Election day

It's election day once again in Israel - the third time in a year - and we get a day off work. I've been saving up a few things to do on this day. Let's see how far I've got ....

About two months ago, I had problems with my development computer. The repairman said that there were many connections which were half-fried on the motherboard and he was surprised that the computer worked at all. This might explain some of the problems which I had been experiencing with my internet browser. He replaced the motherboard which works fine (as does the browser) but the onboard music card was terrible: it seemed to work only on one channel and even then barely. So I connected my external music 'card' to a USB port and I was back in business. When I complained to the repairman about the sound card, he gave me a real sound card, the likes of which I haven't seen for a long time.

One of today's tasks was to open up the computer and insert the sound card. This is not a problem, but after I connected everything up, the computer refused to boot, claiming that it couldn't find a boot device - even though it recognised the hard disks. Back to the repairman. Score so far: 0 out of 1.

Another thing which has been bothering me is that I couldn't get the DVD recorder to display via HDMI. I am convinced that the problem lies with the screen, but we're not about to replace it. One day I had an idea: if the screen can take one HDMI input, buy an HDMI switcher which allows several HDMI sources: as far as the screen is concerned, there is only one HDMI cable connected which should be ok. I ordered a switcher about two months ago: this arrived about a week ago and I've been waiting for today to connect it. I made all the connections, but the screen would only display what was connected to one input socket on the switcher. I moved everything around with no improvement. Now the screen won't even display the one HDMI source! Score so far: 0 out of 2 (actually, -1 out of 2 because I haven't succeeded in getting the screen to display anything now).

For the past year, one kibbutz member has set up a bakery: he bought equipment, found an unused store-room of the kitchens and started work. He bakes lovely bread and sells once a week on Friday mornings. Almost every week I buy a loaf made with 50% spelt flour (let's hope that the other half is wholewheat flour), honey and walnuts. Every time I go to collect my loaf, I see that they struggle with what appears to be a spreadsheet in which they keep details of who has ordered what and how much to charge. Last Friday the penny dropped: why should they struggle with such a 'program' when I can write something which will make their life much easier. For fun, I started work on Friday evening, writing a program in which every screen is non-modal (this should be an interesting experiment), continued on Saturday and finished yesterday evening with a few reports. 

I intend to show him the program which means that I have to copy it onto a mobile computer and also ensure that the Firebird database manager is running on the same computer and can show the program in Hebrew. My first step was to try and install my old version of Firebird (1.5) on my mobile - Windows refused to accept it. I then tried on my work computer with the same results. I have another version of Firebird which should work, but I was afraid that this version wouldn't be compatible with my program. I installed Firebird 2.1 on my work computer, copied the files which I had backed up last night ... and the program worked directly out of the box! I went through the same procedure on my mobile; the program works but the Hebrew doesn't display correctly in all places and the program displays left to right. Obviously there are some locale kinks to sort out. Now I can report a score of 1 out of 3.

I've voted, and I'm going to devote the rest of the day to programming in Priority for one of my clients. At least this will go ok. It only goes to show that I am a software person and not a hardware one.