Mid-night revelations

Unfortunately, I often wake up twice during the night: the first time is normally two hours after having gone to bed and the second time is an hour or two later. I awake due to nocturia, that is caused by the various blood pressure medications that I take. After visiting the toilet, once back in bed I normally fall asleep almost immediately. 

Every now and then, I awake with a revelation on my tongue. This is normally due to the right hemisphere of my brain chewing on a problem and suddenly spits out the answer. It has happened that I have awoken with the (correct) reason as to why some program that I was writing wasn't working. 

Last night (or more accurately, early this morning), I awoke with the words 'ERP enhancement management' (EEM) on my tongue. This is a concept from my doctoral thesis, and is in fact one of the tenets of the thesis: I am trying to show that there is a need for this concept. What it means to me, though, is that I used this concept in the introduction chapter and in the conclusions chapter, but not in the middle of the thesis. More frequently I used the term 'development and deployment of enhancements'. I realised that I should replace this phrase whenever possible with EEM. 

I'm thinking that the examiners might see that I've defined this concept at the beginning then ignore it for the rest of the thesis until I suddenly pull it out of my hat again for the end. I should refer to this more often.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
148	30/11/2008	Criminal Justice	TV series
652	30/11/2013	Arik Einstein	Israel, Obituary
988	30/11/2016	Backing up data	Computer
1557	30/11/2022	Mid-night revelations	DBA

Communal grief

It's a very sad aspect of kibbutz life, but nothing brings us more together than communal grief, when a kibbutz member dies. Most of the time, it's the elderly that pass away, and more often than not this can be a relief for the family. But sometimes, when an unexpected death occurs ... it's a shock that everybody feels.

About 20 years ago, if not more, one kibbutz member died in a car crash on a Friday morning. He was a member in high standing, probably as old then as I am now. I hadn't had much contact with him, but as it happened, a few days before his death, I was showing him how to use the spreadsheet Paradox (that was later overtaken by Excel) in order to prepare budgets. His family organised an evening in his memory, itself an unusual event that shows how highly regarded he was. I volunteered to play a sad song, but before I did, I took the opportunity to speak to the audience about how in the days before his death, I had been working with him. On the Saturday night I had a dream (as I told the audience) that I was sitting with the kibbutz treasurer and wondering how we would complete the work of this member, from where we would find the data. Then he (the member who died) came into the dream and said that everything would be ok, and that we would manage without him. Then I tried to play the song, but my hands were so slippery that I probably didn't play too well.

Why am I writing all this now? Because we were informed about an hour ago that a 32 year old member and 'son of the kibbutz' had died. He had a growth in his brain; we had been given to understand that his health had improved, but hearing the sad news has knocked everyone for six. He was married and had two small children; they will grow up without knowing their father (a situation that has unfortunately not been infrequent in Israel). I personally didn't know him, but I know his parents and used to work with his grandparents before they retired.

There was supposed to be a joint meeting of three very important committees (I'm a member of one) this evening, but unsurprisingly it has been cancelled. No date has been announced yet for the funeral (it would normally be tomorrow, but there must be some reason for its delay) but I am sure that it is going to be a traumatic event.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
147	27/11/2008	Achievements	Programming, ERP
1187	27/11/2018	Intermediate thesis accepted!!	DBA
1276	27/11/2019	Song festival 2019 - 2	Song writing
1359	27/11/2020	Preparing for the DBA viva	DBA
1556	27/11/2022	Grief	Obituary, Kibbutz

Using the steam basket

Two weeks ago I wrote about purchasing a steam basket, or as it's called in Hebrew translated into English, a 'collapsible steamer lily'. Today was the first chance that I had to use it, in order to cook pearl barley with chicken, but keeping the barley separate.

This is the cooking tray with the basket and the chicken. On the chicken has been poured fig syrup and I've scattered on them purple onion slices that are supposed to be slightly sweeter than the regular onion (although they cost the same). In the top left hand corner is the steam basket and if one looks closely, the pearl barley can be seen inside the basket.

After adding liquid and cooking for 2.5 hours, the chicken was sublime, but I was more interested in the pearl barley. It seems that I put too much barley in the basket as the upper layer wasn't cooked. OK, I'll remember this for next time. Also, the chicken wasn't particularly brown as it was a few weeks ago. It seems that rolling the chicken in 'date honey' (ie 'honey' derived from dates) and olive oil is preferable to simply pouring the date honey and olive oil on top. This time I forgot the almonds.

Here's the same tray after cooking. It can be seen that the barley has risen higher in the basket, as the lower grains have swelled with the cooking liquid, but the top most grains are uncooked. After taking the basket out of the tray and transferring the barley to a normal pyrex dish, I added more liquid in the hope that over the next few days the under-cooked grains will continue to absorb liquid and improve. Taste wise, the barley was fine, but not as spectacular as the first time when I tried this (without the basket).

I wonder which is better from a nutrional point of view, pearl barley or quinoa. This site sets out various comparisons:

• Quinoa provides a higher percentage of protein, vitamins and minerals.
• Barley is lower in calories than quinoa.
• Barley provides more fiber than quinoa.
• Barley has a better glycemic index than quinoa.

More importantly for me, it appears that raw pearl barley has half the potassium content of raw quinoa on an equal weight basis (it also has only half the iron and magnesium, so it's not a complete win). So it looks like I'm going to switch to pearl barley whilst still cooking quinoa for my wife (whom I've converted) and family, or maybe I'll eat both at the same time.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
20	21/11/2005	Hello again (Kate Bush)	Kate Bush
307	21/11/2010	Improving the dual list box dialog	Programming, SQL, Dual list box
1091	21/11/2017	Joe Cool	Grandfather
1275	21/11/2019	Thesis update	DBA, Health

Belated discovery about indices and ClientDataSets

In my blogs database program, I wanted that one query would display a list of all tags, ordered by the number of appearances and by name. The number of appearances has to have descending sort, so that the first tag appearing is the most popular, whereas the last tag is the least popular. On the other hand, there are many tags that appear only once and it would be nice if these tags could be sorted in alphabetical order. In terms of SQL, this would be

  select tags.name, count (*) as id
  from tags
  inner join tag2entry on tag2entry.tag = tags.id
  group by 1
  order by 2 desc, 1  
  

but because of the way that the indices are defined in Delphi, I am using the AddIndex call in the following manner:

  qTags.addindex ('idx', 'id', [ixdescending], '', '', 0);
  

Whilst this gives me a descending index on 'id', it doesn't explain how to have one field sorted in descending order and one in ascending order. Maybe I have never come across this situation before, previously having allowed the user to sort by one field only, either ascending or descending.

After poking around a little, I found the answer here; this involves one of the mysterious parameters that are passed as empty strings to AddIndex. It turns out that one leaves the options set empty, then adds in the first string the name(s) of the field(s) that are to be sorted in descending order (the name of this parameter is 'DescFields', making it more explicit). The second string parameter is called 'CaseInsFields', controlling which fields are sorted by case and which not. In Hebrew this doesn't make any sense (which is probably why I've never come across this problem before), but in the blogs program, it would make 'At' come before 'as'. The command that I am using is

  qTags.addindex ('idx', 'id;name', [], 'id', '', 0);
  

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
649	20/11/2013	More song festival	MIDI, Kibbutz, Song writing
650	20/11/2013	Stack Overflow	Programming

DBA update

Just over a month ago, I sent an updated version of my thesis to my supervisor, and since then I've been waiting for his response. In the mean time, I learnt how to create an automatic list of tables and of figures, in a similar manner to the automatic table of contents. I also added some more material, especially to the 'conclusions from the data' section of the thesis. Since then, I've been waiting....

The supervisor's response came on Tuesday, so on Wednesday I set about implementing most of the changes that he requested. These were primarily writing about how I mitigated biases in the research and moving one section from the concluding chapter to a new 'research design' section in the methodology chapter. This new section also received new material about how each case study is going to be conducted, i.e. a description, a list of documents, a list of interviews and the interviews themselves. This allowed me to use a word that is new to me - quadripartite! 

I also completely excised a section in the results chapter that examined the pilot study in terms of the model that had been developed from the case studies. I understand his point of view, but there were also some interesting points that arose from the pilot case study.

Today I devoted some time to creating a document that listed the changes requested after my unsuccessful viva examination. I had most of the answers at my fingertips, but there was a request to discuss the interview questions and their development in the methodology chapter. I had done this a few days earlier in response to a similar request from my supervisor ('moving one section from the concluding chapter' that I wrote a few paragraphs ago alludes to this), but it leaves me somewhat uneasy. The final development of the interview questions was carried out after the pilot study, so to me this seems to be putting the cart before the horse. 

Reflecting on this now, what I think they mean is 'discuss where you got the ideas from for the original interview questions'. Using the 'rubber duck debugging' technique, I now realise that there were two sources: one was my original thesis (although I think that it would be a good idea not to mention this) and the second was the five models of engineering change that appear in the literature review. I will add this now to the thesis and the 'changes document'.

I hope that I will get a quick turnaround from my supervisor as time is running out.

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This day in history

 

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
648	19/11/2013	What's in a name?	Israel, Personal
904	19/11/2015	Even dogs in the wild	Ian Rankin
1186	19/11/2018	E dorian	Song writing, Music theory
1274	19/11/2019	The luxury of digital recording	MIDI, Kibbutz, Song writing
1441	19/11/2021	Tables in Word documents opened in a thread	Programming, Delphi, Office automation
1553	19/11/2022	DBA update	DBA

Fairport news

I've been so busy with my own life in the past few months (and rightly so) that I missed a few items of Fairport news.

First off: Gerry Conway, the drummer since 1998, has announced his retirement: "I never expected to still be playing at 75, my Mum was always asking me when I’d retire! Well, I’m not retiring but looking forward to some new adventures. Thanks Fairport, we had some great times". It appears that Fairport might be returning to the acoustic four piece (i.e. no drums), but also that the great Dave Mattacks will be returning!

Secondly, today was published a book called "Gonna see all my friends - a people's history of Fairport Convention", that is described as a fully authorised history of Fairport Convention as told through over 300 fan memories. This is published as a 384 page limited edition hardback, meaning that it's going to be heavy (man) and that the postage is going to be expensive. I wonder whether I should delay ordering this, so that I can read what others have to say about it, or order straight away. The 'limited edition' phrase worries me, but it doesn't say how many copies will be printed, so 'limited' may mean that there will not be a reprint.

First rain of the year

Apart from a few drops of rain that fell over the past few weeks, last night and this morning was the first serious rain that has fallen this autumn - 5.3 mm. Of course, this was also the day that I had to travel first to Haifa and from there to Karmiel. No rain fell on me, but the view at Lod train station at about 6 am reminded me of an early scene in 'The Matrix' where the rain can be seen falling down the windows.

Appearances in my school's Chronicles

I am currently reading a book ("How to change your mind") that mentions a Professor David Nutt. This name seems familiar to me, although I can't pinpoint why*. The David Nutt referred to in the book went to Bristol Grammar School, as did I, but he left in 1969, whereas I only started in 1967, so I very much doubt that I knew him. Looking through back numbers of the BGS Chronicles didn't find much either. Of course, once I started looking, I had to find references to myself.

The first comes in Chronicle vol 30 no 6 from July 1970 (that means that I'm in the fifth form, our third year). In my house's report, the following appears Metcalfe's had the effrontery to challenge our right to the title of House Quiz Champions and in the resulting contest our team of R.F. Pannel, R. Dean, N.B. Newman, A. Dean, R. J. Hill-Cottingham and D. G. Griffiths duly put the upstarts in their place. Any more challenges? Not only do I not remember such a competition, I also don't recognise a single name, even though they were in my house. Perhaps they were all older than me?

A year later I appear in vol 30 no 8 from July 1971 as one of those who had established [his] position in the [Junior Colts] hockey team. This I certainly remember, along with the opening statement Despite the fact that the XI won none of its matches, the season was not without encouragement:the team did rather better against its opponents than in the previous year.

The next appearance is in the following chronicle, vol 31 no 1 from February 1972 where I appear as a member of the Junior Colts cricket XI. In the following chronicle (vol 31, no 2) from July 1972, I make three appearances: one as a member of the Colts hockey XI, one as a 'house official' and again in the house quiz team: The Spring term opened with yet another challenge to our supremacy in House Quizzes from Warrens; M. Davies, R. Pannell, N. Newman and N. Hunter scored a memorable victory by 64-30 points. I remember being a 'house official' - I even won a trophy for my contributions to the house, but remember nothing about the quiz team. Again, the names don't ring any bells, although I see that R. Panell was still in the team.

In volume 31 no 3 from February 1973, I appear in the house report as one who coached the youngsters in rugby and as a 'house official' - I used to organise the 'house assemblies' once a week. I appear again in what appears to be the report from the library: N.B. Newman (6Sc.B2) [supplied] even greater quantities of popular paperback fiction. If you say so. These were probably cheap detective novels, but who remembers? Finally, I appear at the end of the list of those who "represented the 2nd XI [cricket]". Most of the names that appear are familiar to me. If one looks closely, one can even see a picture of me taken from the school play: standing far right in the front row with a headband (page 126).

Vol 31 no 4 from July 1973: we read that In the Senior competition we were within points of 1st place, and this was a truly one-man effort. A.J. Sykes swam in seven events, scoring 29 out of our total of 47 points. Unfortunately neither A. Plumb nor N. Newman had done any swimming since the previous Swimming sports, and the resulting 5th position in the final relay left us in 2nd place behind Cockitt's. The same report goes on to say that In the Senior Hockey K.O. Trott's reached the final, where they were extremely unlucky to be defeated by Warren's — at full time the teams were even on goals, but Warren's had had one more short corner which was sufficient to give them victory. The whole team, captained by J.R. Dolton, is to be congratulated on a fine performance. I have a sneaking suspicion that I wrote this house report, even though it appears under Stephen Plumb's name; I remember that I wrote one report, and the next one would appear only after I left the school. Part of the house report also carps about the concentration on games and requests more articles for the house magazine - this sounds like me writing.

Incidentally, it's interesting to read what the victors wrote, a few pages later:  The Spring Term was notable for its one major sporting success, that of the House winning the Open Hockey K.O. for the first time in many years. After a relatively easy passage, we came to what had been forecast as a very even final against Trott's [my house - NN]. The pundits were certainly right, for after a "competitive" match, we eventually emerged victors, 7-6 on short corners, after  the game had ended at two goals each at full time. It is easy to highlight the obviously telling contributions of the recognised Hockey players, but the final result stemmed much from the contributions of the "thugs" of the Rugby fraternity, notably Bob Stirratt and Nick Noble, and of a Junior Colt, Richard Mason. Not only have the reports become loquacious, we now have first names! 

Apparently I gave more books to the library, and I made a fourth appearance in this chronicle as a member of the 2nd XI (hockey), where it is written ... teamwork could be added to individual skills to bring many triumphs, culminating in the defeat of the O.B.'s, apparently the first time this has happened since the war. 

In volume 31 no 5, Winter 1973, I appear twice, once again as a donator to the library, and once in the house report  I would like to wish all the best to those members of the House leaving at the end of this term and include those who left at the end of last term, especially S. Plumb, N. Clewett, R. Cleave, S. Jay, D. Pollock and N. Newman, who have in their time contributed greatly to the House's running. We're back to initials.

I thought that this would be my final appearance, but in 1977 I crop up again, in Old Bristolians' News: Newman, Norman (67— 73), 360 Finchley Rd., London NW3 7AJ spent his first post school year with war and terrorism in a Kibbutz in Israel. In Sept. 74 he began a sandwich course for BSc (Hons) in Food Science at the Polytechnic of the South Bank, London,working his sandwich period (75—76) as an analyst with Schweppe's. Currently he is a microbiologist with the Public Analyst for Surrey. He expects to graduate in 1978\ and then emigrate to Kibbutz Mishmar David but in the meantime would welcome a meeting with any who remember him. Obviously I wrote this, but someone mangled it as I was not a microbiologist for the Public Analyst for Surrey (although this sounds impressive).

[* Edit from a few days later: I think my mind confused David Nutt with David Nott, who taught physics at BGS when I was there and might have become a house-master]

November 5

I suppose that it's obligatory to note that today is Peter Hammill's 74th birthday. It's also Guy Fawkes Night (aka bonfire night), a celebration that played only a small part in my early years, and none at all afterwards. But blowing up Parliament ... that's something that I wouldn't mind doing today, in view of the results of the Israeli general election held a few days ago. 

I want to quote a paragraph from "The Rotters Club" (by Jonathan Coe) that takes place on Bonfire night

He held the sparkler up in front of my face and said, "Wait, wait".

I was already waiting. What else was there to do?

"Here you are", he said. "Look. What's this?"

At that precise moment, his sparkler fizzled out. I didn't say anything, so he supplied the answer himself. "The death of the socialist dream", he said....

But it was never going to happen. If there had ever been a time when it might have happened, that time was slipping away. The moment had passed. Goodbye to all that.

Indeed, I feel very much that the socialist dream is over in Israel as well, when there are only four MKs elected (out of 120) that belong to a socialist party. Our time has slipped away, our moment has passed.

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This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
1272	05/11/2019	Draft thesis review	DBA
1355	05/11/2020	First rain	Personal, Weather
1435	05/11/2021	Counting beats with Van der Graaf Generator (3)	Van der Graaf Generator, Time signatures

Redesigning the 'blogs' program

Over the past few weeks, I've spent a fair bit of time with my 'blogs database' program and have been thinking about various improvements. Roughly speaking, the program (as like many others) can be split into two: the part that deals with entering/storing the blog entries and the part that deals with creating reports about the entries. Whilst the first part was handled well, the second part was totally lacking. The ideas that I've had, such as the 'this day in the blog history' don't fit into the paradigm established by the program, so I realised that I would have to redesign it and rewrite parts (as well as adding new parts).

Yesterday evening, while walking the dog, I was thinking some more and realised that I would like several different functions to output a list of blogs, each showing different data. This would mean using the multiple document interface (MDI) and displaying the same form several times. How would each instance of the form know what to display? I was thinking originally in terms of a temporary table that would hold the chosen data, but I quickly realised that this would not be sufficient. 

In Priority, there is a mechanism called 'link' that creates a new copy of a table; data is inserted into this copy and then displayed. Eventually the copied table is destroyed. For a few moments I thought about creating new tables then dropping them, but after a while I realised that I could greatly simplify this.  I added to the temporary table a new field, 'instance' that would be part of the primary key; each query would get a unique instance and store its data (entries) along with that instance. The form that displays the data would be sent the instance number and so would retrieve the correct data. When the form closes, it deletes the data from the temporary table and frees the instance number for further use. 

I worked all of this out last night and today I was able to spend a few hours working on the program and changing it around. Some parts - for example, choosing tags for an entry - have remained the same, whereas other parts have been slightly modified. The whole 'instances' idea worked perfectly. Using the same idea for tags is a bit more difficult as one query (unused tags) needs to display only tags whereas another query (entries per tag) needs to display both the tags and their counts. After fiddling around a little, I figured out how to handle this.

Another idea for a report was taking one popular tag (e.g. programming) and seeing how many times different tags have been paired with this tag. Then I could retrieve the entries that have the chosen combination of tags and show them in the the 'show entries' form. Expanding the program is much easier now.

Have I found the solution to a cooking problem?

When discussing cooking chicken a few days ago, I wrote today's experiment: adding some pearl barley to soak up some of the excess liquid. I like pearl barley but my wife doesn't, so I've got to find a way of keeping the barley separate but also allowing it free access to the liquid. Well, I think I've found the solution, after examining the goods for sale in three different kitchen goods shops last night in the local shopping centre: translated literally, it's a 'collapsible steamer lily' (שושנת אידוי) which I assume in English is a steamer basket - and lo and behold! That's the correct name and here's an article about its use. My problem was finding the correct name for what I wanted. See here also.

The picture on the left shows how the basket will look when it's placed inside the oven dish: liquid can get in, but the contents can't get out. The middle picture shows how the basket looks when it's open: obviously this is when one puts the contents (e.g. pearl barley) into the basket. The right-hand side picture show the basket on its side, so that its legs can be seen (although not very clearly). I think that the legs would be opened if one wants to steam vegetables in an open saucepan, but not have the vegetables in contact with the liquid. One would put some water in the pan and then the basket: steam will come up from the water and cook the vegetables, but there would be very little leaching.

I won't get a chance to use this until next Friday night, but I'm looking forward to the opportunity. The pearl barley that I cooked with the chicken absorbed all the excess liquid, so it became very tasty after a day or two. Using the steam basket means that the barley will be served in a separate dish: if I want it to taste good after a few days, I will have to add to the saved barley some of the liquid from the chicken.

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Note that I used the tip from a few days ago as to how to place pictures side by side, although this time, I've gone one stage further: I figured out how to put some blank space between them. In the HTML code for the picture, there's a command 'style = "padding: 1em 0...."'. Replace the 0 with a number like 10 or 15 and this will define the padding around each picture. I'm unsure as to whether 'px' (pixels) should appear after this number.

New song, with a little something extra

A couple of weeks ago, I laid down the basis of a new song. I wasn't too happy at first with the chord sequence to the first half of the verse as it is very similar to several other songs of mine, but at least the second half was more interesting. I sequenced a couple of verses along with an instrumental section that includes a modulation. Of course, no words.

Then along comes David Bennett Piano with another of his videos giving examples of common chord progressions. On the basis of this, I thought to myself that I could add a chorus to the song that would add some variety, especially as almost none of my songs have a chorus. I used a variation of one of the progressions that DBP talked about: I IV iv V (in the key of D, D G Bm A). I repeated this twice, then added another IV V at the end, just to make the sequence slightly less four square.

I then sat at the piano, played those chords a few times and came up with a melody that is centered on the note A. This note appears naturally in the D and A chords; it's the seventh over Bm, which is fairly regular, but over the G chord it becomes a ninth - somewhat unusual. I then added this chorus to the sequenced song and listened to it. I added an arpeggio'd guitar part for the chorus that really boosts the entire song, so much so that I now enjoy listening to it.

At first the chorus reminded me of an instrumental tune - the first part of the final track on the Lunasa album, "Merry sisters of fate", called 'the wedding reel'. Then, more unfortunately, it reminded me strongly of a newish tune of Fairport Convention*, about flying saucers over Banbury, with a 'doo-wop' chorus that uses the same chord progression. So I had to change my tune slightly. 

A few days later, I had a delicious thought: why not create an instrumental coda, or as it is known in the trade, a hidden track? This would begin with the same chorus tune then morph into 'the wedding reel'. In order to do this, I would, of course, need the notes to the reel. After some false leads, I found the tune in sheet music form. 

Yesterday I 'typed' in the notes and today I worked on the arrangement: the important thing was finding the right sounds that didn't saturate the aural space. I think that the arrangement still needs a little work, to be thinned out some more.

* It turns out that the Fairport song does not use this progression, so I'm safe on that count.

Big cloud

While walking the dog in late afternoon, my eyes were attracted to a slightly unusual cloud formation (as pictured on the left). First of all, this cloud seemed massive (in terms of other clouds), but the lighting was extreme. It's as if the sun was behind the cloud and lighting it, but in fact the sun was in the opposite direction, behind my back. Also at the hour of the walk, the sun was already red and going down fast (that's the problem with winter time - the late afternoon walks are now at dusk or after dusk when the light isn't so good).

It's as if the cloud were 'haloed'.