his adventure in Turkey as opposed to Hong Kong (Portugal in the BBC version). Budgeting again?
Someone got confused between Sam Collins and Jerry Westerby: Sam's lines were spoken by Westerby! So why was the character not called Collins?
Smiley's hotel has moved from near Paddington to near Liverpool Street.
Russian spy Poliakov was only a veiled threat during the book, where he appeared in one scene at the end; in the film we see him frequently.
Whilst Irina was shipped off from Hong Kong by plane, here she is shipped off (literally); that's understandable if her part of the action took place in Istanbul. But why on earth was she presented during Jim Prideaux's interrogation? There was no way that Prideaux could or should have known who she was. And as for her demise ... the one truly shocking moment of the film ("I didn't see that one coming" - Austin Powers).

The casting was also slightly strange: in my humble opinion, Cieran Hinds (Roy Bland) would have been much more successful as Sir Percy Alleline than Toby Jones was; Hinds had the height of the fictional Alleline and was much more threatening. Colin Firth was wasted as Bill Haydon; his charisma was never shone (Firth hardly spoke) and one never got the sense that everyone knew it was him but was afraid of saying so (although this is mentioned right at the end). As for the characterisation of Toby Esterhase, the less said, the better.

I can't say whether the story as presented makes much sense. So much seems to be a fait accompli, Witchcraft is presented at the beginning and Smiley doesn't have to ferret out the truth.

It's ironic that Irina was shipped back to Russia from Istanbul. The general story of Bill Haydon was based on that of Kim Philby; John Le Carre himself (under his born name of David Cornwell) was one of the spies blown by Philby. Philby himself was nearly blown by the attempted defection of a Russian spy called Volkov; the telegram offering his services (like Tarr's telegram) ended up on Philby's desk, who was able to arrange the capture of Volkov. Volkov was then invalided out of Istanbul onto a Russian ship, like Irina.

More City Boy

2012-01-14T17:47:00.001+02:00

When I was listening to City Boy in the mid to late seventies, there was of course no Internet and very little transfer of information. That can easily be rectified now. The picture below shows drummer Roy Ward (first on left), who joined after original drummer Roger Kent (first two albums) left (fired?) the group.

l-r: Roy Ward (drums, lead vocals), Mike Slater (lead guitar), Chris Dunn (bass), Max Thomas (keyboards), Steve Broughton (lead vocals, rhythm guitar), Lol Mason (lead vocals).

A little bit of work today revealed three sites worthy of attention:

An interview with Steve Lunt, aka Steve Broughton, joint lead singer with City Boy. It's not mentioned in the interview why he changed his name; I believe that Lunt was his original name which he changed to Broughton during the CB days. This is most confusing as during the early to mid seventies, there was a group called the Edgar Broughton Band from the Birmingham area (Warwick), whose bassist was also named Steve Broughton, Edgar's brother. Just to add to the confusion, the City Boy 'where are they now' page says that his name was Steve Blunt.
A message board, containing plenty of information about City Boy (as well as much extraneous information; one has to sift).
A concert recorded at the BBC prior to the release of their first album! This shows how capable they were of reproducing their recorded sound live - in fact, so close that I'm not too sure how valuable it is listening to the concert. I normally find live or rehearsal recordings illuminating as regards the released versions, but here there's very little difference (obviously no double tracked guitars, and the keyboards are barely audible).

Caught in a musical timeweb

2012-01-13T15:00:00.000+02:00

In 1977, I went a few times to concerts at the Roundhouse in Camden Town, London. In those days, the bill would feature three groups with hopefully some form of compatibility between them. One Sunday, the bill was headlined by Van der Graaf Generator supported by two punk/pubrock groups (the 101ers, including Joe Strummer, who went on to The Clash). I have never seen such an antagonistic audience (including myself shouting 'Get off!' at the support); someone made a mistake with that bill!

In June 1977 I saw Caravan play, supported by an otherwise unknown group called City Boy. Actually, I had heard the name before: in 1975, I started reviewing lps for my university's newspaper and received in the course of my duties records and information packs about upcoming acts, including the above mentioned City Boy. Their information sheet must not have been too attractive as I elected not to ask for their record.

Anyway, in my opinion, City Boy blew Caravan off the stage. A few days after the concert, I bought their current record (their second) called 'Dinner at the Ritz', and a few months later I bought their third album, called 'Young men gone west'. I recall dimly finding their eponymous debut album at Swiss Cottage library and taping it.

Fast forward to the 2000s and the cd age: I managed to find a compilation cd by City Boy called 'Anthology' which contained a melange of tracks from all their albums, presented with no logical order. Finally in the past few days I managed to locate the original albums in their original, and I burned a copy of the eponymous album in order to listen to it in the car on the way to studies (It seems that most of their albums are now available on cd, which wasn't the case a few years ago).

The core of City Boy came from a semiprofessional folk group which played in the Birmingham area; some of the folk sound came through to the record, especially the opener ("Moonlight") and the closer ("Haymaking time"). Inbetween was a sound somewhere between pop and rock; they have been described as a mixture of 10cc and Queen.

The 10cc comparison comes mainly from the smart alec lyrics, written by singer Lol Mason (and funnily enough, 10cc had Lol Creme, LOL), whereas the Queen comparison probably comes from the amount of electric guitar liberally sprayed around the songs.

There are parts of the record which still hold up, 35 years after the event. I'm not one for screaming electric guitars, which makes listening to part of the record a bit difficult. But there are still some excellent songs which reward one. 'Dinner at the Ritz', as I recall, was even more guitar orientated (and featured the saxophone of David Jackson and voice of Peter Hammill on the eponymous track), whereas 'Young men gone west' was more laid-back and mellow. After these first three records, they aimed for a more pop/rock sound (hit single '5705') which I liked less and less.

I listened today to 10cc's 1976 record, "How dare you!"; whilst there might be grounds for comparing City Boy's lyrics to those of 10cc, 10cc leave City Boy in the dust from a musical point of view. City Boy had conventional and singable songs with conventional arrangements, whereas 10cc (in those days) were anything but. Unfortunately, Lol Creme and Kevin Godley, who were the anarchistic half of the group left at the end of 1976, and 10cc went on to be much more conventional.

Their 1977 offering, "Deceptive Bends" was a mixture, with only one song reaching the heights of their previous offerings ("Honeymoon with B troop") and a few others which were reasonable ("Good morning Judge" and frequently played hit, "The things we do for love").

One of the more annoying tracks on "Deceptive Bends" was an uptempo song called "You've got a cold". It so happens that one of the best songs on City Boy's debut album was called "Doctor Doctor", which covers a similar lyrical topic (only better) and has a killer bass riff (as does "You've got a cold"). I wondered then (and now) whether 10cc even knew of the City Boy song when they recorded their song.

Tooth extraction

2012-01-08T09:54:00.000+02:00

I had the dubious pleasure of having a wisdom tooth extracted on Friday. I wrote about this before, at which time a date was set in February. The clinic called me on Thursday, presumably because they had an empty slot, and as it happens, I too was available.

As I have a particularly strong gag reflex, the hardest part for me was accepting the local anaesthesia. This was eventually accomplished with much gagging, choking and spitting. The dentist sprayed my throat with the same spray which is used during an gastroscopy, although there it is accompanied by a very quick acting version of the date-rape drug, which apart from relaxing the patient, prevents the creation of memories.

Once we got over that part, there was only the minor problem of extracting the tooth. I got the feeling that the tooth was extracted in three parts; it didn't hurt but was uncomfortable. Afterwards, I bit on a gauze pad to stop bleeding. I was given two simple pain killers which more than did their job: there was no pain in the evening or on the following morning, for which I am thankful.

So: there only remains the problem of the embedded tooth. The dental expert wants it removed whereas I don't - at least, until it causes problems. If I do have to go to hospital, then I am going to try to obtain special anaesthesia.

The difficult negotiator

2012-01-07T10:50:00.001+02:00

I freely admit that I am only taking the MBA course in Negotiation because of timetable scheduling. If I had more freedom and were prepared to take more than one course per semester, then I probably would have taken a financial course. Even so, the Negotiation course is intellectually stimulating.

Today, when reading the course book, I came across the following paragraphs, written about handling the difficult negotiator (I have edited it slightly to make it more comprehensible when taken out of context; the 'Thompson' referred to is not Richard Thompson but rather an argumentative and unpleasant trade unionist).

It might therefore be useful to tie together some general advice on how to handle a difficult negotiator. First, you must separate people who are difficult only with you from those who cause problems for everyone. It might be you that is the cause of the difficulty and not them. What are you contributing to the difficulty of the relationship? What have you done, or been perceived to have done? Whatever it is, you had better put it right.

Some people, however, are deliberately difficult because they have found that their behaviour usually produces what they want. For them there is a direct connection between their behaviour and the outcomes they seek. Their behaviour intimidates their ‘victims’ into submission and where it does not have this effect we get the kind of problem represented by the Thompson situation – bitter contests of will, much stress and tension and a totally Red–Red manner from both him and the managers. Dealing with these types of difficult negotiators sometimes prompts a debate on whether to match or contrast their behaviour.

The choices of matching or contrasting look like another dilemma because neither response answers the key question of what you are supposed to do next. The clue to the answer lies in what outcome the difficult negotiator is seeking from his behaviour – he intends that you will submit. Hence, your tactical aim is to deprive him of that purpose by disconnecting his behaviour from the outcome.

The response to all forms of difficult behaviour can be summed up in the statement that ‘your behaviour will not affect the outcome’. Whether you express this statement directly to the difficult negotiator must depend upon the circumstances, but you certainly must articulate its meaning to yourself in all circumstances. Let it become your mantra!

By disconnecting his behaviour from the outcome you will also cease to make his behaviour an issue – how he chooses to behave is his business not yours. Hence, all temptations to advise him on how to behave must be resisted. Statements like there will be no negotiations until ‘he changes his manners’ or until the ‘union is back into procedure’ and so on, are a waste of time and re-connect the behaviour with the outcome. Realising that his behaviour is not going to influence the outcome – you are not going to submit to it – does more to change his behaviour than confronting the behaviour directly.

I too have my private Thompson, my bete noire; this is someone who runs a subsidiary company to mine. For some reason I was designated the point of contact regarding the inventory which he holds on a consignment basis (ie it's our inventory which he pays for when he sells). Every few months, relations grow very hot under the collar, and at one point I refused to have any more to do with this person, so unpleasant is he. In a discussion with my company's president, it turns out that everybody feels the same way as our private Thompson.

The above quoted paragraphs from the Negotiation text should be my mantra: his behaviour will not affect the outcome!

Spooks

2012-01-01T14:10:00.000+02:00

One of the minor television channels in Israel started showing the British drama series Spooks from the beginning, and I was fortunate to see all the episodes screened, starting from the beginning (previously I had seen a few episodes from the seventh or eighth series and didn't really understand very much).

The first series started off promisingly by showing as much of top agent Tom's out of office life as it did his in office life. The second series was even better than the first and finished on a huge cliff-hanger. As episodes were being screened here on a nightly basis, I didn't have to wait long for the resolution. One thing became clear about this series: anybody could die (or at least, leave). This was signaled in only the second episode when one of the staff was killed, but the second episode of the third series had main character Tom being sacked after undergoing what amounted to a nervous breakdown.

His leaving was signaled in advance by the addition of a new character in the first episode of the third series; this signal was to be repeated twice more during the same series as two of the other mainstays (Zoe and Danny) also left the series. Might the fact that the actress playing the part of Zoe left her husband in order to live with the actor playing the part of Tom have anything to do with this?

The fourth series opened with 50% of the original cast/staff having been replaced and an emphasis on more action orientated stories. I have to admit that I prefer the more cerebral stuff. I don't think that a gun was shown at all during the first series, whereas the series 3 closer and the series 4 opener had guns alore - which were used. The body count in one episode was higher than the entire first series (and possibly the first two series).

As I've only seen the first two episodes of the fourth series, I will refrain from making more comments, save to say that these episodes brought a change of style which I didn't care for. Although I had recorded all the episodes (for the show is shown late at night), to my chagrin I had deleted almost all of them, and only the last few episodes have found their way to permanent storage. I'm going to retain all the episodes from now on, and recover the missing episodes from the Internet.

Negotiation

2011-12-24T09:03:00.000+02:00

Negotiations and love songs
Are often mistaken for one and the same
(Paul Simon)

I started my eighth MBA course, Negotiation, a bare week ago, but already we've had four sessions as the timetable calls for one session on Thursday evening and another on Friday morning. This is quite a taxing schedule and it's not clear why this was adopted; I suspect it might be that the lecturer far lives away from Tel Aviv and this schedule minimises his traveling time by allowing him to sleep over in Tel Aviv on Thursday evening. We have six weeks like this (twelve meetings) and one more Friday morning meeting which takes us up to the end of January. There are no lectures whatsoever during February, then there is a revision meeting at the beginning of March and the exam on 10 March. This isn't the sort of schedule which I would have preferred, but as the youth of today say, "Deal with it".

The opening lectures gave an introduction into the subject of negotiation (the text was written by Professor Gavin Kennedy), in which we initially learnt that negotiation is but one of ten ways of resolving disputes (or making decisions). The other ways are refusal, persuasion, problem solving, chance (tossing a coin), arbitration, coercion, postponing, instruction and giving up. The major difference between negotiation and the other methods is that in negotiation, both sides give up something in order to achieve a mutually agreed conclusion, whereas in the other methods, one side gives up nothing and the other side gives up everything.

After this, we learnt about the four stages of negotiation:

Prepare
Debate
Propose
Bargain

The following lecture was about preparing for negotiation; this includes identifying interests, deriving tradables from these interests, prioritising these tradables and then defining entry and exit values for them.

On Thursday night we learnt how to conduct the debate stage of negotiation, which means trying to maximise one's constructive behaviour whilst minimising one's destructive behaviour (I won't list what constructs these behaviours).

I wasn't feeling very well that evening and had to leave halfway through the evening; on Friday morning I was feeling a bit - but not much - better, so I decided to drive to Tel Aviv. Fortunately, we didn't have a lecture - instead we had to simulate a negotiation; the scenario was taken from an old exam paper. The class (very small: we started off at 8am with maybe eight students and the number doubled by 8:30am) divided into two groups, where each group took one side of the negotiation. Each group was tasked with identifying the interests and deriving the tradables etc, as per the earlier paragraph. We were also advised to try and do the same for the opposite side so that we wouldn't been surprised during the negotiation.

During this time, most of my group were silent; only two other people and I contributed to the discussion. This was slightly annoying as I was having difficulty in speaking and had to maintain a constant infusion of tea. Nevertheless, I and one other were nominated to conduct the negotiation. At least I won't have to do this again in the future.

I won't describe how the simulation went (not that anything extra-ordinary happened); afterwards, everyone else in the class was invited to make comments about what they saw. Unknown to the negotiators, one extra person from each group had been specifically nominated to analyse each team's behaviour (constructive and destructive). Whilst there was a fair amount of constructive behaviour (I was very conscious of all four negotiators being extremely polite, not interrupting and trying to be 'good'), there was also a certain amount of destructive behaviour. What was lacking primarily, though, was a lack of connections between tradables (I'll give you this if you give me that), which made the negotiation problematic.

I will paraphrase a comment made by someone yesterday (who came late): at first, I thought this was going to be a boring exercise, but by the time it had finished, I came to understand the theory much better. Indeed, the criticism brought home how we could have better run the negotiation (in mitigation, I point out that none of us were personally involved, so the other side's reduction of its price by "five million pounds" would not have happened in real life).

The lectures are held in the same room as my previous course, finance (in fact, all my lectures for the past two years have been held in this room). In the previous course, one had to arrive early in order to get a good seat (the lecturer had a quiet voice, so I preferred to be near the front in order to hear her properly). In this course, one can arrive half an hour late, bring two friends and still get a good seat! I'm not sure how many students are actually registered to take the course, but most have only made token appearances. Apart from a 'hard core' of maybe eight who appear every time, the course seems to have attracted a floating set of students who appear now and then. This seems to bother me more than it bothers the lecturer.

The sense of an ending

2011-12-21T09:25:00.000+02:00

Although I grew up reading literary novels, these days I read more non-fiction than fiction, and more police procedurals than anything else. Despite this, I very much enjoyed reading Julian Barnes' novel, "The sense of an ending", which won the 2011 Man Booker prize (I didn't know this when I started to read the book).

I think that my enjoyment stemmed more from identifying with the protagonist than anything described in the book, which means that I will have to reread the book in a few weeks in which time I hope that my emotional involvement will have lessened.

It's not as if anything specific which happened in the book happened to me in real life (in fact, I would be hard pressed to find anything which happened in the book that also happened to me); it's just that the opening half of the book is, (quoting the Guardian)

[a] memoir of "book-hungry, sex-hungry" sixth form days, and the painful failure of his first relationship at university, with the spiky, enigmatic Veronica. It's a lightly sketched portrait of awkwardness and repression. This is something which makes a great deal of sense to me and seems very familiar. I too look back on my formative years from a 30-40 year distance.

Watching the weight / 3

2011-12-18T14:06:00.000+02:00

Even though I finished my course of acupuncture and massage about six weeks ago, I continue to eat according to the diet that the naturopath gave me, and continue with my 'heavy' walking in the evenings. I had an appointment with the naturopath the day of my finance exam (two weeks ago already!) and she was very pleased by the fact that I had lost over 5kg in weight.

I asked her about the flax seeds which I had been eating - it turns out that these should be ground before eating them! I was eating and excreting them without deriving any benefit. She gave me some alternatives to the flax seeds which don't require any treatment prior to eating - wheat germ and chi'a seeds (? I'm not sure what these are in English). I bought some wheat germ which I have been adding to my morning yoghurt; this has no discernible taste but definitely thickens the yoghurt. Yesterday evening my wife surprised me by grounding some flax seed, so I added this to my yoghurt this morning - the result was near enough the same as with the wheat germ. Both of these items seem to provide many micro-nutrients.

My weight did decrease to 79.1 kg prior to the exam but it's crept up by about half a kilo since then. I'm not sure what I was doing then or since which might have caused the change - apart from a great deal of mental exercise. I know that the brain requires as much as 15% of the body's energy intake, but I don't think that one can increase this amount by thinking hard!

Front end program for converting HTML to PDF

2011-12-15T09:10:00.001+02:00

I was approached by someone (not in my company) with a peculiar problem, connected with our mutual ERP program, Priority. This person has to send to a medical insurance company copies of invoices issued to certain customers each month, in PDF format.

Until she approached me, she had been selecting and displaying each invoice separately (Priority uses Internet Explorer as its default display mechanism for all reports, including invoices), then sending the invoice to be 'printed' via a PDF printer (thus creating a PDF file) and then renaming the file to be the name of the customer (unfortunately, Priority gives an arbitrary name to files it creates). This process was taking a few hours every month and I was asked to speed it up.

My initial action was to change a definition in the PDF printer driver, so that the driver would create a separate file for every page sent to it. I then showed the person how to select and display all the necessary invoices in one go and send the data to the PDF printer, thus creating several files. Unfortunately, there still existed the need to rename each file. This simple action maybe cut the time needed by 25% but it wasn't enough.

There had to be a better way. The first stage in improving the process was to write a little program (a stored procedure, really) in Priority which creates one html file per invoice, where the file is named according to the customer name and the invoice number. Unfortunately, it transpired that it was not possible to create such a file when the customer name was in Hebrew, and as all the customers' names are in Hebrew, this was quite a problem. So I substituted the customer identity number (not the customer number) for the customer name and was able to create separate html files.

Then there only remained the problem of creating pdf files from these html files. At one stage, I asked whether the medical insurance company would be willing to receive html files, but the answer was negative. After contemplation, I realised that I needed a program to convert html to pdf in order to provide a complete solution.

Like many problems, this was easier said than done. I spent several hours googling html pdf convert and then checking out the links. Most of the answers which I received pointed to online services, which would not be suitable. Of the answers remaining, most of these were for commercial programs. I found one program which seemed to be free; I downloaded it and tried it out but saw that it lacked a batch mechanism (my idea required to convert 10+ files in one go). I tried a trial version of a commercial program: whilst this had a batch interface, it included a 'trial message' version in the pdf, and more damning, failed to convert a Hebrew html file.

Eventually I found a command line program (CLP) called wkhtmltopdf, written by a enthusiast programmer (as opposed to a commercial program written by a professional programmer). My experience is that such programs are often better than commercial ones, although getting them to work can be awkward. First I checked that this program could convert a Hebrew html file correctly (yes). Then I set about writing a front end interface program - this program would list all html files found in a specific directory, allow the user to choose which files to convert and then pass these files to the CLP for conversion.

My first version of the front end program wasn't too successful as it tried to start about ten simultaneous instances of the CLP; this brought my computer to its knees. Whilst waiting for my computer to reboot, I realised that I needed to send one file to the CLP, wait for it to finish converting, and then send the next file.

Another problem which I encountered was that the CLP couldn't handle files which were stored in a subdirectory of c:\program files. I solved this program by using a routine which creates short directory names (eg c:\progra~1). The 'executing' flag was added as a precaution that the user not close the program before all the chosen files were converted; the program's CanClose procedure checks the value of this variable and refuses to close if executing is true. Edit1.text hold the location of the CLP.

Here is the interesting part of the code.

procedure TForm1.ConvertBtnClick(Sender: TObject);
var
i: integer;
ExitCode: DWORD;
mydir, htmlname, pdfname: string;
SEInfo: TShellExecuteInfo;

begin
ConvertBtn.enabled:= false;
executing:= true;
FillChar (SEInfo, SizeOf (SEInfo), 0);
with SEInfo do
  begin
   cbSize:= SizeOf (TShellExecuteInfo);
   fMask:= SEE_MASK_NOCLOSEPROCESS;
   Wnd:= Application.Handle;
   lpFile:= PChar(edit1.text);
   nShow:= SW_SHOWNORMAL;
  end;

mydir:= IncludeTrailingPathDelimiter (shortdir (dlb.directory));
for i:= 1 to lb.items.count do
  if lb.Checked[i-1] then
   begin
    htmlname:= mydir + lb.items[i-1];
    pdfname:= copy (htmlname, 1, length (htmlname) - 4) + 'pdf';
    seInfo.lpParameters:= PChar(htmlname + ' ' + pdfname);
    if ShellExecuteEx (@SEInfo) then
     repeat
      Application.ProcessMessages;
      GetExitCodeProcess (SEInfo.hProcess, ExitCode);
     until ExitCode <> STILL_ACTIVE;
   end;
executing:= false;
end;

It's not enough to use the Windows API ShellExecute procedure as this simply executes the given program; this is how I managed to create all the simultaneous instances of the CLP.

50 words for snow - Kate Bush

2011-12-11T10:33:00.000+02:00

I've been listening to this album on and off for the past few weeks, ever since an advance copy was available on the NPR website. I've been dreading writing about it, because I find the album difficult to categorise.

I was a very early adopter of Kate Bush, marveling at her 'Wuthering Heights' single and buying her first album in January 1978. I enjoyed all of her first five albums, although there were often songs which didn't find favour in these courts. The sixth and seventh albums were bought and almost never played. I obtained 'Aerial' when it came out but again hardly ever played it. It seemed as if time had stood still for Ms Bush and her music seemed anachronistic. 'The directors cut' again was hosted on NPR prior to its official release, earlier this year. The reworked album was quite listenable but again wasn't really the sort of music to which I listen these days.

'50 words for snow' is different from almost everything else Ms Bush has recorded. Unusually, it is very sparse, featuring mainly piano and vocals only. Of course, there are other instruments (Steve Gadd's drums are a highlight, as are the orchestral instruments which add shade here and there) but they're subdued.

In my humble opinion, the sequencing could have been improved. The album starts in a very risky manner, with Kate's son Bertie taking lead vocal on "Snowflake". I find this song very precious (in the non-complimentary sense of the word) and I can imagine many listeners being put off by the first minute of the song (which lasts almost ten minutes). The second song, "Lake Tahoe", also starts in a testing manner, with some operatic vocals. This song continues for just over eleven minutes.

But the third song, "Misty", is where it all comes together. Even though the track lasts for thirteen and a half minutes (!), one never gets the feeling that the track is over-long, or indeed, long. It is a master lesson in dynamics, especially the drums. The next three tracks are much more accessible than everything that has gone before whilst the closing track is a return to the amorphous ballad.

My wife has picked up on this album as well. Yesterday we had the bizarre situation in which I was listening to the album on headphones whilst writing a blog entry; when I finished, I went into the lounge only to hear the same album on the stereo, albeit not the same song (that would have been too weird).

This is an impressionistic piece of music full of prosody; as a musician who lives by harmony, I feel that I don't appreciate it as much as I could.

Preventing "MDI creep": how to decascade a child window

2011-12-10T09:12:00.002+02:00

I confessed a terrible feeling of emptiness to my Occupational Psychologist (OP) during our weekly meeting yesterday: until the day before, I been concentrating almost entirely on learning Finance, and now that the exam is over, I don't need to know how to price an option nor what the theory of indifference to dividend policy is. "Don't worry", she said, "I'll find you things to fill you up". And so she did (Happy birthday, by the way!).

One side effect with using MDI applications (such as the management program which I wrote and constantly improve) can be described as follows: when the program's first child window is opened, this window will have its top left hand corner placed in the screen's top left hand corner (coordinates 0, 0). The second child window will be opened automatically at 10, 10 and the third at 20, 20. This was a good idea when screen resolution was not particularly high as it makes good use of the screen's 'real estate'. But times have changed; the OP has one of those extra wide screens and she uses it in a mode which provides a huge amount of real estate. All the child windows congregate on the left hand of the screen and the right hand side is unoccupied.

So the OP drags certain child windows to the right hand side so that she can see several complete and unhidden child windows simultaneously. All is fine until a new child window is displayed; within the program I followed each new window creation with the 'cascade' command - and then the personalised display disappears when all the child windows line up again on the left hand side. This was easy to fix by removing the 'cascade' command after new window creation.

But more insidious is that the MDI screen manager (to which we have no access) will create new child windows as if cascade is still in effect. In other words, the first child window will be created at 0,0, the second at 10,10 and the third at 20,20 - even if the second child window has been moved to a location 200, 600. Worse, this behaviour continues even after the child windows have been closed: new child windows will appear at a location which would be consistent with cascading all the previous child windows.

I researched this behaviour a little yesterday afternoon and discovered that it has been named MDI creep. Whilst naming the behaviour makes it easier to talk about, it doesn't make it any easier to solve.

I posted a question of the Stack Overflow site and master programmer David Heffernan gave an answer which pointed me in the correct direction [I often wonder how David actually gets any work done as he seems to be found almost permanently on SO, answering people's esoteric questions]. It took me about an hour of to-ing and fro-ing with his idea before I had something that worked and about another hour of polishing the entire solution.

The solution boils down to three different parts:

How to enable a child window to signify that it wants to be 'uncascadable'
How to universalise this ability
How to prevent the main MDI window from cascading the uncascadable child windows

The answer to the first part is to use each form's system menu; this is the menu that pops up when one clicks on the form's icon sitting in the top left hand corner of the caption bar. I used to use the system menu in the early days of Windows programming, but haven't touched it in over a decade. Each form has to add an option to the system menu whose effect will be to toggle the 'cascadability' of the form; so the form has to detect when that option has been chosen and to toggle an internal variable. At the same time, it would be good to give visual feedback on the menu what the state of that variable is at any given time.

Here's the article which I used as the basis for developing the code to add the menu option and detect its being pressed. Finding out how to give the visual feedback was a bit more difficult but eventually I found out how to do this (and more importantly, how to do this correctly!). I'll show the complete code a bit further on.

When I originally wrote this code, it was sitting in the form which needed to be decascaded, but it occurred to me that the technique would be much more valuable if I could use it in almost every form and I wasn't going to copy the code fifty times. The solution is to use form inheritance - to define an ancestor form type which contains the code and then define the actual forms to inherit from this ancestor type. This is one of the huge strengths of Delphi (the entire VCL works on this principal) but is something which I have barely touched.

unit ManageForms;

interface

uses Windows, Forms, Menus, Messages;

type
TNoCascadeForm = class (TForm)
                   private
                    SysMenu: HMenu;
                   public
                    nocascade: boolean;
                    Procedure GetSysMenu;
                    Procedure WMSysCommand(var Msg: TWMSysCommand); message WM_SYSCOMMAND;
                    Procedure SetCheck;
                    Procedure SaveCheck; virtual; abstract;
                   end;

implementation

const
SC_NoCascade = WM_USER + 1;

procedure TNoCascadeForm.GetSysMenu;
begin
SysMenu:= GetSystemMenu (Handle, FALSE);
AppendMenu (SysMenu, MF_SEPARATOR, 0, '');
AppendMenu (SysMenu, MF_STRING, SC_NoCascade, 'Decascade');
SetCheck;
end;

procedure TNoCascadeForm.WMSysCommand (var Msg: TWMSysCommand);
begin
if Msg.CmdType = SC_NoCascade then
begin
   nocascade:= not nocascade;
   SetCheck;
   SaveCheck;
end
else inherited;
end;

procedure TNoCascadeForm.SetCheck;
var
iChecked: Integer;

begin
if nocascade
then iChecked:= MF_CHECKED
else iChecked:= MF_UNCHECKED;
CheckMenuItem (SysMenu, SC_NoCascade, mf_bycommand or ichecked);
end;

end.

Procedure GetSysMenu first gets a pointer to the form's system menu, then adds two options: the first is a separator bar and the second is the 'decascade' option. When this option is pressed, a system message of type 'SC_NoCascade' will be sent to the form. Of course, the form has to know how to handle this message.

The final line in this procedure (which will be called once during the inherited form's create method) is to SetCheck - this procedure draws (or erases) the check mark next to 'Decascade' on the system menu, according to the value of the variable nocascade. This is initially set in the inherited form by reading a value stored in the registry; if there is no registry value then the variable is false (no check mark).

When the system message of type 'SC_NoCascade' is sent, it is intercepted by the form's WMSysCommand method. As all system menu messages pass through this method, it is vital to check what the actual message is; if it is not the specific message, then it is passed on to the inherited message handler. Assuming that the message received is SC_NoCascade, then first the method reverses the value of the internal flag, then calls SetCheck to have the menu option updated and finally calls an abstract method called SaveCheck (this probably should have been defined as a stub in the ancestor form).

The SaveCheck procedure is located in the inherited form and stores the value of nocascade in the registry. This is necessary, for if a new inherited form were to be displayed, its nocascade variable would contain the value previously stored in the registry - which would be oblivious to the change which has just occurred. This procedure has to be located in the inherited form as it is dependent on specific registry values which the ancestor form cannot know.

Here is part of the code of a form which inherits from TNoCascadeForm:

unit Manage57;

interface

uses
Windows, Messages, ManageForms, ,,,;
type
TShowCallsTree = class(TNoCascadeForm)
  .
  .
  .
private
public
   Procedure SaveCheck; override;
end;

implementation

{$R *.dfm}
procedure TShowCallsTree.FormCreate(Sender: TObject);
const
myheight = 440;
mywidth = 816;

begin
constraints.MinWidth:= mywidth;
constraints.MinHeight:= myheight;
with reg do
begin
   height:= ReadInteger (progname, 'ShowCallsTreeH', myheight);
   width:= ReadInteger (progname, 'ShowCallsTreeW', mywidth);
   nocascade:= ReadBool (progname, 'ShowCallsTreeCas', false);
end;
GetSysMenu;
  .
  .
  .
end;

procedure TShowCallsTree.FormClose(Sender: TObject; var Action: TCloseAction);
begin
with reg do
begin
   WriteInteger (progname, 'ShowCallsTreeH', height);
   WriteInteger (progname, 'ShowCallsTreeW', width);
   WriteBool (progname, 'ShowCallsTreeCas', nocascade);
end;
action:= caFree
end;

procedure TShowCallsTree.SaveCheck;
begin
reg.WriteBool (progname, 'ShowCallsTreeCas', nocascade);
end;

After this excursion into the worlds of system menus and inherited forms, we can know address the issue for which we have gathered: how to decascade a child window.

David says in his answer: looking at WM_MDICASCADE it has an option to skip disabled MDI children from cascading. So you could disable certain child windows, send a WM_MDICASCADE message yourself and then re-enable the child windows. Probably easier said that done. The program's main form has a method called cascade, but this is an encapsulation of the WM_MDICascade message and leaves no room for manoeuvre. It has to be replaced by sending the actual WM_MDICascade message, and this message has to have the parameter 2 in order to ensure that disabled windows are ignored.

The main form iterates over the child windows, looking for a form which is decended from TNoCascadeForm; if its nocascade variable is set to true, then the form is disabled. Once this has been done, the form can send the above message to its MDI container window, which handles the cascade. Then the form iterates once more over the child windows, re-enabling those which had previously been disabled.

procedure TMainForm.mnCascadeClick(Sender: TObject);
var
i: integer;

begin
for i:= 0 to MDIChildCount - 1 do
if MDIChildren[i] is TNoCascadeForm
   then if TNoCascadeForm (MDIChildren[i]).nocascade
    then TNoCascadeForm (MDIChildren[i]).enabled:= false;

sendmessage (mainform.clienthandle, WM_MDICASCADE, 2, 0);

for i:= 0 to MDIChildCount - 1 do
if MDIChildren[i] is TNoCascadeForm
   then if TNoCascadeForm (MDIChildren[i]).nocascade
    then TNoCascadeForm (MDIChildren[i]).enabled:= true;
end;

The proof is in the pudding - this really works! Thank you, David, for the help in pointing the way.

Post mortem on the Finance exam

2011-12-08T18:21:00.000+02:00

I've been quiet for the past few weeks mainly because I've been revising for the MBA Finance exam, which was held today. Other than this, there hasn't been much to write about (not that this will stop me...).

The exam was in two halves; 50% of the marks come from multiple choice questions (MCQ) and 50% come from open questions. The agreed tactic was to start with the MCQs, do those which could done without too much thought or effort, then do the open questions, and in the remaining time one does the MCQs which were previously skipped over.

The examiners don't care how one arrives at the answers of the MCQs; they could come from calculation, from intuition or from guessing (I prefer to calculate). The class had passed around a collection of MCQs collected over the years, and I don't think that there was one question today which appeared in the collection (so much for those students who memorised the questions and answers!). Of course, there were questions of the kind "If someone receives a loan of X pounds and repays so much for four years, what is the rate of interest?" and "How much do I have to save every year if I want to receive a pension of 1 milllion pounds in 25 years, with an interest rate of 6%", but apart from that, almost everything was new. I skipped maybe four questions the first time around; three became obvious when doing them at the end, and the fourth question I guessed (even though there are four options, two were algebraicly the same, presented in slightly different forms, so the possibility of getting the question right is 50%). There were a few questions which I am slightly doubtful about in retrospect, but I imagine that I got about 40 out of 50 marks here.

The first open question started off with a calculation comparing leasing buses or taking a loan in order to buy them, For ten marks, one had to lay out the cash flow, calculate the the company's weighted average cost of capital (WACC) and say which option was better. We've done similar exercises in the past, so this wasn't problematic. Even so, talking with someone after the exam, I discovered that I might well have made a mistake here regarding one of the sums of money. Even so, I'll probably only lose one mark, because I used the correct methods throughout.

A further five marks were to be made by listing the advantages of leasing (easy), four or five with a strange question about a company selling its shop and then leasing it back straight away, and then a few more marks about 'agency problems'. I would like to think that I did very well on this question.

The final question (20 marks) started off with calculating spot and forward interest rates before demanding the calculation of a bond's current price and a question about the bond's duration. As it happens, I had ignored spot and forward interest rates until the subject came up at a revision meeting about two weeks ago when I relearnt the material, which is not too complicated. The data, however, were presented in an unfamiliar manner and I made a false start before I hit on the correct method (or at least, I hope that it's the correct method) of making the calculations. The subquestions about the bond were easy although on reflection, I made a small mistake regarding the duration (lose one mark).

Unless I have made a gross miscalculation, I should have done very well on this exam. Results in about six weeks.

As it happens, I've been reading (when not revising) a very interesting book on the Kindle, called "The ascent of money" by Niall Ferguson. This should be required background material for both the Economics and Finance courses. Apart from the interesting historical background, it is also written after the 2007 crash, which changed the rules of finance. At times, I found the course amusing with remarkably high interest rates (10% is not to be sneered at, when the interest rate in Britain or USA is about 1% these days); even more amusing were the statements that "real (inflation less) interest rates are the same in every country" and that "exchange rates can be calculated on the basis of inflation rates". Will someone please explain to me why the exchange rate for shekels to sterling has remained around six for some time? The interest rate in Britain is maybe 1% and the inflation rate 5%, whereas the interest rate in Israel is 2.75% (just lowered from 3%) and inflation is also about 2.75%. The exchange rate should be completely different.

Despite being told that there are no arbitrage opportunities for long, the above shows possibilities: if I were to take a loan in Britain for (say) 1000 pounds at 2% per annum (I don't know whether that's accurate), I would have to pay 1020 pounds back after a year - but as there is 5% inflation, that would only be 971 'real' pounds. I could invest that money here in Israel, get a higher rate of nominal interest and then repay the loan, making a profit. But I won't do this.

Next Thursday, I start my penultimate course, "Negotiation". Unfortunately we have one lecture on Thursday evening and one lecture on Friday morning for six weeks but no lectures in February (the exam is in March). I wish I could sleep in the college on Thursday night instead of returning home and then returning the next morning.

Crisis averted: no need for oral surgery

2011-11-25T16:13:00.000+02:00

You know the story about the man who goes into hospital for an examination of his left knee and ends up having his right leg amputated? That nearly happened to me, albeit on a much smaller scale.

The story starts about a month and a half ago when I went to the dental clinic for a routine checkup. The only thing that the dentist could find that needed treatment was the wisdom tooth on the left upper hand side (let's dispose with technical terms such as maxilla and mandible). I was surprised as I thought that I had had all my wisdom teeth extracted; it turns out that I had the teeth on the right hand side extracted but not on the left. The tooth was decaying and as there was no corresponding tooth on the lower side (the jaw), the dentist thought it best that the tooth be extracted.

She tried to take x-rays of the offending tooth but because of its position, she wasn't able to get a good picture, so she sent me to get a panoramic x-ray of my teeth. This I did, which I returned to the clinic; then I waited for the expert to decide whether the extraction could be performed in the clinic or in hospital (both of my children have had wisdom teeth extracted in the oral surgery department of the hospital).

Yesterday I kept my appointment with the expert; he looked at the x-ray and saw a wisdom tooth embedded on the lower left hand side, at 90 degrees to the rest of my teeth: a perfect case for surgical extraction. He wrote an explanatory note for the surgeon at the hospital and sent me on my way. Outside, I was stunned for a few moments until I recalled that my regular dentist had sent me for a panoramic x-ray because she couldn't get a good picture of the decayed tooth. If she could see the tooth then it couldn't be embedded!

I went back to the expert and explained why I had been referred to him in the first place. He consulted my dental notes, saw what my dentist had written and confirmed that he had indeed been looking at the wrong tooth. Instead of an operation, I needed a relatively simple extraction, which he could do in half an hour. Crisis averted.

He still thinks that the embedded tooth should be extracted, but as long as it's not causing any problems, there's no real need to do so. Dentists are divided on whether such teeth should be extracted as a manner of course. The surgical extraction of the wisdom tooth on the upper right hand side some 25 years ago caused me many after-affects, including low blood pressure for a few years. That's not something that I will willingly undergo again if there is no real acute cause.

Two spy novels

2011-11-20T09:08:00.001+02:00

Despite having invested in a Kindle, I found myself ordering two real books a week ago, as either there aren't Kindle versions available yet or the Kindle version is more expensive.

First off was the third book by Stella Rimington in her Liz Carlyle series, "Illegal action". The basis of this book was more to my liking that the previous ones: Liz has been transferred to Counter-Intelligence (i.e. working against the Soviet threat) from Counter-Terrorism. As an old cold warrior, I much prefer the deviousness of the Soviets. I can't put my finger on the exact cause, but all the way through the book, I kept feeling unsatisfied. As I have pointed out before, Rimington is no literary stylist and seems to write by the numbers (at five sixths of the way through the book, there will be a huge twist in the story which changes one's entire outlook). There are always a few chapters in which the main character of the chapter is referred to solely as "He" or "She", meaning that Rimington is describing someone's actions but that she doesn't want the reader to guess who that person is. I won't reveal the detail for this book, but it wasn't too hard to figure out who the mystery person was. At the end of the book, I found myself so unimpressed that I decided probably not to bother buying any more books in this series. A shame, because a better writer could have done so much more with the story elements.

On the other hand, "The Trinity Six" by Charles Cumming was the real thing. Dense, intriguing and cerebral, this is a worthy successor to Le Carre, mixing fact with fiction almost seamlessly. I've read most of the books listed in the 'bibliography' at the end, so the the historical parts of the story were very familiar. Cumming's anti-hero, Dr Sam Gaddis, does come over as slightly too resourceful for an academic, but that only makes for a better story. He is also a tad too trusting during at least the first half of the novel; I would have thought that someone as well versed in all things Russian would have been more suspicious. Presumably I had an advantage over Gaddis in that I could read what other characters in the book were doing when they were not interacting with him, and so I was able to identify his babysitter well in advance. I also found the fact that Gaddis repeatedly was able to slip under the Russians' radar unbelievable. Maybe they too have lost their touch since the end of the cold war.

Looking back on the story (and this is one that deserves a second and third read, without doubt), it occurs to me that the focus of the story changes in a subtle manner about half way through: the sixth man becomes abandoned and someone else takes his place as being the the book's raison d'etre. The sixth man essentially becomes a red herring.

I hope that Cumming's other book, "A Spy by Nature" is of a similarly high quality. I note that Cumming was approached to join MI6 but turned them down.

Relieving the pressure

2011-11-13T13:51:00.000+02:00

I wrote a few days ago about waking up every morning and feeling anxious about the finance exam, which will take place in another 25 days. I found the perfect solution - I sat down and solved some of the questions from previous exams.

The lecturer pointed out a few questions from previous papers; these were so old that there was no printed solution, which actually is a good thing as one can't cheat. I solved about 80% of the questions correctly, and asked her (the lecturer) on Friday about the points which I wasn't sure about. I'm going to sit down either tonight and tomorrow night and resolve the questions, thus reinforcing the techniques which I need. She will demonstrate how to solve the questions on Tuesday and I want to be super-prepared.

I point out that during the Marketing course, we 'solved' the same exam question again and again until we had it down perfectly and could reproduce the answer from memory. There, the answer took five pages of A4 paper, filled with writing. Solving a finance question is much shorter.

It has become clear what the tactics are: first of all, one has to find the cost of capital which to be used, which is the weighted cost of equity and dept (WACC). There are two ways of calculating the cost of equity and two ways of calculating the cost of dept; in both cases there is one simple method (SML) and one slightly more complicated method (dividends and yield to maturity). I knew the simple methods but wasn't too familiar with the more complicated methods; this has now been rectified.

Then one has to lay out a cash flow table. This isn't complicated but it can be finicky. Once the cashflow is known along with the cost of capital, then one can calculate the NPV. These are the basics of every question.

The questions which will be answered on Tuesday have the same characteristic in that one has to compare two projects with different lengths. In these cases, it's not enough to calculate the NPV; one also has to calculate the average cost per year. It's not correct to divide the NPV by the number of years that the project runs; one has to perform another calculation on the NPV in order to calculate the annual payment. The lecturer tells me that one will still be able to calculate which project is better if one performs simple division, but that the figure won't be right.

One question was about two machines, one having a life time of four years and the other seven. Another question was about renewing the parquet floor of a basketball court (four and eight years); this latter question can also be solved by changing the cash flow so that there is a second investment after five years. Put simply, which is better - investing $1,000 in a washing machine which will last eight years, or $600 in a washing machine which lasts four years and will then have to be bought again?

Once one has finished with these questions, the examiners always twist the knife a little and change the scenario. How would the washing machine answer change if there is 3.5% annual inflation? What would happen if the more expensive washing machine lasts nine years instead of eight?

As one can easily get confused about inflation, I think it wise to note a few things here. One can either work with nominal figures (no adjustment for inflation) or real figures (adjusted for inflation), although of course one has to know whether the figures are nominal or real. Rule of thumb: unless otherwise explicitly noted, all figures are nominal. Thus, if we have to pay $600 for a washing machine now and there is 3.5% annual inflation, then in four years time we will have to pay 600 X 1.035 X 1.035 X 1.035 X 1.035 = $668.5; this is the figure than one puts into the cash flow whilst leaving the cost of capital unchanged. The other way of doing this is by leaving the price at $600 and reducing the cost of capital by 1.035 to the power of four, but this seems to be less intuitive even though mathematically it is exactly the same.

Anyway: the pressure is relieved and I am confident.

Kindle arrives

2011-11-13T12:50:00.000+02:00

I received my Kindle on Friday lunchtime. At first, I thought that I was missing a cable, but it turns out that the power cord is one of those new-fangled dual-function cables which serves as both USB and power cable. My first act upon arriving home was to connect the Kindle to mains electricity via the USB charger.

After a few hours, I became inquisitive as to whether the Kindle was fully charged (apparently not) and whether I could use it. After a fair amount of scratching my head and looking at web sites, I was just about to write to a technical support site when I noticed another post in which someone wrote about having problems turning the Kindle on. "One has to turn the Kindle on?", I asked myself. I then had a close look at the user guide (which is on the web and on the Kindle, but of course I couldn't access the Kindle version yet) and discovered that there is a recessed power button. I pressed the button and the Kindle came to life. I laughed for about five minutes.

Once I crossed this minor hurdle, I saw fairly quickly how to use the controls. There are still some things which I haven't learnt yet but I'm sure that I'll catch on quickly. I connected the Kindle to my computer and loaded all the books which I have stored in preparation for this great event. Then I was indeed able to read books.

Two observations: one can sort the books by title, by author or by last loading date. It would be more useful if I could sort by last access date. I will have to see whether this is possible.

Secondly, most books - even if they were originally PDF files - converted well and are readable. It seems that the PDFs aren't as navigatable as the MOBI files, as they are lacking chapters. I had converted the PDF text to my current MBA course to MOBI and looked at this on the Kindle. When the text was pure text, then it was easily readable, but tables and formulae came out in a wrong format and are useless. Reading the finance text was very difficult, so I think I'm not going to bother with this again. On the other hand, my next MBA course will be 'Negotiation', and I imagine that this will be mainly text so it should be readable.

Early days yet, but the machine seems promising.

Feeling the pressure

2011-11-09T07:58:00.000+02:00

My exam in finance will take place in four weeks (and one day), theoretically plenty of time to become even more acquainted with the material. Despite this, every morning I awake with the emotion of anxiety running through my body.

Every week there is a lecture on Friday morning and a 'practice session' on Tuesday evening, in which the lecturer goes over previous exam questions and solves them. Yesterday evening was the first time that I attended such a session, and noted that there was almost 100% attendance. The first question which the lecturer chose to solve covered about 60-70% of the curriculum, so obviously it was a good choice.

I haven't attended these sessions for a few reasons; first of all, I can manage quite well on my own to solve the questions (although a bit of help will go a long way!), and secondly I imagine that the pace of these sessions is quite slow. It wasn't quite as slow as I had thought that it would be but I still had plenty of time in which to twiddle my thumbs and progress within the question (which is really a scenario with five or six questions to be solved) before the lecturer caught up.

She has given us a few more questions to do as homework; I am going to work on these on my own and hopefully finish them before Friday's lecture (it depends how much time I will have to devote to them). If the homework goes ok, then I won't bother attending next week. We have the answers to all the questions so I'm not dependent on 'handing in the homework' in order to see how well I have done. Of course, the temptation exists to read the answer before attempting the question, but the value of doing so is negative - the idea is to learn how to solve the questions and not particularly to solve them.

I will definitely go over the exam questions which she solved last night as it is important to get into the habit of solving them, to recognise which fact means what, which details can be ignored and which are very important.

Apparently the lecturer had provided in a previous session an analysis of subjects and in which exams they had occurred. I don't like playing 'exam lotto' very much as it can be dangerous. Even so, it is clear that certain subjects such as cash flow (the most basic concept), CAPM and risk in a company which has two separate divisions are going to appear in the exam.

Unfortunately for me, there are quite a few sub-questions which require writing about theoretical models as opposed to calculating values. I imagine that most people find the written material easier to regurgitate as opposed to the numbers, but I'm inclined the other way.

User defined menus

2011-11-04T17:58:00.001+02:00

In our weekly meeting today, the Occupational Psychologist raised the possibility of adding user defined menus to her management program. At first I demurred, as the menu is something which is fixed at compile time, but later I figured out a way in which to implement this.

Fortunately, I have already defined a table ('progs') in the program which lists all the forms which I use to track program usage. To this table I added two new fields: the option's name in Hebrew, as it appears in the main menu, and a flag to show whether this is indeed an option which appears on the main menu. Then I added to the form which adds data to the above table fields so that I could mark the required forms.

The next stage was to define a table ('usermenu') which contains the data regarding the user defined menus: an id, the user's internal id number, the menu option's program number and the display order of the option. Then I defined a pair of forms which allow the user to maintain a list of her options, to set the order and to add/remove items.

I haven't gone into much detail regarding the above because it's all fairly straight forward. The challenging part was figuring out how to read the table and turn the entries into real menu entries at run time. Creating menu entries at real time is not difficult, but connecting a random menu entry to the correct event handler (what should the program do when the new option is clicked) is the crux of the matter.

I handled (sorry about the pun) this by finding the pre-defined event handler for the menu option and copying its event handler into the new menu option. For example, if there is an entry in the 'usermenu' table for the program 'DoDockets', then the function FindOption, which appears in the code below, traverses the fixed menu structure looking for a menu item whose caption is 'DoDockets'. The function exits when the match is found, and this menu item's event handler is copied.

The program knows that it is to add the dynamic entries to a main menu whose name is mnUser.

procedure TMainForm.FormShow(Sender: TObject);
var
item, original: tmenuitem;
menucaption: string[31];

Function FindOption (const s: string): TMenuItem;
var
found: boolean;
i: integer;
tmp: tmenuitem;

begin
found:= false;
i:= -1;
while not found do
   begin // traverse main menu
    inc (i);
    tmp:= mainmenu1.items[i].find (s);
    if tmp <> nil then
     begin
      found:= true;
      result:= tmp
     end
   end
end;

begin
// handle user defined menu
with qUserMenu do
begin
   params[0].asinteger:= user;
   open;
   while not eof do
    begin
     menucaption:= fieldbyname ('hebrew').asstring;
     original:= FindOption (menucaption);
     item:= TMenuItem.Create (self);
     item.caption:= menucaption;
     item.OnClick:= original.OnClick;
     mnUser.Insert (fieldbyname ('disporder').asinteger, item);
     next
    end;
   close
end;
end;

I think that this is a really neat piece of code. It occurred to me when I was documenting this that I could add hot keys to the dynamic menu options: F1 would activate the first option, F2 the second, etc. At the moment, the F keys have been assigned to what I thought were the important options but the importance changes as time goes by.

Coffee addicts (Millennium trilogy)

2011-11-04T13:39:00.002+02:00

Here's a paragraph which I filched from the New York Times book review about the Millennium trilogy:

But these transparently “activist” moments are forgivable, as is the pathological coffee drinking, a tic that recurs so relentlessly that I don’t think Larsson realized it was a tic. A thought on this subject: Many of the Larsson faithful subscribe to a belief that the author’s premature death was not of natural causes. He had been threatened in real life by skinheads and neo-Nazis; ergo, the theories go, he was made dead by the very sorts of heavies who crop up in his novels. But such talk has been emphatically dismissed by Larsson’s intimates. So let me advance my own theory: Coffee killed him. If we accept that Blomkvist is, in many respects, a romanticized version of Larsson, and that Blomkvist’s habits reflected the author’s own, Larsson overcaffeinated himself to death. Of course, the cigarettes and junk food to which both men are/were partial couldn’t have helped, either.

Not being a coffee drinker myself, I tend to ignore people's coffee consumption in the same way that I tend to ignore the amount they smoke. I point out that "The time traveler's wife" also has coffee addicts and I lazily assumed that this was an American habit (not that the Millennium trilogy is American). I have often wondered why in the film "You've got mail", Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan frequently drink tea (a British habit) but not coffee.

The thousand-dollar penalty for reusing passwords

2011-11-03T07:33:00.000+02:00

This is from a computer orientated newsletter which I received this morning. There is some personal relevance which I will mention at the end.

The thousand-dollar penalty for reusing passwords
By Woody Leonhard

You can find no end of advice on creating strong passwords, using clever tricks, stats, mnemonics, and such.

But all too frequently we (and I include myself in this rebuke) tend to reuse little passwords at what we think are inconsequential sites. It's a big mistake — here's why. This story is true. As the admonition goes: only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

I live in a small town a couple of hours away from a big city we'll call Metropolis. There are several daily newspapers in Metropolis, and one of the largest (let's call it the Daily Planet) boasts a very nice website. The people who create and maintain the Daily Planet site are excellent designers and programmers — but they aren't security experts.

One of Metropolis's citizens is a regular guy named, oh, Joe. He's pretty good with computers, and he knows enough to use strong passwords on bank and stock-market sites. But Joe just got hacked — and bilked in a most unexpected way.

Using simple passwords for unimportant sites
The Daily Planet's website, like most big newspaper sites, lets its readers set up accounts for a variety of services. For example, subscribers can receive e-mail notifications about important breaking-news stories. They also need an account to comment on editorials and to submit photos for the newspaper's photo-judging contest. About 25,000 people have accounts.

Years ago, Joe signed up for a Daily Planet account, using JoeKewl as his user name and JoeSumthinErAnother@yahoo.com for his e-mail address. And because the Daily Planet site should not have posed any real security issues — no sensitive personal information was at stake — he used an easy-to-remember password he frequently employed for such occasions: 12345678.

At some point, Joe's Daily Planet account fell into disuse; he rarely thought about it. Meanwhile, the Daily Planet's website admins were focused on online publishing, applying their energy on search-engine optimization and site layout with a bit of SQL Server and PHP on the side. They knew about security but weren't terribly worried about hackers. Their thinking was: Who in their right mind would want to steal sign-in data for people commenting on news stories?

A new black-hatter beats a site's security
But there was a who — a self-styled password cracker residing in a completely different country. Someone driven to show his hacking moxie by cracking a Web server. He acquired a free version of Havij (more info), a SQL Injection hacking tool with a "user-friendly GUI and automated settings and detections, to make it easy to use for everyone, even amateur users," according to the IT Security Research & Penetration Testing Team's Havij 1.15 user manual. He watched the YouTube video and went through the Havij tutorial — and soon knew how to run a SQL injection attack.

The cracker didn't really care what website he cracked; he was simply looking for a site with simple sign-up routines. Eventually, he discovered that the Daily Planet's website fit the bill nicely. Within a couple of hours, the cracker had figured out how to access the Daily Planet's reader database. He was able to crack only one of the four SQL tables at the site, but that netted him 5,200 user records. He got really lucky because (and this is key — no pun intended) the Daily Planet's site stored user data in the clear — none of it was encrypted.

Then the cracker decided he was hot stuff and wanted to tell the world. So he posted 200 of the stolen records on a public website, claiming he'd post more if enough people subscribed to his Twitter feed. To publicize his accomplishment, he convinced one well-known underground tweeter to send out details about where to find the stolen data.

Using a password once too often spells 'break-in'
This is where I came in. All of this happened in a town not far from where I live. But I caught wind of it only when I checked an underground tweeter account I monitor. By then, the cracker had posted 3,400 user names and more than 300 people had viewed the list. Joe's name was at the top of the list.

One of these 300 visitors soon signed onto a local financial site, using Joe's stolen e-mail address and password. (I won't mention the site by name, but it's an institution in Metropolis.) The password didn't work, so the bad guy clicked the Forgotten Password link. As expected, the financial institution's automatic password-recovery routine offered to e-mail a new password to Joe's Yahoo account.

Next, the bad guy signed onto Yahoo Mail using Joe's e-mail address and entered the password (12345678) he'd stolen from the Daily Planet password list — and sure enough, he got into Joe's Yahoo account. From there, just a couple of clicks gave the bad guy full access to Joe's online financial account.

There are countless other ways Joe could've been compromised, but Joe made the bad guy's job much easier by using the same password for both the Daily Planet and the Yahoo Mail accounts. Joe will most likely get his money back — eventually. But he could have avoided a lot of hassle by simply using a unique, throwaway password for the Daily Planet.

My personal part

As it happens, there was an article in one of the online British newspapers yesterday that so annoyed me that I felt compelled to write an online comment about it. The website demanded that I create a user account; for a change, I decided to use my work email address and a password which is not in use any where else. Thus if the newspaper's web site gets hacked as described above, the email containing a one-off password will be sent to my work email. This password won't allow anyone to access my online bank account. I doubt whether my work email will be hacked either, but that's another story. The 'forgotten password' trick won't work because on the bank's website I use a different email address.

The girl who kicked the hornets' nest

2011-11-02T08:09:00.001+02:00

Whilst collecting books for my soon to arrive Kindle, I read the electronic version of the above book, which is the third (and final) installment of the Millennium trilogy). I very much enjoyed this, so much so that I went back and reread the first two books. Doing so changed my mind about the series.

My review of the second book had left a slightly sour taste in my mind, and indeed this ends with the words: On the basis of GPF, I can't see myself reading the third part of the "Millenium trilogy", "The girl who kicked the hornets' nest". I would probably see any film made from these stories but I won't be investing any more money or time in these books. Well, there's nothing like consistency in personal decisions.

Again, as I wrote then, These pages give one the (post-reading) feeling that Larsson was making the whole thing up as he went along, and inserted events (or "hooks", as the musician or computer scientist might call them) as they occurred to him. If later events revolve around prior knowledge which is given by these hooks, then the reader feels satisfied, but if the hooks are left unresolved, then the feeling is awkward.

The third book resolved the hooks displayed in the second and so I finished the trilogy in a much better state of mind. Even so, my criticism of the series, that the books needed an editor, is still valid. The third book doesn't seem to suffer so much from this problem, but still there are paragraphs that could easily be excised. It is good that Larsson invents a back story for his characters, even the most fleeting, but most of this material should have remained as reference material for him and not placed in the books. I got the feeling that the entire series could be improved if one paragraph per page were removed.

After having completed the series, I began asking myself what it was all about. The second and third books seem closer to each other (the third is a direct continuation of the second) which deal with Lisbeth Salander's heritage and legal status. Viewed from this aspect, the first book seems strangely out of place - all the business about Harriet Vanger seems to be one giant red herring.

But bearing in mind that the book's original Swedish title was Men Who Hate Women, a different reading is possible. The Vanger story is also about two men who hate women and serves as a story within a story for getting Larsson's point across. The problem is that Larsson writes with a blunt sledge-hammer instead of a sharp lancet.

There are still issues which irk (aside from the writing style). Co-protagonist Mikael Blomkvist sleeps with virtually every female character in the books but no one has any problems with jealousy. Lisbeth Salander can break into any computer in the world and extract knowledge from them, but no one has a problem with this. She even manages to extract illegally a fortune from a corrupt financier in the first book (as we say in Hebrew, he who steals from a thief is protected from the law), but as only Blomkvist knows about this (or rather, he suspects this as he has no real proof), one can gloss over this. The moral of the story is not to save any document of importance on one's computer, or at least, computers which are connected to the Internet.

Maybe one shouldn't dig too deep.

Succulent Sunday

2011-10-30T08:43:00.000+02:00

I saw a new (to me) recipe for chicken legs the other day so I thought that I would try it on the family. Technically, this is a simple recipe: one takes chicken drumsticks and thighs, marinades them for a few hours and then cooks them in the oven. The unusual part is the marinade:

mayonnaise: three spoonfulls
orange jam: four spoonfulls
ground ginger: one spoonfull
sesame seed: two spoonfulls
soy sauce: two spoonfulls
onion soup powder: two spoonfulls

One mixes this seemingly random list of ingredients together then pours the resulting brown liquid onto the chicken pieces. One cooks them uncovered for an hour and a half at 150-175 degrees Centigrade, turning the pieces over at half time. When I turned them over, I sprinkled more sesame seeds onto the chicken, giving them a speckled appearance. I think that one can leave the sesame out of the marinade and only use it to dust the pieces, as they didn't seem to add any crunchiness.

When one of my children noticed the tangy aftertaste arising from the jam, they started asking what the ingredients were. I playfully included some fantasy touches, such as bat and ground unicorn horn; I have a suspicion that it wouldn't have made much difference had I included these, as the family were quite amazed at what I did include.

Yesterday I prepared deboned chicken drumsticks stuffed with cranberries and apple puree, cooked in the slow cooker. This was delicious. The drumsticks were larger than the previous batch of deboned drumsticks, making them easier to stuff and easier to eat. Even so, I'm not totally satisfied with them and will try and find a better source (these came from a butcher). The price was also surprisingly high; I normally buy frozen drumsticks at around 27 NIS/kilo whereas these cost 44 NIS/kilo with an extra 6 NIS for the deboning (they were weighed before the bones were taken out). The dog was disappointed that there were no bones left for her to chew.

Sir Jimmy Savile

2011-10-30T08:24:00.000+02:00

Yet another one goes

John McCarthy

2011-10-26T08:54:00.002+02:00

(dies inventor lisp)

Firebird DB management tool (4) - Corrections

2011-10-20T10:38:00.001+02:00

I was struck by an insight the other day: instead of using special buttons in my db management tool for inserting, deleting and updating, I could use the dbNavigator component. This is a component which I never use as it seems to be most effective when directly editing grids, an activity which I never program. So the component was far from my mind, but exactly what I needed for this tool. I didn't even have to program the navigator's buttons - they 'knew' exactly what to do. I define which buttons are active depending on whether the query is live or not.

It also turned out that there was a problem with the tokeniser in the parse routine: I hadn't really checked any semi-complex queries. This wasn't too difficult to fix but was rather annoying.

Dennis Ritchie: The man who created Unix

2011-10-18T07:26:00.000+02:00

Read this article:

It's funny how fickle fame can be. One week Steve Jobs dies and his death tops the news agenda. Just over a week later, Dennis Ritchie dies and nobody -- except for a few geeks -- notices. And yet his work touched the lives of far more people than anything Steve Jobs ever did. In fact if you're reading this online then the chances are that the router which connects you to the internet is running a descendant of the software that Ritchie and his colleague Ken Thompson created in 1969.

That's just the opening paragraph.

Getting ready for the Kindle

2011-10-17T08:57:00.003+02:00

Even though I won't be receiving my Kindle for another few weeks, I thought it prudent to utilise my holiday time in order to start building an e-book library. It turns out that there are plenty of e-books available, if one knows how (and where) to look. I have managed to collect around 280 books, of which I own (or have owned) about 90%.

It will be interesting to see how my reading habits will change. I have managed to find books which I once owned and lost/gave away/discarded over the years; I wonder whether these books will find favour in the 55 year old me. A case in point is Philip Roth's "Portnoy's Complain", an archetypal book for adolescents. I was informed about this book by my History teacher whilst in the fourth year of secondary school, aged 14. I have no idea what happened to my copy of the book; it probably disappeared a few years later. I'll read the book and probably delete it immediately afterwards. This behaviour will be interesting from a psychological point of view. Should I keep the book even though I know I'll never read it again (regret)? Should I delete the book from the Kindle but keep it on my computer?

One very useful tool for the Kindle is the ebook library manager/conversion tool Calibre. It took me a few hours to figure out how to use this program effectively, but once on the right track, there was no stopping me. Apart from maintaining a database of my e-books (title, author, tag/style and other bits and pieces), the program excels by being able to convert a multitude of formats into a multitude of formats. As the native format of the Kindle is MOBI, I was only interested in converting to this format. The books which I have found have been in formats txt, pdf, doc, rtf, zip, lit, epub and probably a few more; Calibre had no difficulty in converting them.

To be honest, I haven't looked at the output so I don't know how good the conversion engine is. I imagine that there should be little problem in converting lit or epub books to mobi, but I understand that doc files - with tables and diagrams - are liable to be problematic. Fortunately I don't think any of the books I found fit into that category.

I also discovered that the Edinburgh Business School, in whose MBA programme I am enrolled, does offer its course material (to registered students) as PDF downloads, so I downloaded the material for the Finance course and converted it. This will be useful to look at the closer I get to the exam (first week in December).

From a programming point of view, Calibre is interesting because it implements a database without a traditional database manager. I think it does this via text (or similar) files but I haven't been interested enough to examine this yet. The interface is also interesting; the conversion part of the program seems to be implemented as a separate thread whereas the rest of the program typically used modal dialog boxes only.

A new dish makes its debut

2011-10-15T17:05:00.000+02:00

I related how my daughter cooked us roast beef for our New Year's dinner two weeks ago; she used a cut of sirloin and cooked it in the oven. I made a rare appearance in a local supermarket and noticed that they were selling cuts of frozen beef (apparently the cut is "cross rib pot roast") for about a third of the price of the sirloin. I make an instant decision to buy such a cut (just over 1kg) in order to cook roast beef in the slow cooker.

I had found a suitable recipe a few weeks ago which I tried on this cut. Yesterday, I took the defrosted cut of meat and made stab holes in the sides which I then filled with chopped garlic. I placed the entire cut in a marinade of olive oil, rosemary, salt, pepper and paprika; this I placed in the fridge for 20 hours. Early this morning, I placed the marinaded meat in the slow cooker; I added diced carrots, green beans, onions and potatoes (the usual suspects) and turned the cooker onto high for five hours. As opposed to the oven method of cooking, there didn't seem to be any need to let the meat rest, as five hours in the slow cooker should have let the heat disperse equally throughout the meat.

The results were very good, so much so that I am adding this dish to my repertoire. It's not too expensive, and the rest of the family enjoys a cut of beef (I don't care for beef myself, and normally bits get caught in my teeth, but today, my teeth seem beef-free). I'm doubtful about the garlic and marinade; next time, I think I'll brush the cut with olive oil and sprinkle the spices onto the oil.

It would have been nice to have a little gravy; maybe next time, I'll remove the liquid which forms in the cooker, add a little corn flour and prepare a separate gravy. My father and wife spread mustard on the beef slices, a taste which I didn't care too much for.

Dieting has a number of destructive side effects

2011-10-14T08:01:00.001+02:00

On the first of September 1993, I wrote the following in an email (slightly edited, mainly to correct the English):

I receive a weekly newsletter at work, written by a sort of computer consultant (he's actually a retired priest), focusing each week on a different subject. Sometimes it's not interesting, normally it's worth reading, and every now and then there's an issue which is really interesting. So it was a few weeks ago when he wrote about self-improvement, and in connection with that, he wrote about the psychologist Martin Seligman, who has written a couple of books, "Learned optimism" and "What you can change ... and what you can't " . I was very interested by what I read, and checked these books out at Amazon, which has 20 sample pages from each book. So impressed was I that I ordered "What you can change" there and then.

The book came a few days ago, and whilst it was more academic (or less populist) than I had expected, its message was still very strong, and in certain respects, surprising. One of the main thrusts of the book is that many of our behavioural patterns are genetic and cannot be changed; most of these traits derive from our prehistorical days, when the main goal of the human being was to survive and protect itself. But also there are patterns which can be changed, and it's important to recognise what can or cannot be changed, in order to concentrate one's efforts at self-improvement in an area which stands a chance of being improved. Thus he writes at great length about dieting, how the body settles at a certain weight, and how the actual process of dieting causes irreversible biochemical changes in the body with regard to fat metabolism, which causes people to put more weight on when they cease dieting.

That book was the first in a long series of purchases whose subject matter varied from psychology to neuroscience, with a great deal of interest in the brain. I've stopped buying such books, partially because it's difficult to find a book which is both interesting and well written, and partially because I am less interested in the subject now (or maybe I've read enough).

Anyway, something reminded me of the book and its chapter on dieting, so I pulled it from the shelf last night and read it again. Here are three concluding points:

Weight is almost always regained after dieting
Dieting has a number of destructive side effects including repeated failure and hopelessness, bulimia, depression and fatigue
Losing and regaining weight itself presents a health risk comparable to the risk of [being] overweight

I'm not being fanatic about my diet and there's no way that I'm going to become bulimic nor depressed, neither about my current weight nor the possible failure to maintain a lower body weight.

I notice that in the past two days my weight has increased slightly, from 80.0 kg on Monday to 80.4 kg on Thursday. Again, it will be interesting to see what happens after next Sunday's acupuncture treatment. I only have three treatments left in this series; I may return for another series in January.

The fact that I am writing so much about my weight indicates that the subject is currently important to me; I would like to eat normally without having to calculate whether I can afford the calories. Actually, when I am at work, things are easier as I only have a very limited supply of food available and my mind is distracted with other matters (such as work, which is very much a cerebral activity in my case). It's harder when I'm at home - and as this is currently the holiday season, I worked three days this week and rested four days. Next week will be the same.

Kindle

2011-10-13T09:41:00.002+02:00

I must admit that I am not a gadgets man. I imagine that this is because I am (at times) a computer programmer and so am more interested in programmable devices than those that are set up to provide one function. Also, my close eyesight is slowly getting worse, meaning that I can't see these small devices properly in order to operate them.

Despite the above, I have decided to buy an Amazon Kindle. Introducing the new 'Fire' model has caused the simpler models to be reduces in price, so much so that the basic, international Kindle edition now costs 'only' $109 (Americans can buy an even cheaper version which displays adverts). I priced this model being sent to Israel; shipping and taxes cause the price to double which seems to be extremely uneconomic. But it so happens that a relative of a friend will shortly be coming to Israel, and said relative is amenable to bringing the Kindle with her.

A colleague told me that his daughter in law, who lives in Israel, has a Kindle, so I phoned her and asked what it is like using the device in Israel. I was worried that the download mechanism (via wifi) wouldn't work, or that there would be some restriction because I would be using an American bought device in Israel (so does she). It turns out that my fears were unfounded.

The pricing of Kindle books seems to be slightly erratic, but even if a book costs 10-12 dollars, this might be cheaper than buying from the Book Depository. For example, I am considering buying 'Blink' by Malcolm Gladwell. The Kindle version costs $11.29, whereas the same book at the Book Depository would cost only $8.75 (there are several editions available, but that is the cheapest). On the other hand, 'What the dog saw' by the same author costs $13.84 at the Book Depository but $11.99 for the Kindle.

Buying e-books means that my shelves will cease to be overloaded with books, and also means less trees will be destroyed (although I imagine that books will still be printed and my minor contribution will be meaningless).

One is not limited to the Kindle store; there are other sources of PDF files, mainly free, which can be mined (the Kindle can read PDFs). There is Project Gutenberg, which has classic books available for free, but I have read that many people download the classics then never read them. I am also hoping that my MBA course materials will be available in PDF form, so that I can read them anywhere, but this seems to be unlikely.

There seems to be a bug with the Amazon Associates gadget, which would have enabled me to post a link to the Kindle and to the other books.

Watching the weight / 2

2011-10-10T07:57:00.000+02:00

A week has gone by since I last wrote about my weight. Interestingly, my weight stayed constantly at 80.6 kg all last week, even after fasting on Yom Kippur. What is more interesting is that yesterday afternoon I had my regular acupuncture and massage sessions and this morning, when I weighed myself, I had reached the psychological barrier of 80.0 kg.

I am making a tentative hypothesis that I am maintaining a constant weight during the week and that the acupuncture session itself (not the magnets in my ears) is causing an immediate loss of half a kilo, presumably by 'revving up' the stomach (yesterday I had four needles over my stomach and one on my foot). This hypothesis accounts for the weight loss patterns of the past two weeks.

One could argue that it doesn't matter what the cause is; the main thing is that I am losing weight. We shall see. I still have another three acupuncture treatments before the series comes to an end and it will be interesting to see what happens during those weeks. It will be more interesting to see what happens after I finish the series.

Of course, I have to do my part as well - heavy walking in the evening and maintaining the diet.

Rest in peace

2011-10-06T06:29:00.002+02:00

Bert Jansch

Steve Jobs

Within 24 hours of each other. Neither touched me personally, I must admit, but I have been influenced by the influenced. The world is a colder place this morning.

Firebird DB management tool (3) - Bells and whistles

2011-10-05T07:58:00.000+02:00

After using the new tool for another few weeks, I discovered a problem with updating live queries. If the query returns more than one tuple, then an edited tuple will be automagically updated when one leaves the line. But if the query returns only one line, then there is no way of updating the tuple.

In order to address this issue, I added a speedbutton whose function is to call the 'ApplyUpdates' method of the query and so force the update. After doing this, I added another speedbutton whose function is to call the query's 'Delete' method, and after a few more minutes contemplation, I added an 'Add' button as well.

Once the brain was actively thinking about improving the program, a few more simple hacks popped into my mind. Double clicking the 'fields' combobox will add to the query text the current table and field combination (eg ACTIVITIES.NAME), whereas double clicking the 'tables' combobox will add the current table name only. These hacks will be useful when building queries - they save typing.

Here's a screen capture of the program as it looks at the moment

Watching the weight

2011-10-04T07:52:00.000+02:00

When I started dieting, my weight was slightly over 85kg. I bought a digital weight scale (my mind wants to say that I bought a pair of scales, but scales now come as single items) which arrived at the beginning of last week, and my first measurement on the scale was 81.1 kg. Well done!

A few days later, I weighed myself again and noted a further 200g decrease; good. Then there were four days at home when the temptation to eat was presumably greater, and my weight returned to 81.1 kg on Sunday morning. Today is Tuesday, two days later, and my weight is now only 80.6 kg. Either I have lost half a kilo in two days or the previous measurement was wrong. I tend to believe the latter possibility, but the main point is that my weight is steadily decreasing.

There won't be any temptations to eat this weekend as it is the Yom Kippur fast. It will be interesting to see what my weight will be on Sunday morning.

As the logic puts it, the only real way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more. I have been doing this religiously for the past five or six weeks and the results are clear. It is doubtful how much of this weight loss can be attributed to the acupuncture treatment which has been focused on two areas: pins in my ear for a week, and pins in my stomach for half an hour. The latter leaves me with a slight stomach ache all week; I don't know whether this ache is muscular or a sign that my stomach is working overtime (or maybe trying to adapt to less raw material on which to work).

Holiday cooking

2011-10-02T13:35:00.001+02:00

We've just come off a four day holiday, celebrating first the Jewish New Year, and then a normal Shabbat. As a result, I've been cooking every day and it's about time I shared some of what's been going on in our kitchen.

For the first night of New Year (we get two nights), we had decided in advance that my daughter would cook roast beef. After checking a few recipes, my wife was dispatched to the local supermarket to buy a joint of sirloin steak. As the supermarket was very crowded (this was on Monday morning), she in turn delegated the task to a friend that she met on the meat counter. Only when she came home did she discover that the butcher had cut the sirloin into slices, presumably so that we could cook them as steaks. Disaster! After explaining to her why this ruined our plans, she returned to the supermarket. Initially, the head butcher was very angry and unwilling to receive the meat, but after my wife turned on the waterworks, he changed his attitude. They didn't have any sirloin left in the supermarket, but he ordered some more specially for us and my wife picked it up the next day. After the cooking the joint in the oven for about an hour, we let the meat 'rest'; whilst this apparently improved its taste, it also caused the meat to cool down.

The next day, I whipped up meat balls which I cooked in the oven, along with a delicious tomato sauce.

Friday night had us eating pineapple chicken, cooked in the wok, accompanied by rice. I like this very much.

For Saturday lunch, I thought that I would try something new and experimental. I asked my wife to buy deboned chicken drumsticks with the intention of stuffing them with something suitable for the occasion, such as apple and cranberries. The drumsticks turned out to be very small and I couldn't put much stuffing into them, so I took a complete chicken breast and 'stuffed' this as well. I had to tie the breast with wire in order to hold it together; the drumsticks were held together with toothpicks which did the job admirably. My wife had baked an apple pie a few days earlier so I asked her to save the peels; these I put at the bottom of the slow cooker and on top I put the stuffed drumsticks.

The dish turned out to be very tasty but there are a few things which need improving should I do this again. First of all, I have to find a better type of meat; maybe a deboned turkey leg will be better. Secondly, it would be nice to have a rack within the slow cooker, so that I can put the chicken pieces on this, raised above the apple peel, instead of placing the chicken directly onto the peel. I have found something on the Internet but will look for a local supplier.

Firebird DB management tool - continuing the story

2011-09-21T11:25:00.000+03:00

After a week of using my homegrown tool for managing Firebird databases, I have realised that it would help a great deal if I could edit live data - in other words,

issue a query
display the results of that query in a grid
edit fields within that grid with immediate updating

I have already achieved the first two points above but editing the live data is something which I have never done before. There is a way of updating a database from a grid with TIB components but this would be extremely complicated to do with ad hoc queries. So with regret, I switched back to using the dbExpress components. As a result, I no longer have access to the query plan, but this was always a nice thing to have and not essential.

Unfortunately, dbExpress lacks the concept of a live query, because the components are not buffered. A query which references only one table and does not use parameters is a candidate for being live. I have searched high and low but have found no reference about how to check a query to see whether it references one or more tables (this management tool is not going to use parameters so I don't have to bother about this).

Just to make things clear, the following query would return a live query

select * from ranks

whereas the following query will not return a live query

select dockets.id
from dockets inner join statuses
on dockets.status = statuses.id
where statuses.future = 1

There is the canmodify property, but this is always false for SQLDataSets and always true for ClientDataSets, so basing any solution on this is doomed. It seems that the only way to solve this problem is to parse the query, at least to a certain extent.

I checked a few SQL parsers but they are far more complex than I need. Basically, all I need to do is find the 'from' keyword in the query; following that word will come the name of the first table in the query. I have to check what comes after the name of the first table - if nothing comes after the table name, or the next word is either 'where' or 'order', then there is only one table in the query and it can be regarded as being live. Anything else means that the query is not live. On the basis of this examination, I can set the editing flag of the grid.

After having written the above 'livequery' function, my program can now display and update simple recordsets or display complex recordsets.

Here is the very ad hoc parser from the program (global variable mem is a memo component which holds the user query):

function TForm1.LiveQuery: boolean;
// check what the second token after 'from' is
const
EOI = #26;

var
cmdlen, curpos: integer;
ch: char;
tmp: string;

Procedure GetChar;
begin
  inc (curpos);
  if curpos >= cmdlen
   then ch:= mem.text[curpos]
   else ch:= EOI;
end;

Function Token: string;
begin
  result:= '';
  while ch = ' ' do getchar;
  while not (ch in [' ', ',', ';', EOI]) do
   begin
    result:= result + upcase (ch);
    getchar
   end
end;

begin
ch:= ' ';
cmdlen:= length (mem.text);
curpos:= 0;
tmp:= token;
while tmp <> 'FROM' do tmp:= token;
tmp:= token; // this should be the first table name
if ch = ',' then result:= false // select ... from table1, table2
else if ch = EOI then result:= true // select * from table1
else
  begin
   tmp:= token;
   result:= (tmp = 'WHERE') or (tmp = 'ORDER')
  end;
end;

Continuing the diet

2011-09-18T09:10:00.000+03:00

I wrote a month ago about starting a diet. I have been keeping to the diet quite strictly (although I've been drinking more milk and eating less quinoa as time passes), as well as exercising in the evenings (walking swiftly for 30-40 minutes). Last week's acupuncture treatment left me with a stapled left ear, which is supposed to reduce my appetite. It's become clear to me that whilst it's important to reduce the amount of food that I eat, it's also a psychological problem which becomes apparent over the weekend (when it's all too easy to eat a biscuit instead of a cucumber).

Anyway, I weighed myself in the clinic on Friday, when I was having a 10 year tetanus booster. To my surprise, I had shed three kilograms from my weight! I haven't felt any different, but I should point out that today I am wearing a pair of trousers which I haven't been able to wear in years - albeit without a belt. This is definitely good news, and the sort of positive reinforcement that one needs to keep on doing whatever has been done in the past month in order to continue losing weight.

Planning the SQL

2011-09-15T08:12:00.000+03:00

Continuing from yesterday's post about the simple Firebird DB management tool that I wrote, I eventually found out how to display a query's plan. The answer was not to use the dbExpress components in order to connect to the database, but rather the IB components. These latter components are only for use in connecting to Firebird/Interbase databases and so have improved functionality at the cost of a less wide user base. This doesn't bother me as at the moment I am only supporting FB.

Firebird DB management

2011-09-14T14:07:00.000+03:00

Normally I use a program called 'EMS SQL Manager 2005 for InterBase and Firebird Lite' for managing my Firebird databases (adding tables and fields, or correcting data) but every now and then there are problems with it. Then I use a much smaller program (both in scope and size) called 'MyWiSql', but this too has its problems. Slowly at the back of my mind, a need has been growing to write my own tool which would combine the best aspects of both programs and today I wrote that tool.

Here's a screen capture of the program

The program reads the database aliases and locations from the registry (that's the advantage of writing my own program - but of course, no one else can use the program); once a database has been chosen, its tables are selected, along with the fields of the first table. Queries can be made against the database (selects, updates, deletes, changing table structure) and the results can be shown in a different pane. The program keeps a log of the queries - I often find that when using one of the management tools, I issue a 'select' query, update a value then issue the 'select' query again to ensure that the change has been made. Now I can simply copy the original query from the log instead of typing it again.

Normally, one has to press the 'execute' button in order to execute a query but this quickly became a nuisance so I added some code which causes the query to execute whenever a semicolon is typed (this character is normally used as an SQL statement separator).

I even added a pane which displays the SQL trace, but the results of this have been disappointing. I had hoped to see the execution plan (which MyWiSQL manages to display) but I have yet to achieve this. Once can hope, but there seems to be very little information about the SQLMonitor component, which displays this information. I may have to resort to reverse engineering MyWiSQL, but I'm very doubtful about this.

Otherwise, this will be a very useful addition to my programming toolbox.

Fictional MI5

2011-09-11T12:33:00.000+03:00

Along with the Stella Rimington book ("At risk"), I've also been watching the BBC series "Spooks". The program is more action orientated than I would have liked, which made sense when I realised that the program is about the counter-terrorism section. Similarly, Liz Carlyle (LC) belongs to the counter-terrorism section.

I ordered an received the second LC book, "Secret asset", and read it greedily over Thursday night/Friday morning. This is more cerebral/less action orientated than its predecessor and thus found more favour in these quarters. Whilst the prose is nothing to write home about, it tells an interesting story and I'm sure that a second and more sedate reading would be rewarding.

The book begins in a very similar manner to its predecessor, so much so that I'm sure a page was lifted (the description of the recruitment of the agent whose cover name escapes me). But the agent is shortly discovered and killed; here the resemblance between the novels ends. Ostensibly, the book is about the leads thrown up by this agent and a task force assembles to follow them up. But on the side, LC is given a separate task: find an unactivated mole within the ranks of MI5.

The reader, from his privileged position, is able to see how the two strands intertwine. Having two separate strands in a story is much more rewarding than one, and their combination and resolution lead to a much more satisfying finish. So author Rimington is showing welcome signs of sophistication.

But! In the terrorism strand of the book, much is made of the mistakes in tradecraft that the terrorists make (as an aside, it is inferred that MI5 can tap any phone at will, including mobile phones; I have my doubts about this). But there is no comment about the poor tradecraft of the mole, who blows an operation then has the agent killed. After a third and similar lapse, one of LC's colleagues becomes suspicious and begins suspecting a mole himself; this conclusion is made whilst being unaware of LC's activities.

The mole, in retrospect, has several damaging conversations and disseminates information which later turns out to be disinformation. Maybe he was counting on the obscurity of that information and the low possibility of his lying being caught, but it was a dangerous thing to do and led to his downfall.

The mole is not a patch on Bill Haydon ("Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy") and should be ashamed of his poor performance in this role. Real moles are much harder to catch, and the fact that he had never been activated should have made it impossible to have caught him.

There is no real reason for MI5 to have heard about this 'unactivated mole' in the first place, although this mole's actions quite likely would have led to his being discovered anyway. The person who told MI5 had no reason to do this, and this strand of the story invokes several characters who are peripheral - if not totally irrelevant - to the story. Was the author trying to confuse the reader?

So: I enjoyed this book more than its predecessor, but it's clear that author Rimington has a long way to go before she even catches up with the shadow of 'Tinker tailor'. A film version of the latter, incidentally, has recently been made and I look forward to seeing it. It will be interesting to see how well it manages to translate the story and whether it too suffers from the same problem as the famous TV adaption which often has George Smiley (as played by Sir Alec Guiness) sitting and staring into space (or polishing his glasses on his tie).

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

2011-09-10T20:15:00.002+03:00

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

("The second coming", W.B. Yeats)

The above refers to what is currently happening in Turkey and Egypt, re Israel.

A resizable dialog box

2011-09-07T13:10:00.001+03:00

I can't claim that this was my idea, but it can be useful in certain circumstances. Normally a dialog box should be of fixed size; the controls are normally at fixed locations and so enlarging the box doesn't really change anything. For an extreme example, try maximising a dialog box. Thus the dialog box style doesn't allow resizing.

But every now and then, it can be useful to have a resizable dialog box: let's say that the only controls within the dialog box are a rich edit control (possibly connected to a database) and a pair of buttons. Using the anchor property, the rich edit can have all four anchors set, so its size will grow as the dialog box grows. The button on the left has its bottom and left anchors set whereas the button on the right has its bottom and right anchors set.

Here's the code

type
TSizeDemo = class(TForm)
    Memo1: TMemo;
    BitBtn1: TBitBtn;
    BitBtn2: TBitBtn;
    PaintBox1: TPaintBox;
    procedure PaintBox1Paint(Sender: TObject);
private
protected    procedure CreateParams(var Params: TCreateParams); override;
    procedure CreateWnd; override;
end;
implementation

{$R *.dfm}

procedure TSizeDemo.CreateParams(var Params: TCreateParams);
begin
inherited CreateParams (Params);
Params.Style:= WS_CAPTION or WS_SIZEBOX or WS_SYSMENU;
Params.ExStyle:= WS_EX_DLGMODALFRAME or WS_EX_WINDOWEDGE;
end;

procedure TSizeDemo.CreateWnd;
begin
inherited CreateWnd;
SendMessage (Self.Handle, WM_SETICON, 1, 0);
end;

procedure TSizeDemo.PaintBox1Paint(Sender: TObject);
begin
With PaintBox1 do
DrawFrameControl (Canvas.Handle,
                   Rect (Width - 12, Height - 12, Width, Height),
                   DFC_SCROLL,
                   DFCS_SCROLLSIZEGRIP );
end;

end.

The paintbox is necessary in order to display the sizing handle in the bottom right hand corner. Here is the link to the original article.

At risk/2

2011-09-06T16:08:00.003+03:00

Here's part of review of another of Stella Rimington's books; I think that the author makes his/her point more eloquently than I did.

What I hate most is that Liz Carlyle is portrayed as being completely omniscient. Every hunch she has, every deduction she makes, any inferences she makes from questioning people - they're always right! This feeling that MI5 could function effectively with only one member of staff - superwoman Liz - spoils it for me. She's the one who could tell you what the train driver had for lunch just knowing his shoe size. Shame - because otherwise a good read.

At risk

2011-09-06T15:58:00.002+03:00

"At risk" is the title of the first novel written by Dame Stella Rimington, who received her damehood for running MI5. Not surprisingly, the book (and the following series) is about a female agent in MI5 - virgin territory for me (in terms of fiction, that is). Whilst Rimington is no literary stylist, her prose is far better than I had been led to believe, and reading the novel was an enjoyable experience.

As usual, the first few chapters provide background about several characters who appear later in the book; the story as such gets going at around the seventh or eighth chapter (the chapters themselves are very short). There are a few early chapters which could easily have been cut without causing damage to the story; they don't provide much background information and serve only to distract the reader.

Once the story gets going, it is an exciting read which is more similar to a police procedural than a spy novel. The story is a manhunt after two terrorists, in which protagonist Liz Carlyle provides most of the directions for the hunt. I doubt that in real life MI5 officers become so involved in such matters, and indeed, at a late stage in the story Carlyle feels that her part of the job - the cerebral analysis - is over, even though she eventually produces the final piece in the puzzle, the terrorists' target.

Carlyle does become some kind of 'wonder woman', divining intents correctly with too little input. Nowhere is this more apparent that the final chapter: in the previous scene, Carlyle suffered shell shock when the terrorists are apprehended and is hospitalised. She wakes up the next day with everything very fuzzy, but manages to make a conclusion on very slim evidence. I can't see how she had the time or the mental energy to achieve this, and as a result the book finishes on an unbelievable note.

I enjoyed the book sufficiently to order the next installment. I hope that this is more about her life in the office as an agent-runner/analyst and less about running around in the field.

Financial report

2011-09-03T09:11:00.001+03:00

Sometimes people ask me how my studies are going. I ask myself this question frequently. Here is the answer....

The following is an exercise which we completed at the end of yesterday's session. It takes longer to write the question down than it does to solve it.

A company is examining the possibility of investing in the following project: the project requires an initial investment in equipment and supplies at a cost of $100,000. Operating the equipment will require an improvement in the water filtering capability which will cost $20,000. The project also requires working capital of $54,000; this capital will be kept at the same level throughout the project's lifespan.

The company completed a marketing survey which examined the demand for the project and paid $10,000 for this. The company expects that the project will last for eight years, in which time the income will be $45,000 for the first five years and $30,000 for the next three years. Expenses are expected to be $4,000 per year.

Running the project will cause a loss in income of $3,000 per year from other projects of the company. The company depreciates the cost of equipment at a constant rate of the project's lifetime with an expected residual value of $0. The company's economists expect that at the end of the project it will be possible to sell the equipment for $10,000.

Tax is paid at the rate of 30%, on cash income from the same year. The project will be financed from equity (shares) and bonds which have a nominal interest rate of 5.8% per annum. The average weighted capital cost of the company is 12% per annum.

Would you recommend the company to carry out the project? Present a cash flow statement and NPV calculation in order to support your recommendation.

Straightforward, no? Yet this is the sort of thing which financial MBAs face every day (ok, not every day, but maybe every few months). I imagine that everyone in the class understood the question and all the items contained within, although I doubt whether everyone could solve it without being shown how.

Here comes the answer to the question which I posed at the beginning of this post (how are your studies going?) - I wouldn't say that it's easy but the course isn't hard (I solved the above question while the lecturer was about half way through explaining the items). It just doesn't do anything for me; it doesn't exercise my intellect. I'm not enjoying this course as much as I have enjoyed others, although of course, my enjoyment is irrelevant to the final mark or whether I am going to use this material in my daily life. But when one studies primarily for one's enjoyment and intellectual stimulation, then the course should provide that stimulation.

By the way, the project is not recommended, with an NPV of -$9,179.

Implicit vs explicit joins (SQL)/2

2011-08-26T22:32:00.000+03:00

Following up my recent blog on the subject, I thought that I would look at the SQL statements in one small program of mine. About 50% of the queries were based on one table only, so of course there was no need to change them. Of the other 50%, about half were simple to change; in the remaining 25%, I had cleverly put the limiting clause before the connecting clause. Correcting these queries was simple, of course, and I did become aware of the organising power of the explicit syntax.

I had to write a new report for the OP's management program, so this was a chance to use the new syntax from day one. As luck would have it, this query was somewhat more complex than the usual type of query, involving two joins to the same table (in other words, I had to use the same table twice in order to display different values). Here I discovered my first 'gotcha': if the same table is being used twice, it has to be aliased both times. Initially, I was only aliasing the table once, but when I saw that the returned results were not as they should be, I added the extra alias. This probably explains why I see the frequent use of aliasing in answers about SQL on Stack Overflow: people have been taught to alias everything to prevent problems. And I thought that they were just being lazy.

Here is the new query in all its glory:

select dockets.id, c1.name, dockets.opendate, c2.name as xname, xtracust.curdate
from dockets inner join customers c1
on dockets.customer = c1.id
inner join xtracust
on dockets.id = xtracust.docket
inner join customers c2
on xtracust.customer = c2.id
where xtracust.xtra = 1

Probably all the (Firebird) world knows this already, but here is another tidbit which I picked up this morning: in order to limit the number of rows being returned, one uses the non-standard syntax select first 1 [skip n] .... I'm not aware of having needed this (otherwise I would already have known this), but an extra piece of knowledge is always good to know. I sometimes have to check whether a query returns a dataset, but this is not the same thing. It might be useful in programs where I display all the records (but not all the fields) from a dataset on program startup; normally I try to limit this by date, but it might be easier to display the first 50 records and then require the user to click on a button if she wants more records displayed.

Spam mail

2011-08-25T07:37:00.000+03:00

Yesterday, I received the following email:

International insurance company is hiring employees for long term cooperation.
Our main purpose is to build a strong team of distant representatives who are ready to work for 4-6 hours from home on weekdays.

Interested affiliates:
ISRAEL

Requirements:
Excellent English both reading and writing Excellent native language Strong computer skills Experience in database processing You must be hard working and responsible You must be intelligent (graduates are preferred) If you’re beginner be ready to pass trial period for 1 month.

Primary responsibilities:
Database processing and translation

We will look to hire you for a long term, at least for 6 month

Payment:
You’ll be paid according to results of interview and consideration of the application We have limited amount of vacancies so please submit your resume as you read this.
To submit your resume please use: Kirby@il-career.com

I would normally have been more than slightly interested in this offer had it not been for the minor fact that the grammar contained too many mistakes for such an email, and for the major fact that the email had apparently been sent from one of my work addresses.

Later on in the day, our system administrator sent a company wide email stating that our email server was under attack with letters similar to the above. During the course of the day, I received another two similar emails, each from a different address (but all mine) and each with a different contact address.

What I find interesting is how the mail managed to combine a few items which would appeal to me: translation, database management, a graduate. It would be interesting to see what other people received (apparently the same). Of course, the point is not the content of the mail but rather the evil intent of flooding our email server.

Replacing the dual list box dialog

2011-08-24T09:18:00.001+03:00

I wrote about nine months ago about how I improved the dual list box dialog which came as a standard template with Delphi 1. I used this dialog once again in a program in which I was initially displaying one field from a database; after testing, I decided to add another field in order to make things clearer. When the OP saw it, she requested another field; afterwards I decided on my own to add yet another field. As a result, the list box was displaying four fields concatenated into one string and the result was visually unpleasant. I used different kinds of brackets for each field, so the string looked something like this

5298 (1110) [31-07-2011] {2543}

The operation of the dialog was oblivious to the content of the string, as the key (deliberate pun) to the string was passed as a linked and hidden object, but from the user's point of view, the modest list box was not up to the task of displaying such a complex line. It was time for a more structured component to hold the string/fields.

Normally, when displaying data taken from a database, my thoughts turn to using a dbgrid, but as the dialog required rows to be removed from one list and added to another, the use of queries would needlessly complicate matters. A compromise solution would be to use a listview. So yesterday, I wrote a small demo program with two listviews; I populated one on program startup and then figured out how to move one item from listview to listview.

I thought that the demo would be sufficient for plugging directly into the program needing this functionality, but I was wrong. First of all, I had to contend with the right to left issue; fortunately I had solved this in the past, so all I had to do was find where I had implemented this. Then I had to figure out the column widths, which was done by excruciating trial and error (there must be a better way!). Then I was left with the task of iterating through one of the listviews and checking whether the current entry had been in the populating query upon startup or had been added during the form's execution; this was the most important problem of all but eventually succumbed.

Whilst none of the above seems to be on the cutting edge of Delphi development, I have found it very difficult to find any references to the sort of problem which I face. So I have to 'wing it' most of the time, creating my own solutions to problems which I encounter. But now that the 'dual list view dialog' problem has been solved, I can reuse this solution whenever needed.

Here is a little of code, which deals with moving one item or all the items from one list view to the other.

Procedure TConnectToReceipt.LVMoveOne (src, dst: tlistview);
var
li1, li2: tlistitem;

begin
if src.selected <> nil then
begin
   li1:= src.Selected;
   li2:= dst.Items.Add;
   li2.Assign (li1);
   src.selected.delete;
end;
dst.alphasort;
setbuttons;
end;

Procedure TConnectToReceipt.LVMoveAll (src, dst: tlistview);
var
i: Integer;

begin
src.Items.BeginUpdate;
dst.Items.BeginUpdate;
for i:= src.Items.Count - 1 downto 0 do
begin
   dst.Items.Add.Assign (src.Items[i]);
   src.Items[i].Delete;
end;
dst.alphasort;
dst.Items.EndUpdate;
src.Items.EndUpdate;
setbuttons;
end;

And here's the code to make the listviews (and their titles) display from right to left. I'm posting this here to make it easier for me to find it the next time.

procedure TConnectToReceipt.FormCreate(Sender: TObject);
const
LVM_FIRST = $1000;      // ListView messages
LVM_GETHEADER = LVM_FIRST + 31;

var
header: thandle;

begin
header:= SendMessage (srclist.Handle, LVM_GETHEADER, 0, 0);
SetWindowLong (header, GWL_EXSTYLE,
GetWindowLong (header, GWL_EXSTYLE) or WS_EX_LAYOUTRTL or WS_EX_NOINHERITLAYOUT);
SetWindowLong (srclist.Handle,GWL_EXSTYLE,
                GetWindowLong (srclist.Handle, GWL_EXSTYLE) or
                WS_EX_LAYOUTRTL or WS_EX_NOINHERITLAYOUT);
srclist.invalidate;
end;

Implicit vs explicit joins (SQL)

2011-08-23T15:05:00.001+03:00

As I don't use MS-SQL Server (which many people take to be the standard, even if that is de facto and not de jure), I had not been aware of the debate regarding the syntax of implicit vs explicit joins until recently. At work, the ERP program has its own specific SQL syntax which is slightly different from the standard, especially with regard to joins, so this cannot serve as an example. It transpires that the version of Firebird which I use supports both implicit and explicit joins, so again, I wasn't aware of any difference.

What is explicit join syntax?

select meetings.curdate, meetings.price, people.forename, people.surname
from meetings inner join people
on meetings.person = people.id
where meetings.kind = 2

And what is implicit join syntax?

select meetings.curdate, meetings.price, people.forename, people.surname
from meetings, people
where meetings.person = people.id
and meetings.kind = 2

What is the difference? The best explanation which I have found is (in my phrasing) the separation of the part which defines how the tables are joined from the part which defines how the rows are filtered. As Firebird is indifferent to which syntax is used (execution times were the same regardless of syntax), it doesn't matter too much which syntax I use. I will try, however, to start using explicit syntax as this is logically clearer.

Update
As this article points out, implicit syntax is otherwise known as SQL-89 join syntax, whereas explicit syntax is otherwise known as SQL-92 join syntax. I quote: "In this [SQL-89] syntax, join criteria are mixed with search criteria. It is applicable ONLY to inner joins. [In] SQL-89 there was no standard for outer joins."

So now you know. Or, seeing as everyone already knew this, now I know.

Before the poison

2011-08-21T09:29:00.000+03:00

If it's late August, then it's time for a new novel from Peter Robinson. Whilst I find this 'writing to timetable' slightly disturbing, I am not complaining. This year's offering is called 'Before the poison', and unusually is not about Robinson's serial character, DCI Alan Banks. Instead, it's about a composer (Chris something) who writes film soundtracks who has moved back from California to his native Yorkshire. But leaving the characterisation aside, this book might be considered a Banks story without Banks. I'll try to write about the book without giving away any spoilers.

The narrator finds himself owner of a large house, well off the beaten track. Slowly he discovers that the house has been virtually unoccupied for the last fifty years, and that the previous lady (Grace Fox) of the house was hung after being convicted of poisoning her husband, even though the husband was originally thought to have died as the result of a heart attack. The composer becomes intrigued by this story and starts chasing facts; he meets one source in a local pub, but for other sources, he has to travel to Paris and Cape Town.

Chris's search for the truth (or at least, his search for an understanding) is woven alongside his new life in the Yorkshire village, where he is befriended by his estate agent, a 40+ old lady with marital problems. Whilst this material has clearly been added to flesh out his characterisation, I'm not sure that it contributes that much to the story (compare this with similar pieces of DCI Banks' life when he's not chasing murderers).

In common with a few of the recent Banks novels, some of the action takes place in the present and some in the past. The past is represented first by the story of Grace Fox's trial taken from a book about famous murder trials (the book is bought by the composer in a second hand bookshop after he becomes curious) and secondly by extracts from Fox's private journal (the provenance of which only becomes clear towards the end of the story). Thus the trial material views what happens only from a distance, and of course only presents what happened at the trial - Grace Fox was not called to the witness stand to defend herself.

Again, in common with a few of the recent Banks novels, the first half is not particularly focused: Robinson lays down the groundwork diligently but it doesn't seem to go anywhere. The book takes off only when the extracts from Fox's private journal begin to appear; these of course tell the tale from a different angle, although all of the entries presented deal with Fox's life during the Second World War. These entries cause Chris to better his understanding of what almost certainly happened regarding the death.

I can understand why this book had to be written without Banks: there is no connection between what happened then as to what is happening now (in the previous novels, there was always a strong connection between past and present) and so there is no room for invoking a police investigation - hence no Banks. The composer is free to come and go as he wishes, asking people for their memories but with no compulsion to answer. I suspect, though, that most people in real life would be less enthusiastic about finding a resolution - indeed, several characters ask the composer why he is so driven about the story.

Continuing the family tradition

2011-08-18T11:45:00.001+03:00

My father spent his 30 year plus career in the British civil service, working alongside accountants. I spent 13 years as an active accountant before moving full time into the computer business. Now my daughter (aged 23 and a half) has announced that she is going to take an accountancy course at a college. She's continuing the family tradition.

This is quite a turn-around for her, as until now all her jobs have been people orientated. She's been a shift manager at a few cafes in the local vicinity (she helped start one such cafe, and simply dropping her name was enough to get a job there for her brother), she managed a stall in the arcades of New Zealand and Australia, and worked for nearly a year in customer support for one of Israel's cellphone companies (hardly anybody survives a year). So it was quite a surprise for me when she announced her intention to turn her back on people and start working with figures.

We had a long discussion on the subject a few weeks ago, in which I played the devil's advocate. When I mentioned the people orientation of all her previous jobs, she replied that these were the only jobs available to her. This may well be so: over the past thirty years, services have become more and more important, to the detriment of other kinds of jobs. Almost all of my jobs (bakery, chicken hatchery, food analyst, accountant, programmer) date from at least twenty years ago, and none of them are people orientated. The only people orientated job which I undertook in my early days was running the kitchens in my first kibbutz, and that was far from a total success.

I was fortunate to have started work when accountancy was already computerised; had I started a few years earlier, it would have meant manually writing up entries and then sending them off to a service centre where they would have been computerised. But one doesn't really understand what's happening until one does some manual examples.

Beginning the diet

2011-08-15T13:49:00.000+03:00

I wrote last week about commencing a diet; I could start some parts of it immediately but other parts required a little time to be organised.

The first thing that enters my mouth in the morning is a glass of cold water with freshly squeezed lemon juice. This isn't as unpalatable as I had expected, but it doesn't "do" much for me. After that, I have yoghurt as before, but instead of three spoonfuls of granola (which apparently are a high calorie source), I have two spoonfuls of flax seed. I bought this in a 'healthy' supermarket when I was in the Haifa bay area on Thursday. As opposed to the picture on the left, they were selling it loose - and very cheap. I miss the crunchiness of the granola and the seeds tend to stick in my teeth - but hopefully the change will help me lose weight.

After yoghurt, I used to eat a slice of wholewheat bread with peanut butter - again, very nutritious but also full of calories. I have cut this out completely and so far it hasn't seemed to matter. During the morning, I munch on a cucumber or peach should I become hungry. Strangely, I haven't been hungry at all, except on Friday morning. Does this mean that I have been eating too much?

Lunch is as it has always been for the past year or so, a stir-fry consisting of chicken breast and seven or eight vegetables, all chopped up and cooked. I normally cook a batch on Saturday night and work my way through it during the week. Most weeks I add turmeric to the food, which naturally makes it yellow. I had thought that this spice didn't contribute anything to the taste, but there was a week when I had run out of turmeric and that week the food was distinctly tasteless. I stocked up on the spice in the Haifa supermarket on Thursday only to find it in my local corner shop on Friday.

The missing piece of the diet was the evening meal, for which I had been recommended to eat quinoa (here in Israel, it is pronounced ki-no-a, but I understand that elsewhere it is pronounced kin-wa). For some reason, I had thought that this was eaten uncooked, a form which looked distinctly unpleasant, but after reading about it (for some reason, the quinoa had slipped my mind otherwise I would have bought some of this as well in the supermarket), I bought a bag of it in the corner shop. I cooked it like rice - first fried a diced onion, then added a cup of quinoa and two cups of boiling water with some chicken flavour soup powder and let it simmer for 20 minutes - but the result was far more tasty than rice in my opinion. I've just been reading about the nutritional properties of quinoa and it seems that this should definitely become a staple of my diet. I'm going to cook it instead of rice on Friday night - it will be interesting to see what the children say, even though I can guess right now.

The other main change in my diet is no milk (apart from the yoghurt) and much drinking of water. It helps that the weather is hot as this encourages me to drink. I calculate that I am drinking about 3.5 litres of water (some of it as herbal tea, some as lemon juice) a day, causing commensurate visits to the toilet. Whereas before I would drink maybe only one cup of tea after returning home from work, I am now drinking that cup along with four or five glasses of water.

I have refrained from weighing myself so far. Next Sunday, I will have the stitches removed from my back after my minor operation, and then I will weigh myself in the clinic. It will be interesting to see what the results are.

Optimisations

2011-08-14T12:40:00.000+03:00

The occupational psychologist (OP) is currently on holiday in USA, so I've had a bit of breathing space. I decided a week ago to try and optimise the use of the management program which I wrote for her; by opimise, I mean to make it work faster and to cut out unnecessary activities.

My first step was to include module logging; I added a table to the database to record which module was used when by whom, and of course added suitable code to each module to record its use, along with a form which displays the total use of each module per time period. The results, even after a few days, were illuminating. As the OP is absent, I was not surprised to see that very few reports were created. What was interesting was to see which data forms were used and how frequently.

It turns out that the most frequently used form - by far - is called EditMeeting. In this form, the user records a meeting for a specific person, choosing values from three different tables in the database along with adding a few dates and a price. My thinking went as follows: as rows are added to those tables infrequently, it might be possible to cache the tables in memory and load them whenever necessary, instead of hitting the database every time the form was loaded. In order to do this, it would be necessary to check first that there had been no change in the tables - meaning that I had to add a new table to the database to record the timestamp of the last change to the tables, and of course, add code to set this timestamp.

Once this had been taken care of, I considered how to cache the data and load. The approach that I took was to define three global clientdatasets in the program's data module, refresh the datasets' contents whenever necessary, and copy their contents to clientdatasets local to the form via cloning their cursors. Part of the information necessary came from this article.

When I tested the new version of the program, it appeared to work correctly. I can't really judge whether the program runs faster as I have a complete copy of the database stored on my computer and so my access times are very fast. In the OP's office, the database is stored on a server and so access will naturally be slower. Theoretically, the program can't run any slower than it does now; it can only run faster. But will that improvement be noticeable?

After completing everything, I started thinking about this blog entry, which led me to consider another point which I had previously neglected. EditMeeting is implemented as a modal dialog box which is created every time the user wishes to add a meeting. This means that on every invocation, Delphi (or Windows) has to build the dialog box, load the data and then display the form. It occurs to me that it might be better to create the form once at program startup, using the auto-create function which I always delete, and then simply show and hide the form appropriately. As the form is modal, there is only ever going to be one instance of it visible on the screen at any given time (as opposed to many other forms in the program, which are non-modal). Making this small programming change should also shorten the time which it takes for the form to be displayed on the screen.

Of course, once the form is displayed, time becomes irrelevant as now it is the user who determines how long the form will be displayed on the screen. User time is measured in seconds whereas program time is measured in milliseconds.

The real test will be to sit with someone running the program in order to see what they are doing and why; only on the basis of those observations will I be able to formulate a better way of running the program. Such structural changes are always going to save more time than small optimisations in program code.

New beginnings

2011-08-09T08:40:00.001+03:00

I've been quiet over the past two weeks because there have been new beginnings in my life and I have been waiting for them to develop before writing about them.

I've started my final year of the MBA; this term's course is Finance, which occupies itself with moving financial resources around in time. So far there have been two lectures, which haven't overly taxed my brain (although the same cannot be said for all the participants); we have learnt how much one should contribute every month in order to receive a large pension, and whether it is better to buy a flat as opposed to renting (no clear answer here, because it depends on the interest rate, the price and any number of psychological factors). This week we should be receiving our financial calculators, which will make calculating some figure to the power of 360 somewhat easier.

After a chance phone call, I have started to visit an alternative medicine care centre (David Lodge has his protagonist visit such a centre in his novel "Therapy"; he calls it the Wellbeing Centre, which is a good name), where I am receiving massages and acupuncture. Unfortunately, my visits will be put on hold for a couple of weeks as yesterday I had a few growths (BCC) removed from my back and I am not to return until the stitches are out. The first acupuncture session was slightly painful, sending electric shocks up my arm after the therapist presumably poked a nerve, but the second was painless. The sole massage which I have received also tended to be painful, but that's because there are muscles in my leg which hurt. Presumably, pain is good.

It doesn't help my general condition that I have been diagnosed once again with anaemia and that I am overweight.

My goals are to improve my body tone (ie no muscle pain) and to lose at least 10kg in weight. Last night I met with what they call a 'Naturapath'; after measuring my height and weight, we talked mainly about what I eat. There are a few things which I have to cut out entirely from my diet, to be replaced by raw vegetables and plenty of water. I find it very difficult to eat raw vegetables, primarily because they were never part of my diet when I was growing up. I will try to eat cucumbers and carrots.

One interesting aspect is that I eat according to the clock as opposed to eating when I am hungry. I was told not to eat my slice of brown bread at 5:45am, but rather wait until my body tells me that I need to eat it. I got up three hours ago and all that has entered my mouth so far is one cup of cold water with squeezed lemon (something new), three cups of herbal tea and 200g yoghurt (with only one spoon of granola as opposed to three; this is to be replaced with flax seed); I don't feel hungry yet.

There was an interview with a famous Israeli basketball coach in the papers over the weekend; the most important part of the interview for me was the fact that he lost 15kg of excess weight thanks to acupuncture. When I mentioned this in the clinic, I was told that acupuncture can't make the body lose weight (good for them; they are not making any false claims) but that it can lower one's hunger. As mentioned above, I don't eat (yet) when I am hungry, but changing my eating habits and acupuncture may make a big difference to when and what I eat.

Closing off a previous post, I obtained access to the unicode complete Delphi XE. After making a few changes to my program (some of which will back propagate), I successfully compiled a unicode version of our flagship exam. More and more customers were having problems running the exam on their computers, and the new version has come just in time. The exam has no dependencies on outside libraries (such as special components or database access) which is why it was so easy to port the program. Converting other programs to unicode will be a major undertaking and won't be done unless there is no other option.

Masochistic programming

2011-07-27T09:02:00.002+03:00

I wrote three years ago about creating a unicode version of one of our exam programs. Recently it transpired that the program doesn't display Hebrew on some computers (all of which are running Windows 7) presumably because the Hebrew was displayed on a non-unicode dialog. It turns out that on some computers, Hebrew was not set as the non-unicode language; when this definition was changed, the programs were displayed correctly. Even so, there are still a few computers which don't display the Hebrew correctly. I tried to create a completely unicode version of the program but it seems that the TNT components which I had been using don't display Hebrew correctly (if at all). One reason for this is that the resource file containing the Hebrew text was saved as ANSI, so it's not surprising that there were problems. But even after saving the resource file as unicode (and compiling it with the unicode resource compiler, GoRC), there were still problems.

There is a TUnicodeLabel component which I discovered which does display Hebrew unicode; unfortunately this component does not display right aligned text nor does it display multiple line text.

The answer of course is to update Delphi 7 to Delphi XE but the financial cost seems to outweigh the advantages. Not only that, every string would suddenly become unicode, a change which is liable to cause more problems than it solves.

The idea occurred to me to recreate the program as a standard WinAPI program in Delphi; this is a very masochistic programming technique as it obviates all the advantages that Delphi brings to the table. The only apparent 'advantage' is that the resulting executable file is very small, which might have been important once but now is meaningless. The program code is verbose and difficult to understand; this is how early Windows programs were written, until frameworks such as Delphi and Visual Basic appeared. Using this technique, I was able to create my own unicode labels and have them display Hebrew correctly.

I discovered this site which gives tutorials into writing WinAPI programs in Delphi. Unfortunately the writing is not too clear (there is also the tendency to confuse its with it's which always annoys and distracts me) and the demonstration programs are presented in a way to defy comprehension, having more comments than code.

After struggling with these concepts for a few hours, I took the dog for a walk. As I have written several times before, this is a very therapeutic step and always helps when confronted with a programming conundrum. As usual, an idea popped into my head whilst walking: keep the Delphi program but add the unicode labels with low-level code. As the exam is very dependent on displaying data but not so dependent on receiving data, this would be a definite possibility to be examined. Can this be done, I wondered? Yes, indeed.

So from one dialog box, I removed the TNT labels and replaced them with calls to CreateWindoxExW. The downside of this is that I am unable to see the labels on the dialog during design time, but the technique does work. The labels at the moment are in a system font and have the wrong coloured background but such matters are not important at the moment. Once I see how to display multiline text in such a label, I can make a full version of the exam program and send it to be tested on a computer which is known to display my programs incorrectly.

Red Cap

2011-07-26T09:37:00.000+03:00

I've been watching the television series "Red Cap", which is being broadcast on BBC Entertainment on Saturday nights. This is a series (two seasons) about the British Military Police, situated in Germany. Instead of the usual CID plainclothes policemen, the series shows SIB (Special Investigative Branch) plainclothes policemen; there's not much difference between the two.

Whilst the initial premise of the series is good - a detective series with a change of scenery and background - I think that there's no real follow-through on this. Each episode starts off promisingly, but soon the story starts following one track out of several possibilities, the endings always seem a bit forced and divorced from all that has gone before.

The fact that the series is set in Germany doesn't seem to count for much. Maybe there are no more British troops in Britain, but the Germany of this series seems remarkably British. The only 'advantage' is that the NCOs have a German liason officer instead of a British one. Most of the crimes investigated are not particularly military; the first episode was about the accidental killing of a soldier during a training exercise and promised much, but other episodes have been more civilian.

The last episode which I saw (episode 1.6, "Payback") showed the normal confused characteristics of this series. It begins with a senior officer arriving at the 'station', expecting to meet one of the detectives; it seems that someone has played a practical joke on this officer, for the detective he is to meet is in fact having his annual physical exam and is not on-site. Whilst this is being explained to the officer, his car is stolen. Another practical joke?

Then the story switches elsewhere to a scene in which our intrepid detectives discover a shipment of hashish in a chocolate box. The soldier for whom this shipment is intended reveals himself by coshing his superior officer (for no apparent reason, as he leaves the hash behind). Two detectives start tracing this soldier and discover that he frequents a certain night club. Despite being 'blown', the soldier turns up that evening at the night club where he is observed by the two detectives; they see him meet 'Mr Big' and transfer an envelope, which one of the detectives manages to attain.

The detective who was taking the physical exam talks with a fellow NCO who is about to be court-martialled for striking an officer whilst in Kosovo. The NCO has 22 years of service but would lose all his pension if indeed he would be court-martialled. Whilst the detective is trying to find a way to help the NCO, the latter shows no signs of remorse at his actions.

Cutting a long story short, this NCO stole the first officer's car; it is intended to be used as the getaway car for a bank robbery in which he is involved, along with the hash smuggling soldier and a few others. The envelope which was passed from hand to hand in the night club contains the codes for the bank vault. Two detectives (including the one from the physical exam) are in the bank enquiring about the codes when the robbery takes place; physical exam detective gets shot during the robbery.

The first set of detectives arrive on the scene and don't really do anything. One gets taken as a hostage by the NCO who decided to go it alone with the stolen money; the (female) hostage detective gets replaced by her partner. Then a police sniper shoots at the getaway car; I'm not sure who was driving, but anyway the car crashes. The NCO is killed, despite the car's airbag which blows up in his face (maybe he was shot) whereas the detective is merely stunned. Female detective embraces male detective, showing signs of relief than nothing had happened to her partner.

Why do I feel let down by all this? Apart from the unlikely events of the robbery, what about the hash smuggling soldier? What about Mr Big, who apparently is occupied with human trafficking? Why does the episode end with all of the detectives having their picture taken, whilst in uniform?

As usual, I seem to be in a minority. The few user reviews which appear on IMDB are heartily in favour: Following on from the successful pilot episode first broadcast in December 2001, Red Cap has now been made into a six-part TV series for the BBC. Initially, it seemed like a bit of a gamble turning a successful, one-off episode into a continuous series which could wear the premise thin and make the stories become predictable or silly. But, on the contrary, the stories in the Red Cap series really require you to use your brain, and [are] full of interesting and exciting twists and turns that sustain viewer interest right until the end.You have to pay attention to everything that is being said and inferred so that you don't lose track of the story, and this is always a great thing with thrillers.Tamzin Outhwaite is also extremely well cast as the heroine of the story and is very engaging to watch perform. Fine programming from the BBC.

Human Resources Management results

2011-07-25T08:07:00.001+03:00

Today, with little fanfare, the results of the HRM exam which I sat in early June were published. I was disappointed to see that I had received only 55%; obviously my internal marking system was more optimistic than the examiner. On the first question, I received 25 out of 40 (whereas I thought that I would get 30 marks), the second only 20 out of 40 (again, I thought that I would get 30 marks, but this was an odd question not allowing itself to clairvoyance), and the third I guessed correctly, getting 10 out of 20.

This is my lowest mark by far and at the moment I'm displeased; this low score doesn't reflect how I felt about the course. On the other hand, this is a subject which does not interest me very much and I doubt whether I will be needing it in the future. I only took the course because it is required by the Israeli Council for Higher Education; as far as Heriot Watt University is concerned, this is an optional course. It will be interesting to see how my fellow examinees faired: I will be seeing some on Friday when the Finance course begins.

The main thing is that I passed.

Lucerne log (5)

2011-07-17T18:40:00.000+03:00

Our final day in Lucerne started with a chocolate buying spree - it's amazing for how many people we have to buy chocolates and how expensive they are (expensive is a relative quality - see later on). Once that was out of the way, my wife could get on with the real business of the day - the bric'n'brac market which was set up on the banks of the Reuss river, a minute from our room.

The variety of articles was outstanding, most of it apparently being derived from house clearing sales. I could have bought any number of voltage adapters, an original Sony walkman cassette player as well as a discman player (like my first cd player). The only thing which remotely tempted me was a flute priced at 150 SFr; I don't play the flute but I would like to. But as a non-playing flautist, I don't have the ability to evalute the qualities of said flute; maybe it is a dud, bent so that it is out of tune. A shame, for the price is less than half of a new flute, if not even less.

My wife picked up a few copper items at miniscule prices but went all out with an antique paraffin lamp (with 'Helvetia' stamped on its body) for 45 SFr. We managed to get the lamp into our luggage, but this item nearly played havoc at the security check at the airport because of the smell of paraffin. Had there been a drop of paraffin in the lamp, it would have had to stay behind, at the chagrin of my wife. But soon it will be adorning our balcony, along with an antique cow bell which we bought at Trummelbach.

Once the market was completed, we set off for the train station, there to buy trousers and have lunch. After this, we set off for a side of Lucerne that we hadn't visited, in search of the glacier museum; on the way, I discovered that we were walking along the far end of the shopping street which I had last visited on the rainy day in Lucerne. The weather was now the complete opposite of that day, being sunny and very hot. With the help of a policewoman, we found the museum and had a good time inside (entrance free, courtesy of the Swiss Pass).

Outside the museum is the famous Lucerne Lion; this must be one of the most photographed objects in Lucerne, judging by the crowds who visited and photographed (most of them did not enter the museum). The museum itself is quite interesting, but not overwhelmingly so. Probably the best part was the end, which had nothing to do with glaciers whatsoever - the mirror maze. I filmed my entire stay within the maze, something which has to be seen to be appreciated. I quote: This fantastic attraction with its 90 mirrors was created in 1896 for the Swiss national exhibition in Geneva and has been at the Glacier Garden since 1899. Although the corridors appear infinitely long, they are in effect quite short - so take your time walking through!

From the museum we walked back to our hotel along the shopping street, thus completing the third side of a triangle. There was a brass band playing in one of the squares which I filmed, but the cassette was almost at its end and so I only caught a minute at most. I had wandered around that area on my own on our first evening and had heard a brass band version of 'Smoke on the water' emanating from one of the restaurants. I wonder whether it was the same band.

As time was getting on, we organised our suitcases then took them by hand to the train station - normally a brisk five minute walk, but this took about twenty minutes. Fortunately, a direct train to Zurich airport was waiting for us at the station (we seemed to be very lucky regarding trains - we didn't have to wait, nor did we have to change at Zurich) and we got to the airport at about 7:15pm. The check-in procedure is totally different from that at Ben Gurion, but we were helped by a helpful lady from Swiss Airlines.

Dining in a self-service restaurant, we finally ate rösti, a traditional Swiss dish made from potatoes. I had been aware of this dish from who else but John Le Carre and his novel, 'The night manager', where the eponymous manager offers it to newly arrived guests. After that, I wandered around the shops, where I discovered that the gift shops were selling goods at a price at least 10% higher than shops in Lucerne; it's just as well that we bought the 'expensive' chocolates in a shop by our hotel for had we waited until the airport, those chocolates really would have been expensive.

It transpires that there were two flights leaving to Tel Aviv with only a fifteen minute difference between their departure times. We naturally went to the wrong gate (apparently we were not the only people to make the same mistake) only to be sent to the other gate; unfortunately the first gate was at one end of the huge Zurich terminal E building and the second gate was at the other end. It took at least twenty minutes to walk from one end to the other, so it's just as well that we arrived early.

There was internet access available at the airport, only it wasn't free, and the time which I had purchased whilst in Locarno had expired that morning. Thus I was unable to write nor post this blog from Zurich. The flight was non-eventful, although I suffered terribly from restless leg syndrome (this got me during some of our train journeys as well) and discovered that the most 'comfortable' position for me was to stand in the aisle. Eventually we landed, got through passport control, luggage and customs and thence to a queue for taxis (at least three flights landed within a twenty minute period).

Into bed at 5am, up again at around 10am, but terribly woozy. Only now do I seem to be ok - but I will go to bed reasonably early tonight as I have to be up at 5am tomorrow morning - back to work.

Lucerne log (4)

2011-07-15T19:51:00.000+03:00

It may seem from reading these logs that Switzerland - or at least, the Switzerland of the tourist - is either mountains or water. Today we visited a place which combines the water with the mountain - Trummelbach Falls. This is a most amazing place in which the visitor can see water - the fall off from the Eiger and other mountains - flow in a mighty surge through the mountain. Paths have been hewn out of the stone in order to allow the visitor access to views of the path of the water. This blows yesterday's Rhine Falls out of the water, to use an inappropriate expression.

After we had finished with the falls (it took us about 3 and a half hours to get there from Lucerne, so this was already after lunch), we had to decide what to do next. Had we arrived earlier, then the plan was to take a local train (or tram) to a place called Kleine Scheidegg and from there take a cog train to the top of a mountain called Jungfraujoch, whose railway station is the highest in Europe. Had we managed to do so, then we wouldn't have returned to Lucerne until 9pm. As it is now 6:45pm, obviously we didn't go there.

Instead, it turned out that there is a cable car service opposite the Lauterbrunnen train station, which when combined with another train, takes one up a mountain to a village called Mürren, at an elevation of a mere 1650 meters - we are getting terribly blase about such things. The train ride had fabulous views of the snow covered mountains on the other side of the Lauterbrunnen gorge, whereas Mürren itself was unremarkable - although a village at such a height is remarkable enough on its own.

We wandered around through the village, photographing the mountains, had an ice cream cone (the cheapest so far in Switzerland) then headed back via the train and cable car. A train was waiting for us in Lauterbrunnen, and we only had to wait a few minutes for our connection in Interlaken.

A good day! This was our penultimate day in Switzerland and our final trip. As our flight leaves Zurich Airport only at 10pm, we will be able to spend a complete day in Lucerne. To my wife's delight, there is supposed to be a flea market being held tomorrow on both sides of the river so that will keep her occupied, although I don't know what I will be doing. And of course, there are chocolates to be bought....

Thus the next log may be written in Zurich Airport or it may be written at home. Whichever way, we certainly went out on a high note!

Lucerne log (3)

2011-07-15T08:53:00.001+03:00

This is going to be a short entry due to lack of time.

Yesterday we took a train from Lucerne to Zurich and another from Zurich to Winterthur, whereupon we changed to a suburban line to Schaffhausen. We got off at the miniscule station at Neuhausen am Rheinfall in order to see the Rhine Falls. In terms of waterfalls (the height that the water falls), this was a bit disappointing, but in terms of power, the waterfall was fascinating.

After photographing the falls from several different angles, we went to visit the castle which stands by the falls. This was built as a hotel and houses an exhibition which explains about the falls, the tourism aspect and the arguments held over the years whether to harness the falls' power for electricity and make the area industrial or to leave the area as is. The environmentalists won (and this argument was held in the 1850s).

Leaving the falls, we returned to Zurich where we prowled around the streets for a few hours, prior to our return to Lucerne. A late meal in a riverside restaurant was followed by falling into bed.

Shortly we'll be out again and may not return until nightfall.

Lucerne log (2)

2011-07-13T18:03:00.000+03:00

Today was a literal wash-out. The weather forecast had shown that today would be rainy and true to form, a thunderclap woke me up at around 4:30am. I had been hoping to go to the Reichenbach Falls, where the fictional Sherlock Holmes faked his death, but the Hebrew Internet reviews that we read had been less than lukewarm about the falls, and so we decided to forego this pleasure, instead spending the day shopping (or looking around shops) in the constant rain.

Not a fun day.

We bought a cuckoo clock at a souvenir shop called Casagrande, which is slightly off the beaten track. There was a wide variety of items for sale in the shop at reasonable prices. We had earlier bought a fair amount of Switzerland tat at a shop called Harry's (one of three) directly opposite our shop, which probably gets more than its fair shop of custom due to its location, but I got the feeling that Harry was more expensive.

Carrying on from the entry about Bern, George Smiley uses the alias 'Lachmann' in the novel 'Smiley's people'. Not knowing German, I had never known the meaning of this name, but now being in the German speaking part of Switzerland, I became curious. As far as I can establish, it means Smiley - lach means smile! Not a subtle cover name

Lucerne log (1)

2011-07-12T21:57:00.000+03:00

Today was a day of mountaineering.

Along with many other people, we caught a train this morning from Lucerne to Engelberg (forty seven minutes) in order to scale the Titlis mountain. Actually we ascended by cable car, which ran in three sections: the first two were 'mundane' (as if any cable car to a mountain is mundane) but the third section was in a car whose floor rotates, thus allowing all the people within to have a 360 degree view.

The peak of the Titlis is 3020 metres, making it the highest mountain that we have visited so far. It is above the snow level, and when we got to the summit, we walked out of the observation building onto a snowy path. It's just as well that I invested in a good pair of leather shoes for otherwise my old leather shoes (with cracked soles) would have caused my feet to freeze. I saw Asian girls wearing open shoes - good luck to them. We also walked around the glacier grotto - a path cut into the glacier itself. As this was dark, we couldn't really see very much.

Coming down was of course similar to going up, although much less crowded and so enabling a better view.

After catching the train from Engelberg back to Lucerne, we then took another train, this time to Alpnachstad (only twenty minutes away). Here we bought tickets for the Pilatus mountain, a dwarf at only 2132 metres, below the snow level. The cogwheel railway is supposedly either the longest in the world, the steepest in the world or both. At some places, the slope is 48%! To my surprise, I discovered that the railway had been built in 1889, originally with steam trains and then electrified in 1932. Even though I am becoming blase about cogwheel railways and/or funiculars, this ride was definitely one to be savoured.

Coming down from Pilatus was via cable car; whilst this was a very long ride (in three sections), most of it was similar to the ride from Cardada, albeit starting from a higher altitude. Again, the cable car path was shielded by trees on both sides; whilst this minimises the view from the cars, the trees probably act as wind shields, preventing shaking.

The Pilatus cable car 'lands' in a place called Kriens, presumably a suburb of Lucerne. One returns to the city via bus.

The weather today was very good, although a bit too hot for my liking. At the summits of the mountains, the air was cool (of course, especially on top of Titlis) but lower down was very humid later on in the afternoon. There was a short and heavy shower at about 7pm, after we had returned to our hotel; this cleared the air a little.

Tomorrow is supposed to bring heavy rain all over Switzerland which is going to put a severe cramp into our plans.

Bern, baby, Bern

2011-07-11T10:30:00.004+03:00

Roll up, roll up for the Mystery Tour….

Before leaving Israel, I had purchased a pair of Swiss Rail Cards, which would enable us to travel for free on all Swiss public transport as well as receiving 50% discounts on other means of travel, specifically the cable cars at Cardada. We hadn't taken extreme advantage of the card yet, although it will see plenty of use in the Lucerne stage of our holiday. But having such a card enabled us to take the mystery tour – ride the first train which leaves Locarno and see what happens after that.

Just as we arrived at the station, a train was leaving for Bellinzona, the local nexus, so we jumped onto the train. In Bellinzona, we had a connection leaving almost immediately for Lucerne and Basel so we took that train. By the time we arrived at Lucerne, at around midday, it became apparent that we wouldn't be have enough time to travel to Basel, walk around for a few hours and catch a train back to Locarno at a reasonable hour (Basel is in the far north of Switzerland, Locarno in the far south). The train pulled into Olten station, north east of Luceerne just as a train on an adjacent platform arrived, headed for Bern. So we jumped ship (or train).

I had wanted to travel to Bern, but the route which I had intended to take – Locarno, Domodossola, Brig, Bern – whilst scenic would have taken several hours and the first train wouldn't leave until 10:40, so I had abandoned that idea. Obviously fate wanted me to come to Bern, for here I was. Bern railway station is a vast affair and it took some time for us to emerge from the platform to the outside streets. When we did, an unpleasant surprise awaited us: the rain was bucketing down. Dismayed, we made a tour of the small shopping centre in the station then decided to have lunch in a pleasant restaurant/diner on the third floor.

Whilst eating, I was reminded of John Le Carre's novel, "A perfect spy", in which the youthful Magnus Pym is 'discovered' whilst eating in the buffet of Bern railway station. Let us not forget that Le Carre (or to give him his real name, David Cornwell) was stationed in Bonn, presumably after he had been burned by Kim Philby's defection, and so many of his books have scenes set in Switzerland (even his latest book, "Our kind of traitor", has its third section set here, albeit in Wallen).

I was then struck by another coincidence: we were on a magical mystery tour and eating spaghetti. After I explained to my wife about the Beatles' MMT and the big mess which it caused, I remembered that there was a scene in which John Lennon played a waiter and fed the fat man buckets and buckets of spaghetti. We were eating spaghetti….

After eating, we bought a rain coat and a pair of Swiss snow/sunglasses from the camping shop conveniently situated next door to the restaurant. When the saleslady heard us speaking Hebrew, she asked "Israel?", and then proceeded to tell us that she had been a volunteer on a kibbutz thirty years ago. I told her about the volunteer convention which had been held the week before we left.

By the time we had completed these purchases, the rain had ceased and the sun had begun to shine. Pleased, we walked out of the station and into a park; there I noticed a funicular railway which of course we had to ride, and from there we made our way to the river. After a few compulsory photographs, we came back to the funicular, went up and arrived at the Swiss General Assembly building (which I am sure is called something like Bundestag).

More surprises awaited us on the other side: a set of fountains set in a plaza which turn on and off according to some predetermined plan. The unpredictability of the fountains provides a perfect playing ground for children, and they (along with a few adults) were running across the dormant fountains, trying not to get wet. Occasionally all the fountains would erupt for a few minutes,eliciting cheers from the crowd.

Across the road was the type of boulevard so beloved of the Europeans (and so lacking in Israel): a wide road of which a third was given over to cafes. At the head of the boulevard a few giant chess boards were painted onto the pavement, and it crossed my mind that this might be the setting for one of the scenes in Le Carre's novel, "Smiley's People" – towards the end, the Russian diplomat Boris is "borrowed" for a few hours whilst watching such a street chess match.

From there, it was a short walk back to the train station; we left shortly after on a train headed to Lucerne, then took a long train back to Bellinzona which arrived a few minutes late, thus causing us to miss our connection to Locarno. Fortunately, trains leave Bellinzone for Locarno every half hour, so we were back in the hotel by 10pm after a long and mainly enjoyable magical mystery tour.

Santana was playing in the Piazza Grande when we arrived and we could hear him very well, although I couldn't recognise much of what he played. At some stage there was a chorus of 'Soul Sacrifice', but that must have been as part of a medley. After going to bed, I awoke a little later to hear Sting sing 'Roxanne' with Santana – very strange. As I had written, Sting had played the previous night; we heard six songs and then everything went quiet. Did he terminate his concert early? Did he go acoustic? I wonder what happened, for we could hear Santana very clearly the following night. If I had an internet connection, I would look this up, but currently I'm on a train going north from Locarno to Lucerne (passing one pretty village after another) and there are no wifi networks to be found.

Addendum: Now in Lucerne, we have wifi in our hotel room so it's not a problem to look something up. It's strange how Google and Wikipedia have become so essential!

Locarno log (6)

2011-07-09T22:28:00.000+03:00

After the excitement of the past few days, we decided to take Saturday at a much more leisurely pace. As noted elsewhere, I discovered how to connect to the Internet, so I spent an hour sitting on the stand of a statue in the Piazza, uploading blogs and doing a little work. My wife did a round of the stalls which comprised the Locarno market. Once we had finished in the Piazza, we returned to the hotel via the supermarket where we bought supplies.

Then off once again to downtown Locarno in order to take the bus to Ascona, a village very close to Locarno. This is supposed to be an artists' village but we saw very little evidence of this. On the other hand, we saw what was very similar to a British south coast holiday town: the lake, a wide promenade, restaurants and a miniature train which makes a circuit of Ascona every hour. We rode on the train and had a very good view of the town, so good that we needn't bother investigating on our own. After the train ride, we had some delicious gelati and sat on the lake front, enjoying the view and the good weather. This is what holidays are made of!

We then caught the bus back to Locarno, getting off at an earlier stop which was only minutes from our hotel. My wife rested whereas I headed back down to the Piazza to 'open my office' again. My previous perch on the statue had been taken but I found another site from which to work which was in the shade. At about 6:30pm, we decided it was time to eat so we headed down to the Piazza again, which was rapidly filling up with people. All the restaurants were full so we headed back towards our hotel, checking every restaurant (and there are several!) on the way – all full. Eventually we found one not that far from our hotel and after we sat down, others joined us. I don't know whether this is a regular occurrence, maybe only on Saturday nights, but the service was incredibly slow. I imagine that the only reason people didn't leave was that they had no other option.

After eating, I took the video camera down to the Piazza once again, this time to film the crowds waiting for Sting to appear. I came back to the hotel, started writing this blog and heard Sting open his concert at 8:30pm prompt. He is now on his third number, "An Englishman in New York". He opened with "Everything she does is magic", followed by one of his solo songs whose name escapes me at the moment. The sound is not particularly clear from the back of the hotel – maybe it's better at the front, and even better in the Piazza, even though he can't be seen. As Sting is not an artist of whom I am particularly fond, my current position on my hotel room balcony facing away from the Piazza is fine.

Locarno log (5)

2011-07-09T11:03:00.000+03:00

I've discovered that in the Piazza Grande, there is a viable connection to the Internet, but one has to pay for the privilege - this is Switzerland, after all. I've uploaded all the previous blog entries and I've also done a little real work (ie work work).

The battery is running out fast so I'll sign off now.

Locarno log (4)

2011-07-08T22:51:00.001+03:00

This morning, as is our habit, we walked down to the railway station. The rain had continued from yesterday afternoon, through the evening and into the night, although I think that there were a few hours when it faded away. Nevertheless, the rain started again at about 6am, but had eased up by the time we walked to the station. We admired the stage which had been set up at the far end of the Piazza Grande and wondered how the people would see the concert if the rain continued; we also wondered whether we would be able to continue walking down the side of the Piazza (thus being able to see the stage).

Our train to Bellinzona (and thence to Basle) was waiting for us in the station; as soon as we were seated, the rain became heavy once more. The trip to Bellinzona took about 20 minutes, and after a few minutes wait, another train to us to Lugano. Fortunately there was no rain waiting for us in Lugano, so we were able to stroll leisurely from the train station (which is quite high up) down to the city centre, where we found a funicular railway which runs back up to the station. We made our way through the colourful side streets until we came to the lake, whereupon it became apparent that there was a festival being held in Lugano, specifically a Harley Davidson festival (congress? convention?). The streets were full of bikes and bikers, and stands were being set up which either sold motorcycle accessories or food and drink.

We were more interested in boat trips and swiftly discovered that there was a boat leaving in a few minutes which would take us to the village of Gandria, which was recommended in my wife's guide book. The boat stopped at several little villages; at one, which seemed to consist solely of a restaurant called Grotto Teresa, I saw two waitresses come out of the restaurant and take down the menu which was hanging on the outside wall. Whether this was because it had started to rain (albeit lightly) or because no one had got off the boat (and so would not be eating in their restaurant) was not clear.

Shortly after we arrived at the pretty village of Gandria. The small jetty led straight into several restaurants and a few alleys which zigzagged back and forth as they climbed the hill. We wandered around for a bit before settling in a restaurant almost chosen at random; it transpired that many of our fellow passengers (a group of about eight motorcyclists from Wolverhampton along with a few others) had also chosen the same restaurant! They had a head start on us because they had arrived early and probably ordered something easy to cook, whereas we ordered boiled trout. We hadn't quite finished eating when the boat arrived to take us back to Lugano, the next boat being an hour and a half later. We quickly finished our meal and besieged our waiter to call out to the ship to wait for a few minutes so that we could get on board (this is southern Switzerland – almost Italy – after all, where punctuality is slightly relaxed). Fortunately, the crew waited and I managed to get on board just before they sailed. To be honest, I wasn't overwhelmed by Gandria and it might have been better in retrospect to have stopped at the Grotto Teresa and receive personal service.

[rant]

Alun Owen was the scriptwriter for the Beatles' first film, "A hard day's night", and reputedly invented a few slang words, such as 'grotty', which quickly found their way into everyday use. Britons are probably well aware of the word grotto; it had never occurred to me that this was a word in Italian. Of course, the plural of grotto is grotti, a homonym of grotty. Anything but. Another Italian word which has found its way into common use is panino, a sandwich. It is the plural panini which is better known, but unfortunately, people tend to consider this as being the singular; thus one sometimes sees the fake word paninis which is taken to mean fancy sandwiches – or should I say, sandwicheses?

[end of rant]

Back in Lugano, we noticed that the boat had dropped us off directly opposite the Tourist Information Office, so I went inside and enquired how to get to the Mount Bre funicular; Mount Bre overlooks Lugano and is 933 metres high. I was given a marked map and told to walk through the park on the way. Unfortunately the instructions weren't too accurate. Several motorcyclists tooled down the embarcadero, which had been closed to other traffic, so we were able to get some clean footage of them. The park was beautiful, full of well tended and colourful flower beds, as well as being alongside the lake. Unfortunately the way from the park to the funicular was much longer than I had been given to believe, making it quite a slog.

When we eventually got to the funicular, it turned out to be in two parts. The first part ascended maybe 50 metres and was quickly over, whereas the second part took us all the way to the summit, and of course took much longer, about 20 minutes. There was housing on the hillside next to the funicular upto a height of about 400 metres, and we wondered whether people use the railway in order to get to work (probably not). It had started to rain again while we were ascending, and by the time we reached the summit, the rain was quite heavy, thus limiting visibility. We looked towards Lugano, but once again there were so many trees in the way that it was impossible to see anything. On the other side, there was nothing obscuring the view except for the clouds. There was so little to do on the summit of Mount Bre that we didn’t stay very long (ten minutes) and took the first train going down. Fortunately I was able to stand behind the driver and film most of our descent, which was at quite a steep angle.

In order not to walk back to Lugano, we decided to take the bus; there was a stop on the main road where one turns off for the funicular. Unfortunately we had to wait for about fifteen minutes (we had hoped to be able to get back to a souvenir shop before it closed, but the long wait for the bus prevented this), although once on board we got back into Lugano quite quickly, thanks to the bus lane and judicious use of the horn. The bus finished at its terminus somewhere in the centre of Lugano; I was able to use the map from the Information Office in order to navigate to the lower end of the central funicular. Once there, we crammed in like sardines and swiftly rose to the train station.

After a short wait, we had a comfortable ride back to Bellinzona but then missed our connection to Locarno, which left as soon as we arrived. So we had another 25 minute wait before a train to Locarno pulled in and we arrived in our fair city at about 8:15pm. As it becoming our habit, we walked across the road to Manora and had a cup of tea with cake; I am becoming quite slick with the 'buona sera, due the por favore' line. People here speak Italian to you whether you understand or not, so it's better to pre-empt them. While we were eating, the rain started bucketing down again (maybe it's a Locarno thing) although it had eased by the time we left.

Whilst in the restaurant, we had noticed several people encased head to knee in plastic (some looked like tailored capes whereas others looked like plastic bags), what Frank Zappa might have called 'The return of the plastic people'. Their density became greater and greater as we walked to where the stage had been set up in Piazza Grande; as we half suspected, we weren't allowed to use our usual path and had to make quite a detour in order to get to the far end. More and more plastic people were to be seen. When we got to 'our' end of the Piazza, we walked down to the barrier which had cunningly be erected at such a spot so that from outside the barrier the stage could not be seen (the piazza is knee shaped and the barrier is at the join of the knee). Hearing is a different matter: I am writing this from the dry comfort of our room and can hear the music quite clearly (although it's not hi-fi). This reminds me slightly of the Cropredy festival; there too are to be found plastic people wandering about holding plastic glasses of beer whilst listening to music being played on a stage. It occurs to us that the plastic coverings are because umbrellas are not allowed in the Piazza as they would block other people's view.

Locarno log (3)

2011-07-07T07:40:00.000+03:00

I didn't have any luck in finding a wifi connection. Whilst there were two networks which showed a strong connection (and weren't encrypted), they wouldn't assign me an IP address and so I couldn't connect.

Yesterday was a big trip: we took the Lake Maggiore Express: hydrofoil boat from Locarno to Stresa (in Italy), train from Stresa to Domodossola, and then special train ("100 valleys", or Centovalli) from Domodossola back to Locarno. What should have been an exciting day turned out to be a washout (literally). Our first days in Switzerland had been accompanied by very good weather; not as hot as Israel, but in the absence of air conditioning, the weather was subjectively hotter (and more humid). Yesterday morning was cooler, and as we left our hotel, there was actually a small amount of drizzle, sufficient to make me go back to the hotel and change my short trousers for longs. On the way down to the embarcadero (close to the train station), the drizzle came on and off, but was not a problem. Just after buying our tickets for the journey, the heavens opened and rain bucketed down. We (and many others) sheltered under the canopy of the ticket office and adjacent café, but it was clear that we would be soaked the minute we left our shelter in order to get to the jetty where our boat was waiting. Inspiration struck: we were standing outside a souvenir shop (one of the few in Locarno) and they were selling umbrellas… so I quickly bought a large umbrella and with its help made our way to the boat.

The boat sailed from Locarno to Ascona and to other places southern on Lake Maggiore. Fortunately the rain ceased the further south we went, so we could see quite well. After an hour and a half (the trip as such was shorter but we made about six stops, each time to take on new passengers or to let them off), we arrived at the Italian town of Stresa. Again, there was on and off drizzle. After walking about a little, looking for a cash dispenser (the Italian name is 'Bancomat', the same 'word' as in Hebrew), I spied a bank at the end of an alleyway. Walking down the alley, I became aware that it was very beautiful, with flowers and trees on the sides of the narrow road, souvenir shops and everything which seemed to be missing in Locarno. After about fifty metres, the alley led in into a piazza filled with shops and restaurants. Between the on and off rain, we decided to eat, dining on a lovely trout ("trota"). I learnt the Italian for hot (calda), allowing me to say Vorrei aqua calda (I would like hot water). After the meal, we headed for the train station in Stresa, about ten minutes away; as soon as we had left the piazza, we also left touristy Stresa and entered a commonplace town. The piazza was full of people which made me wonder what they were doing there, as the town didn't seem to offer very much. It may well be used as a staging post for trips to Isola Bella, a very pretty island nearby (we visited this on our previous journey to Italy in 2000).

The rail trip from Stresa to Domodossola was uneventful, although again rain continued to fall on and off. We couldn't see very much anyway because the train had peculiar windows which narrowed the field of vision. Domodossola too was a non-entity as far as we could see and we waiting the 30 minutes for our connecting train quietly. It seems strange to me that the Italians build huge train stations, although I should point out that Domodossola is a connecting point for many trains – we could have travelled to Milan in the south or Brig in the west, but instead we travelled to Locarno in the east. The tour brochure had said to bring passports as we would be crossing the border from Switzerland to Italy and back again, but no one gave us a second look. No one even checked our ticket from Stresa to Domodossola!

The Centovalli train was an exercise in frustration; the rain, clouds and late hour conspired to lower visibility, but even without these poor conditions, we wouldn't have seen that much (at least on the side of the train that we travelled) because there was always foliage growing next to the tracks which prevented seeing the rivers, gulleys and waterfalls which accompany this scenic route.

Once we got back to Locarno, we had a small meal in the self-service restaurant, whose name fails to stick in my memory, even though it's very close to a word in Hebrew – and that serves as the mnemonic, for its name is Manora. Highly recommended for the weary traveler. On our way back to the hotel, we bought a mountain anorak (expensive, but it should last for years); I don't know what we are going to do about my leather shoes with a tear in the sole which causes my foot to get wet in the rain.

Overnight, there were thunder, lightning and relentless rain. It's now 7:40 in the morning and still no respite. It's never fun when it rains on holiday!

Locarno log (2)

2011-07-06T18:30:00.002+03:00

Even though we didn't do very much yesterday evening, the little that we did helped us this morning. After a pleasant breakfast in the exceedingly delightful breakfast room of the hotel, we set off for 'downtown' Locarno, a ten minute walk from the hotel. This took us past the stage being erected for the Moon and Stars festival and onto the town's train station. We were actually looking for the entrance to the funicular railway which according to my map was somewhere in the vicinity, but I couldn't find it – until I asked in the railway ticket office and was directed to an unassuming entrance 100 metres away. We had walked past it earlier (albeit on the other side of the road) but hadn't noticed.

The funicular runs from downtown Locarno to a 'suburb' called Orselina, which is very close but much higher up than Locarno. The ride only took a few minutes and wasn't particularly interesting. Once out of Orselina 'station', we walked across the road and bought tickets for the aerial cable car to Cardada, a mountain 1340 metres above sea level (Locarno is 210 metres above sea level). The cable car trail runs through forest, so the view whilst going up was not particularly spectacular.

On the other hand, the view from Cardada itself was breath-taking. The station is set in a forest which is exceedingly quiet, the silence being broken only by birdsong (although when we returned, the birdsong was interrupted rudely by a bunch of German speaking teenagers). A short walk of 400 metres brings one to the terminus of the chairlift to the peak of Cimetta, 1672 metres. We were slightly apprehensive of the chairlift, because one is fairly unprotected; I have a problem with heights and internal balance which prevents me from taking rides at funfairs, etc. (as if I wanted to).

The first minute or so of the chairlift ride was marginally troublesome but after that, we acclimatized and began to enjoy the ride. Again, there wasn't actually that much to be seen from the chairlift (as we were looking to the side, not up or down), but once we got to the summit, the views there took our breaths away. There was a mountain just behind where we were which was slowly being obscured by a cloud (cue 'The mist covered mountain'); I was about to start filming this on video when my wife asked me to take a photograph with this background. By the time I had finished with her camera, the mountain had all but disappeared from view.

We walked up a hill (adding maybe another five or ten metres to our elevation) to an observation point. Although we should have been treated to stunning views, most of the mountains and valleys were covered in cloud. Slowly though the clouds disappeared and this time I was able to film the mountain behind us slowly appearing into view. There was also a communications aerial there; as I filmed it, I mentioned on 'the commentary' that there shouldn't be any problem in getting a signal on my mobile phone. A moment after saying this, the phone began to vibrate: someone had sent me a message.

After wandering about a bit more on the summit, we returned to the terminus and took the chairlift back to Cardada; this time the view was very impressive, and we enjoyed the descending ride much more than the ascending ride. Back at Cardada, we found an observation point which gave us a good view over the hills and valleys; the hitherto invisible Gordevio (I think) came into view.

From there, we rode the the cable car back down to Orselino and from there, the funicular back to Locarno. Very enjoyable and highly recommended.

As time was getting on, we decided first to eat before doing anything else. We stopped at a café but then I realized that I didn't have enough cash to pay for any meal. The waitress said that there was a cash machine nearby (in Italian); whilst I did find the cash machine, I also wandered about and found a self service restaurant which seemed to be more promising and cheaper than where I had left my wife. After retracing my steps, we finally found an English menu in the café, only to discover that there was nothing on the menu that we wanted. I convinced my wife that we should eat in the self service restaurant. We had a thoroughly enjoyable lunch of fresh fish, fried on the spot, along with potatoes and broccoli; very healthy and probably much better than anything that we would have eaten at the café. The bill turned out to be higher than I expected, but it was definitely worth the extra – and I could pay by credit card.

Unless I misunderstood the sign, the restaurant also boasted free wi-fi, a service which appeared on the noticeboards of a few cafes and restaurants that we passed on the way, so I am hopeful that I will be able to upload this tonight. Regarding the sign: I can understand about 50% of signs written in Italian, but find it much harder to understand people when they talk, primarily because they talk so fast. Italian is the dominant language in Locarno, followed by German and then French. There aren't that many people who speak English (the café where we didn't eat being a good example). As long as there is something written, we can get along, and I speak enough pidgin Italian to be understood in certain circumstances (like ordering one dish of vanilla ice-cream and one of banana when it's printed in a restaurant menu).

Locarno log (1)

2011-07-05T17:10:00.002+03:00

As I suspected, there is no Wifi connection in our hotel in Locarno; not only that, the wireless card which I use in Israel was unable to make contact as well. So I am going to be writing these entries offline in the hope of uploading them some day (it also means that I can't connect to the computer at work in order to send my daily reports). More importantly, I won't be able to check the various local sites for each day's activities (especially train timetables).

The flight left Israel on time (5am) and arrived in Zurich just after 9am our time, or 8am Zurich time. After disembarking, we made our way to passport control (having to take a short ride on a train!); there was a nearly empty queue for EU passports so we didn't have to wait very long here. There was only a short walk from passport control to the luggage carousels; the luggage from our flight was on the nearest carousel, and our two suitcases appeared almost immediately! It was a short walk from Zurich airport to the train station; we got our Swiss Railcards (purchased in advance) certified and then took a train from the airport to the main Zurich railway station. Once there, we found that a direct train to Locarno would be leaving in about 40 minutes; at the same time, we sorted out our mobile phone situation.

The Locarno train left on time and arrived on time, about three hours later. It was very interesting to see the Swiss countryside: very green! There were lakes during the first part of the journey and several mountains, some of them snow topped. Although we had eaten a roll or two at Ben Gurion airport and had a little to eat on the plane, we were beginning to get hungry by the time our train arrived. I had suggested to my wife that I buy something at a nearby kiosk, but she said that we would get something to eat on the train. Shortly after departure, a man did come by, wheeling a cart, so we bought cheese sandwiches and a bottle of water each. This was our introduction to the Swiss economy: this meagre meal cost 23 SFr, at least twice what it would have cost in Israel. These prices *on the train* were scandalous.

Eventually we arrived in Locarno, found the taxi rank and got taken to our lovely Schlosshotel which seems to be situated in an old castle. This is very much an old world establishment with a largish room, a cupboard with engravings and a rather strange bathroom. The hotel also has its own garden and swimming pool. Apart from the hotel's fittings, it is only two minutes walk away from Locarno's Grand Piazza, which I have investigated slightly. Presumably we will be going there shortly to eat our first meal. More importantly, I have also found a supermarket, where supplies (especially water) can be bought at very reasonable prices.

In a few days, the Locarno music festival ("Moon and stars") will begin, so the Piazza is currenly being turned into an outdoor concert hall. Supposedly we will be able to hear the music from our room and I wonder whether we will be able to see anything without buying tickets. Sting is appearing on Saturday night and Santana on Sunday, so that should be interesting.

Locarno log (0)

2011-07-05T03:27:00.002+03:00

It's 3:30 in the morning and I'm sitting in the VIP lounge of Ben Gurion Airport (one of the benefits of my credit card is free entry to the lounge), waiting for the flight that will take my wife and me to Zurich. From there, we travel by train to Locarno, where we will be staying for six days. From Locarno we will be travelling to Lucerne, where we will stay another five days. We have plenty of activities planned, most of them involving travel by train, so if everything works out (and the weather stays fair), then we should have a good holiday.

It's not clear at the moment what Internet access is going to be like - whether there will be in our hotel or whether I will have to take a chance with public access (and knowing the Swiss, this is likely not to be free). So I don't know at the moment how frequent the blogs are going to be.

Time for a cup of tea and a biscuit before boarding....

Meatballs

2011-07-03T16:17:00.000+03:00

Despite this blog's subtitle promising perceptions about programming, cooking and music, the cooking part has been taking a back seat in the past few months. This isn't to say that I haven't been cooking, just that I haven't written about it.

Since having bought a slow cooker less than a year ago, this has become my primary tool for cooking (supplemented by the wok). I've developed about ten recipes which work well in the cooker and repeat them at various intervals. Here's a new one, meatballs and vegetables, which is a variation on this recipe (oven based).

I sliced and diced a few potatoes, carrots, onions, courgettes and pumpkin then placed all the pieces in the slow cooker. I also added some frozen green beans, preferably warmed up in advance by soaking them in hot water. Then I mixed one kg ground beef, three eggs, a chopped onion, 150 grams bread crumbs and some parsley, making about ten to twelve meatballs; these I placed on top of the cut vegetables. The slow cooker was set to high for two hours and then to low for another two hours (the total equivalent of three hours on high); the results were fine. Depending on how hard/soft one likes one's vegetables, another hour on high wouldn't have hurt. One can optionally add some tomato paste to either the meatballs or the vegetables, but I forgot until it was too late.

Most Fridays I use the same vegetable base, adding chicken thighs and drumsticks instead of meatballs. I cook this for about four hours on high and two hours on low, and the results are delicious. In the past few weeks, I've turned the cooker off about an hour before we are due to eat in order to decant 400 ml of the liquid which has appeared in the cooking process; after decanting, I turn the cooker back on. The liquid is used instead of water when making rice, making it both tastier and more nutritious.

I read over the weekend a book called 'Catching Fire', which explains how the 'invention' of cooking caused a tremendous evolutionary leap. Cooking makes the calories in food more accessible but also makes the digestive process quicker and less expensive (again, in terms of calories). The book starts out with the startling position that a human eating solely non-cooked food would probably starve to death within a few months. The 'metabolic economics' part (my term) was very interesting, as was the discussion of mouth and tooth size. The implications of cooking are far-reaching, and one of the final chapters is devoted to how cooking probably created the institution of marriage.

I was slightly surprised to discover that the material finished about two thirds of the way through the book; the rest of the pages are devoted to notes and a very extensive biography.

Having an author sign her work

2011-06-24T08:26:00.003+03:00

Book authors sometimes go on book reading trips (akin to a musician's "gig"): they travel from bookshop to bookshop, read a little from their current work, then sit behind a trestle table and sign copies of their books, preferably their latest novel which the consumer has bought this moment from the bookshop. Everybody profits: the author has sold another copy (more royalties, although one wonders how many books outsell their advance), the bookshop has sold another book and the customer has a signed copy of the book.

In the spirit of Dan Ariely, let's look at the final transaction rationally. A book signed by its author is worth more in the market place than the same book unsigned, although one might argue that there is no logical reason for this. The contents of the book are still the same; the story or the information contained within have not changed. Yet still people are prepared to pay more for a book signed by its author (presumably in the second hand market). Even stranger, I imagine that most of the people who go to a book reading and ask the author to sign their copy have no intention whatsoever of selling their signed copy, so this apparent addition to the book's value will never be realised.

Presumably people do this for the intrinsic value of the act: the fact that they have a signed copy of a book means that they met the author and for a minute basked in her halo. This gives them pleasure every time that they read the book, show it to their friends or even remember the event.

I wrote a few months ago about purchasing guitarist Mick Abrahams' autobiography. I bought the book discounted from the Book Depository thus saving money (a rational decision), but I could have bought it from Mick's website. I could also have paid more for the book and have it signed. As I wrote then, I wasn't aware at the time of this arrangement, so let's assume for the sake of argument that I haven't bought the book yet. I have three options: the standard price, the discounted price and the premium price (book + dedication). The discounted price is obviously better than the standard price, but what about the premium price? Although the signed book will be worth more in the secondhand market (and of course, I also paid more for it!), I won't be getting the intrinsic value of knowing that I met the author.

I am not always consistent. Abrahams belongs to a set of musicians who have learnt that they can increase their earnings if they offer signed cds at a slightly higher price. I confess that I took advantage of this with an archival recording of Hatfield and the North as well as with a dvd of the Bruford group. This arrangement allowed me to get Pip Pyle's autograph while he was still alive.

On the other hand, there were times when I used to order Fairport Convention cds direct from the group and ask them to autograph the booklet, saying that I wouldn't be able to see them this year and ask them to autograph in person. One wag once wrote on this subject that a non-autographed FC cd from recent years would probably be worth more than an autographed cd, presumably because of its rarity.

So are we behaving rationally when asking an author to sign her work? If the work has cost more because of the signature yet we have no intention of selling the book, then in terms of classic economic extrinsic value, we have behaved irrationally (we paid over the market price). But in terms of intrinsic value, we have behaved rationally. But of course, it's always better to get the author to sign for free and then we benefit both extrinsically and intrisically as well as behaving rationally.

President's Conference / 2

2011-06-23T08:44:00.000+03:00

I suppose that the story begins about three weeks ago when the Occupational Psychologist (OP) asked me whether I wanted to go to a lecture by Dan Ariely. She had given me his book, "Predictably Irrational", about a year before and I had enjoyed reading it (even though she gave me the Hebrew translation), so I jumped at the chance at seeing the man.

About a week later, I received via email an invitation to the President's Conference; whilst I was flattered that I had received the invitation, I was bewildered as to why I had received it. Only a few days later in a conversation with the OP, I discovered that Dan Ariely would be giving his lecture within the framework of the conference. Even so, it was difficult at first to find where and when he was due to appear; it later transpires that he was a popular guest who was assigned several appearances.

After I wrote yesterday's blog about the opening evening, I considered my options. I realised that it might be better to turn up after Ariely had finished a lecture than before. As he was due to appear at 11:30am, I wouldn't have to leave work at 10am but could delay my departure until noon. Whilst I was mulling this over, I had a brainwave and sent him an email detailing my failure to meet him the previous evening and asking whether we could arrange a time and a place to meet. Whilst there was a good chance that the email would be ignored (because it was sent to his university address), there was also a good chance that I would receive a reply.

Two minutes after sending the email, I received a call on my cellphone from an unrecognised number. Could it be Dan himself on the phone? Not quite: it was the OP asking how I came home the previous evening and what my further plans were. We were intending to go today (Thursday) but it transpired that Dan was appearing in yet another panel yesterday afternoon at 4:30pm, a much more congenial time. We agreed to set off at 3:30pm.

After the phone call, I returned to my work environment and discovered that I had received a reply from Dan saying that he would be available after all his lectures; he also enclosed his mobile telephone number in case that we didn't meet!

Fast forward a few hours; the OP, her family and I are sitting in a much smaller hall, watching Israeli television journalist (and lawyer) Ilana Dayan. She will be interviewing five people, one of whom will be Dan Ariely. Her guests were (in order) Arieh Der'i (a meteor in Israeli politics who was convicted of receiving a bribe and who has just returned from a five year cooling off period), Lord David Trimble (Member of the British Parliament ; First Minister of Northern Ireland; Former Leader, Ulster Unionist Party; 1998 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate), Professor Larry Summers (Charles W. Eliot University Professor, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University; President Emeritus, Harvard University; Former Director of the White House National Economic Council, Obama Administration), Jibril Rajoub (Palestinian Authority, Senior Fatah leader; Former head, Palestinian Security Force; Member, Fatah Central Committee; Head, Palestinian Football Federation and the Palestine Olympic Committee) and Dan the Man.

All of the first four interviews were very interesting, Lord Trimble especially. But as their contents were political and this is not a political blog, I won't go into what they said. Dan Ariely, on the other hand, seemed slightly out of place with his heavyweight confreres; he told a few more anecdotes from his book and went into more detail about his accident, his recovery and his interest in pain.

Once the session was over, I quickly walked the few yards which separated the speakers and dignified guests from the hoi polloi. Someone had got to Dan before me, also with a copy of his book, so I had to wait before I had a chance to speak. Then someone else entered the conversation, asking how long Dan would be in Israel and where else he would be speaking. Dan gave this person a few details and then said to send him an email; at this point I intervened and said that Dan answers his emails very promptly! I then gave him (Dan) my books and he began to sign. He commented that the books were in English, and I replied that I did have the first book in Hebrew but it took me so long to read that I preferred to read the English versions (I believe that the books were first written in English and then translated into Hebrew).

<scoop>

At this point, I asked why Dan had spoken in English all through the interview (simultaneous translation into Hebrew via headphones) whilst we were speaking in Hebrew now. I briefly considered that he might have been denying his Israeli roots, but this wasn't the reason. He asked Ilana Dayan (who was standing behind me) why indeed the interview was conducted in English, and she replied that she had been asked to do so. I note that about 75% of the interview with Jibril Rajoub was conducted in Hebrew, the rest being in English. Strange.

</scoop>

As the session had overrun, the ushers were firmly ushering us out of the hall so they could set up for the next session, meaning that my brief meeting had concluded. As I turned away, I obviously made some strange body movement for suddenly a muscle in my chest contracted and stayed contracted, giving me severe pain for about fifteen minutes until the muscle relaxed. During this time, I was vigorously rubbing my chest and looking for a place where I could sit down without being mobbed.

Only when I got home did I find out what Dan had written in the books. As 70% of his body had been severely burned in his accident, he still has problems writing ("my hands don’t work very well, and typing causes a great amount of pain", his email) so I wasn't surprised that it was very hard to read what he had written. I think that in "Predictably Irrational", he had written "Irrationally yours", and his dedication in "The upside of Irrationality" appears below. I was slightly surprised to notice that my name appears in both dedications as he hadn't asked me my name; he obviously read it off my name tag.

Next time around: my thoughts on getting authors and musicians to sign books/records.

President's Conference

2011-06-22T07:52:00.002+03:00

I spent yesterday afternoon/early evening in the Jerusalem Conference Centre, where I was attending the opening plenum session of the President's Conference. The conference, which runs over three days, is by invitation only, but judging by the 4,000 strong crowd, it's not clear what the criteria for invitation were (especially as I had wangled an invitation).

The opening session was entitled "My recipe for a better tomorrow", and the opening speaker was Prof. Dan Ariely who is a behavioural psychologist and the main reason for me attending. His fifteen minute talk was mainly taken from his book "The upside of irrationality" which I had bought (and read) about a month ago, so he didn't really provide me with any new information. His talk centred around how we tend to chose options which gratify us now instead of choosing harder or more painful options which will benefit us in the future. As he puts it, "How many people ate more than they should have this week? How many people exercised less than they should have?". Ariely told about an episode in his life when he was diagnosed with Hepatitis C and was told to inject himself with interferon; this treatment caused sickness, vomiting and general malaise. He managed to minimise the negative psychological affects of the treatment by combining them with an activity which he found extremely pleasant, namely watching movies. What does this have to do with his recipe for a better tomorrow? Better to do the unpleasant things today so that we might have a better tomorrow than do the pleasant things today (which might well lead to a worse tomorrow).

Second up was Sir Martin Sorrell; his talk was a slightly hit and miss affair. First he would mention an interesting subject, talk about it for a few minutes and then say that he wasn't here to talk about this subject. Eventually he did get onto the subject which he was to talk about: city administration. Apparently, in fifty years time there will be about 350 cities with a population greater than one million, and the task of administering these cities will be immense. He believes than government and local authorities must find a way of working together and improving the face of society (my words).

Next was Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. Whilst this talk was very interesting, it had little to do with a recipe for a better tomorrow (or maybe it was because I was nodding off at this stage).

Then came the speaker who was added at the last minute but seemed to be the most popular of all: Shakira. I had expected an air-head, but she turned out to be more than sensible. Her recipe for a better tomorrow was education, education, education. She talked about her visit that morning to a joint Israeli/Palestinian school (footage of this was shown on the evening news) and the work that her foundation has done in Columbia: every child who enrolls in school stands a much better chance of not becoming a terrorist or a drug smuggler.

Closing the show was American comic Sara Silverman. I have to admit that this name caused me to raise an eyebrow when I saw it listed in the programme, and true to form, this part of the evening was the lowest. It was totally irrelevant (and slightly hard to understand) but a short clip made the evening news. Obviously there is more publicity attached to being a comic actress than a successful behavioural economist, a successful businessman or the founder of Wikipedia.

After the session ended, there was an hour or so of 'mingling', during which I hoped to meet Dan Ariely and have him sign my copies of his books. Unfortunately, the halls were so crowded with people that I never saw him (he might have already left the building). I did come face to face with the current Israeli Justice Minister Ya'akov Ne'eman (I couldn't think of his name; all I could remember was Yuval Ne'eman, who was a successful particle physicist and science minister before dying) and the one time Minister for Pensioners, Rafi Eitan, but no Dan Ariely.

Professor Ariely is scheduled to take part in another plenary session today at 11:30am, entitled "Who will triumph in the marketing battle of tomorrow" and again on Thursday afternoon in a session entitled "how well does the science of economics understand economics". My MBA training has prepared me well for both subjects, but unless I get extremely bored at work by 10am, I think that I will skip today and go again tomorrow. Of course, there is no guarantee that I will get to meet Ariely, but logically the more times that I go, the higher are my chances. Also, yesterday probably had the highest attendance due to the presence of President Peres, Tony Blair and of course Shakira.

Here is someone else's take on Ms Silverman. It just goes to show how two people can be at the same event and interpret in completely differently.

Herpes simplex

2011-06-19T15:10:00.001+03:00

My wife suffers from herpes simplex, aka cold sores. This is a viral infection which normally causes sores on her lower lip; it also causes her to feel lousy for several days. Unlike most viral infections, once the body has been infected with this virus, it can never be eradicated. Most of the time, the virus is dormant, but every now and then, normally at times of stress or when the immune system is weakened, the virus takes advantage of the situation by waking up and placing a greater strain on her immune system.

A few weeks ago, I was idly googling the subject when I came across the fact that there is some form of treatment with light which while not killing the virus, can at least shorten the virus' active period. A bit more googling and I found this. Whilst I might be sceptical of the idea, there seemed to be empirical research that treatment by UV B light was effective in shortening the period that the herpes virus was active.

After a quick consultation with my wife, we decided to buy a 'machine' - it's about the size of a pocket torch, so calling it a machine is slightly misleading. I ordered it via Ebay, where a new one seemed the cheapest option, even after allowing for postage.

The machine arrived after a week, ironically on the same day that a new sore appeared on my wife's lip. Immediately she inserted the enclosed 9v battery into the machine and used it. The instructions say that it should be used every twelve hours for three days (six treatments) although one can use it more frequently. After three and a half days, my wife pronounced the sore gone.

So whilst maybe the machine does not totally live up to its advertising pitch, let us not forget that everyone is different and that there are no guarantees in medicine. What is clear is that the machine worked faster than putting ointment onto the sore, and it's more aesthetically pleasing (the sore is bad enough, but an ugly mound of white cream on the sore is even worse). I think that we can definitely call this one a win and so I can recommend this machine should one suffer from herpes simplex.

Cryptonomicon

2011-06-13T08:12:00.001+03:00

One of my favourite books is Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon". I bought this in 2000 (that was the year that we visited Scotland, and I remember buying in Inverness a few other Stephenson novels on the strength of this book) and it has been worth several rereadings over the years. Bringing together a thread from the second world war (Alan Turing, the Enigma machine along with an updated version of 'The man who never was') along with a thread of modern day computer wizards who invent a global currency, there was something in the book for everybody.

Today I spotted an article in the online Guardian newspaper which is a direct development of the Cryptonomicon's currency vault - the Bitcoin. As in the book, governments are exceedingly unhappy with this new kind of currency, but will have less ability to cope, as the real life bitcoin is decentralised.

Life imitates art. The future is here.