Stormbringer!

Several years ago, when I was looking to see whether the Island samplers "Bumpers" and "El pea" had received a reissue on cd, I discovered that there was a 3 cd set entitled "Strangely strange" which encompassed (if I remember correctly) all four Island samplers. I only downloaded songs which I didn't already have, so I'm not too familiar with the complete set.

One track which was on 'Bumpers' but not SS, was "Go out and get it" by John and Beverley Martin; this song didn't impress me very much at the time. Someone obviously did their homework, for it was replaced by a song, "Stormbringer!", which is much better. That's an understatement: it's far far better, being an excellent track.

'Stormbringer!' the song starts off with what sounds like a 12 string guitar playing an octave chord with no third, before drums call the song to order. Then follows the weakest of all chord progressions, where a major chord falls to its relative minor (think G -> Em); the feeling which I get from this is one of resignation. The Em then resolves to D which is the tonic (I am probably wrong about the key) and a verse evolves. The chorus is much stronger although the music is familiar with a descending bass line. Then follows a piano solo, picking notes here and there with no attempt to create a melodic line. Another verse follows with understated strings in the left channel accompanied by very assertive drums. Those drums: one could make a substantiated claim that they are the lead instrument here. They're not keeping time but rather punctuating and emphasising the lyrics. The sound of this song is very 'open': instruments can breathe; they're not competing for room in the audio spectrum, instead each contributes a little to the final product, where the total is greater than the sum of its parts. I suppose that this is part of the production style of Joe Boyd.

It is customary to mention at this point that the entire 'Stormbringer!' album was recorded in Woodstock NY under the influence of The Band. Levon Helm does indeed play on two tracks but ironically not the eponymous song; the outstanding drummer is Herbie Lovelle, otherwise known as a session drummer. The pianist and musical director is Paul Harris, with whom Joe Boyd also worked with on Nick Drake's albums.

I was so enraptured by this song that of course I had to listen to the entire album: I wish I hadn't. The album is credited to John and Beverley Martin: Beverley was quite possibly better known at the time. and so the album is approximately shared 50:50 with his and her songs. I do not like the Beverley songs and I don't like her singing (or her phrasing): there's an 'ad lib' in one of her songs which is cringe inducing. 'Come and get it' is about the third best song on the album, which isn't saying much, and 'John the Baptist' is second best. The title song stands head and shoulders above everything else.

I wondered what their follow-up record, "The road to ruin", would sound like: one listen discouraged me so much that I am disinclined to try again. Then the marriage fell apart and John went out on his own (or maybe the other way around), developing an echoplexed sound and becoming a professional drunk. None of his later, electric, work matches the beauty of 'Stormbringer!' (the song); his singing also became more relaxed, or to use the technical term, 'slurred'. This does not press my buttons.

'The road to ruin' compared to 'Stormbringer!' sounds a little like Nick Drake's 'Bryter Layter' compared to 'Five leaves left', which is not accidental as they had the same producer, Joe Boyd, and many of the musicians that played on 'Bryter Layter' also played on 'The road to ruin'. I thought that I would look up the Joe Boyd angle in his autobiography, 'White Bicycles': I was quite surprised to read that Joe didn't think much of John Martyn.

"[Chris] Blackwell [owner of Island records] made me a present of John Martyn. He had released a couple of LPs on Island but Chris didn’t really know what to do with him and thought I ought to. I admired his playing but had never been a huge fan. When John started living and performing with Beverley Kutner, an ex-Denny Cordell artist [that] Tod Lloyd wanted to sign to Witchseason, I was stuck with him. I recorded an album with the couple in America using a New York pianist named Paul Harris as musical director. I thought Paul’s style would work for ‘Time Has Told Me’, so when he came to London to finish John & Beverley’s Stormbringer, I introduced him to Nick."

I actually saw John and Beverley Martin perform in the time between the two albums in April 1970 when they appeared on a treble bill with Fotheringay headlining and Nick Drake supporting. As I've written elsewhere, unfortunately I have no recollection of this evening whatsoever, so much so that I don't know whether Nick Drake even appeared or whether J&B performed as a duo or with extra musicians.

Someone else's take on this album can be found here.

[Edit: I have revised somewhat my opinion of this record. The title track is still the best by far; in second place is 'Would you believe me', that closes the album. The style of this song is completely different from everything that precedes it and also features instruments not previously heard (electric guitar, electric piano). The drums are also very forceful here. In third place would be 'John the Baptist' with 'Come and get it' relegated to fourth place.]

Pitfalls when designing Priority forms

I'm not sure whether what I will describe here can be defined as a bug; it's certainly not a feature. Let's call it a pitfall - in fact, last night I was considering created a completely new blog which would be called 'Programming Pitfalls in Priority' or PPP for short (where 'programming' is an adjective, not a verb). I have now done so and so this entry can be found here. From now on, Priority tips and pitfalls will appear on my new blog and not this one.

Disclaimer: all of the below is written to the best of my knowledge. As this topic is barely documented, I have to base my comments on my experience which may well be limited. In other words, there may be a simple way of getting around the pitfall described below of which I am simply unaware.

The scenario: a client wants to add a new personalised field to an existing form. My normal way of doing this is to add the required field to the base table of the form and then add the field to the form which will display it; a more complicated method involves adding the field to a continuation table (good examples of this are the service calls and projects forms). Built-in triggers on every form are responsible for loading and saving all data which is displayed on the form which is derived from the base table, whereas the developer is responsible for loading and saving data which comes from a continuation table. In other words, if I add a field to a base table and then to a form, I don't have to worry about it being loaded or saved. 

The problem: after a few days' testing, the client decides that she doesn't need the added field. OK: the automatic, unthinking, simple solution is simply to remove the field from the form by deleting the definition. WRONG!!!! Form preparation, after adding the field, will modify the built-in triggers to include the new field (if it was defined as belonging to the base table) and so deleting the field from the form will cause these triggers to scream that they are missing a field when a user accesses this form. What is worse is that 'form preparation' does not detect this problem. The developer has no way of accessing the built-in triggers so it is not possible to remove from them the references to the new field. 

The correct way to 'remove' the added field would seem to be to hide it, not delete it.

In my opinion, the bug is that after deleting the field, form preparation does not update the built-in triggers and instruct them to remove the added field.   

Ironically, displaying the field via a continuation table does not cause this problem as the field is loaded and saved 'manually' and so the developer can simply remove the references to the added field.

VideoPad

A friend asked me the other day whether I knew of a simple program to edit video files. After one minute of research, I discovered that the default Movie player in Windows 10 enables one to trim video files, i.e. extract a portion of an existing file and save this portion to a new file. I checked that this indeed does work and passed the tip on.

The next time that we discussed this topic, she said that the player didn't work on her computer and that it was 'LimitedWare', that it [presumably the editing functionality] stops working after a certain time. It may be so but that doesn't interest me. Someone else had suggested a program called VideoPad which I saw on her desktop when we had a zoom chat. I intuited that this program could put together several video files in order to create a composite movie.

Today I downloaded and installed the program; I used it to create a movie of clips which my wife had filmed of our garden and balconies. I wanted to see whether this program could replace the venerable (but painful) Microsoft Movie Maker. On the basis of the short film which I made, the answer is YES! There are both time line and storyboard views as well as transitions. I didn't see whether the possibility of turning a picture by 90 degrees exists, but I suspect that it does. Fewer transitions between two clips are available in VP than in MMM, but the existing ones are sufficient as normally I only use fades and cross-fades .

Extra advantages: the program accepts both mp4 and mov files without the need to convert them to wmv, which saves time. The program can output to a variety of formats, where mp4 is the default, as well as to ISO format in order to burn a DVD. In other words, VideoPad is much better than MMM for these functions.

Summing up: it seems that VideoPad is anywhere between the same and infinitely better than MMM, so I will definitely use it for my next movie project. Except that I can't imagine what this next project might be as the possibility of a holiday abroad is currently 0%. 

One idea which I had was as follows: in 'the old days' before we had a video camera which directly created computer files (since 2013), I used to transfer video cassettes directly to DVDs, without any editing. I could take such a dvd, upload it into a computer as one huge file then cut it into myriad pieces, each one a 'scene'. Then I could recombine chosen pieces in order to create a more coherent movie. Of course, the quality won't be so high as my current movies, as the very first step was analog to digital, but there won't be any further loss of quality along the way. I have to admit that such a project currently has a very low possibility of happening.

Another more up-to-date and ongoing project is to make a compilation of grand-daughter number two in her first steps. 

I am 'coming out of the bunker' and going back to work in my office tomorrow. The major thing that I am going to miss is the quiet of home; I haven't heard a word of Russian in six weeks. I suspect that whilst working I will listen to music through headphones for most of the time. I will wear a mask every time that I leave my minimal work space, although I don't know what to do about gloves - especially when going to the toilet. I don't particularly want to use eight pairs of gloves a day, but on the other hand, I don't want to touch 'communal surfaces' with my bare hands.

[Edit: frequent hand washing replaces the need for gloves]

Intra-program messaging

I wrote just over a month ago: "For fun, I started work on Friday evening, writing a program [the bakery manager] in which every screen is non-modal (this should be an interesting experiment), continued on Saturday and finished yesterday evening with a few reports". This program, like the OP's management program, is composed mainly of pairs of screens: one screen displays records about an entity (customers, sales items, orders, nicknames) and the other screen in the pair allows a given record to be edited. Normally, this second, edit, screen is invoked by using the ShowModal method, but this time around I wanted to try something different.

The edit screens are non-modal MDI son screens, as are their parent screens. The method which I originally chose to allow an edit screen to communicate with its parent was to invoke a procedure in the main form which then iterated through all the currently displayed MDI son screens in order to find a form which could be updated. When walking the dog the other day, I thought of a different and faster method (no pun intended) to achieve this.

The parent screen invokes the edit screen via a 'Create' call instead of 'Execute': this is simply using a more modern technique and has nothing to do with the intra-program messaging. In the past, normally one parameter was passed to the edit screen, the index number of the tuple to be edited (for a new tuple, -1 is passed). In the new scheme of things, two parameters are now passed: the index number as before along with the handle of the calling screen. When the edit screen finishes, it sends a message to this handle with the index number of the tuple which has been edited (if -1 was originally passed then a new value will be returned). No more calling the main screen, etc.

In the calling screen, I added one new procedure, DefaultHandler, which handles all messages sent to this screen. I'm only interested in one, so all the others are passed onto the inherited handler. As this procedure handles messages with a high frequency, my handler should be as short as possible, so all it does is save the passed index number then sets a timer to execute in 500 ms. It is the timer which does the actual updating - previously this was in the procedure which was called by the main form.

Following is an example of the new (for me) code paradigm

procedure TDoCustomers.DefaultHandler(var Message);
begin
 with TMessage (Message) do
  if msg = WM_UpdateCust then
   begin
    newcust:= wparam;
    timer1.enabled:= true;
   end
  else inherited DefaultHandler (Message);
end;

procedure TDoCustomers.Timer1Timer(Sender: TObject);
begin
 timer1.enabled:= false;
 try
  qCustomers.disablecontrols;
  if qCustomers.locate ('id', newcust, []) then qCustomers.delete;
  qGetOne.params[0].asinteger:= newcust;
  qGetOne.open
  if qCustomers.state in [dsInactive] then qCustomers.open;
  qCustomers.append;
  qCustomersID.asinteger:= newcust;
  qCustomersCustName.asstring:= qGetOneCustName.asstring;
  qCustomersTaksiv.asinteger:= qGetOneTaksiv.asinteger;
  qCustomers.post;
  qGetOne.close;
  qCustomers.locate ('id', newcust, []);
 finally
  qCustomers.enablecontrols;
 end;
end;

This code also shows one of my discoveries from six years ago: instead of closing the dataset then retrieving all the records again, I simply add the new tuple.

This new technique works for adding customers, sales items and nicknames, but not yet for orders: in the first three cases, there is one parent screen calling one edit screen, but with orders, there are a couple of parent screens which can call the 'edit order' screen, but only one of them should be updated (an order can be made from the customers screen and from the orders screen). The customers screen does not know (at the moment) the handle of the orders screen so this can't be passed to the edit screen. At the moment, I've used the old technique for updating this type of datum; I'm sure that I'll think of a solution when I'm showering or walking the dog.

Italian holiday film

I thought that I would do something useful with all the time that I have on my hands (it's the Passover holiday which lasts a week) and so decided to create a film from our 2018 holiday in Italy. 

The first step in doing so is to convert all the MOV files to WMV format so that Movie Maker can handle them; there is a program which does this painlessly albeit slowly. At the same time, I discovered that there were a few files which lasted several minutes and generally showed pictures of my shoes or the inside of my bag: these files were created when I thought that I was turning the camera off when in fact I was turning it on. Of course, I tried not to convert these files, thus saving time and space.

All the videos are organised by day which makes it very easy to know where to find those per topic. I discovered that I had no stills saved - probably due to the great disk crash - but five minutes with my wife's telephone yielded over a hundred photos. As each file's name is basically the date and time of the picture being taken, it was also easy to categorise them.

The next stage was to build a rough cut of the film: Pisa, Riomaggiore and Lucca, then various aspects of our stay in Torino. Once this was done, I slotted in stills; in the past I have presented videos of a location followed by stills of the same, but this time around I mixed stills in-between the videos whenever it seemed appropriate. I also added the transitions, almost always fading from one piece to the next. About half of the stills had the wrong orientation but they seemed to right themselves whenever I watched a preview so I didn't bother to rotate them. 

Once I had everything in the desired order, I added music. There are a few scenes which have their own 'soundtrack': I filmed one scene early in the morning on the roof of our Pisan hotel and all that can be heard are birds so I left this as is. Another scene has about ten Hare Krishna devotees winding their way through the tables of people eating al fresco - obviously they had to be heard. I left in a portion of David Byrne in the cinema museum but found a way to download the complete video from Youtube and include it as an appendix to the film. 

As I have noted in the past, the pain of working with Movie Maker grows as the composite video lengthens. A minimal change at the end of the film requires the computer to become unresponsive for a few minutes. But that's nothing compared to the final part which is the most painful of all: mastering. This procedure takes all the little bits of video and pictures and makes one cohesive file of them all, taking about 45 minutes. Then I watch the completed film ... and see that most of the photos need to be rotated. Another 45 minutes of mastering and then I see ... that two pieces of video have incomprehensibly been added twice. I remove them - then I have to fix the soundtrack as the gaps are now out of synchronisation. This takes about ten minutes and then I have to publish the film again. 

I thought that the fourth revision had fixed everything, but to my horror I discover that the volume has been muted in the section where David Byrne appears in the film museum! Fix this then master again..... Whilst this process is conceptually the same as mixing songs then mastering them, the major difference is the time factor: mastering a song takes around a minute, depending on the length of the song and the number of effects, so it easy to go through several revisions in a short period of time. Mastering films takes a l-o-n-g time.

Obligatory Covid-19 reference: whilst it is great to see again these places that I remember fondly, sadly I wonder when the field by the tower of Pisa or the road of Riomaggiore will be filled again by throngs of happy tourists. Maybe they never will again and this film will serve as a memorial which I can show to our grandchilden: see how it was before the virus! People could walk in the streets, stop, chat and even eat in the open! No masks, no gloves. 

I like the sound of falling rain

Well, I don't really, but I'm prepared to do so for artistic purposes.

About a month ago, I wrote It also rained on and off on Saturday, and at one stage I found myself composing the beginning of a tune whose first line is "I like (love?) to listen to the rain" - I think this is going to be minimalistic as I couldn't develop the tune very much. At the moment it has a very big range - from G below middle C, a note which I can't reach in a dependable manner, to B above middle C, in other words an octave and a half. We'll see.....

I sketched the outline of the music quite fast, then every day I'd add a little bit to the music, fleshing out the arrangement. Instruments were added and taken away in order to match whatever I was hearing in my head at the time. A few days ago I thought that the arrangement was complete, but then I decided to remove two instruments which played only a few bars each and assign their parts to other instruments. I played this arrangement for my wife who said that the introduction was "very much you". Hmmm. I had to go somewhere after this and while I was walking to wherever it was, I thought about her words. It would be better if I could have some prosody - notes which sound like rain. I added some semi-random strokes on a log drum which then became doubled - this is the shower starting and getting heavier - followed by arpeggios on a marimba that lead into the song.

Then I had to concentrate on writing the lyrics. Over three weeks I had succeeded in writing only about six lines, as well as a few notes to myself. I find that I have great difficulty in starting to write lyrics, but the words begin to flow once I get over the initial hump. Of all the lines, I would say about 75% came from the last two days. There is still one little part which I'm not to pleased about: maybe one day I'll think of a better couplet. At the end, I discovered that the title of the song had mutated: instead of "I like to listen to the rain", it had somehow become "I like the sound of falling rain" - and these were the first words that I wrote.

I note that in recent years, I start writing lyrics with a song title: a phrase will catch my attention which serves as as starting point. I didn't write like this in "the old days" - frequently the title would not come directly from the lyrics.

I decided to dedicate yesterday morning to recording the vocals. After getting set up, I sang the song three times, each time improving. I then discovered that the microphone hadn't been defined correctly in the software and so had recorded nothing. I then sang (and recorded) the song a fourth time, which became the master take. I decided to have the vocal in mono with no apparent effects: I had to use slightly different EQ settings from the usual as there was no need for the vocal to cut through a dense instrumental track.

Once again, it's raining outside: I only like the sound when I don't have to go out. My early morning walk with the dog was cut short as it had started raining a few minutes before we went out. I waited an hour when there was no rain, set out, and then half way through it began raining once again. My wife says that there's no such thing as too much rain, but maybe she's reconsidering.....

Pesach in the shade of Corona

Last night was the first night of Pesach (Passover). Instead of celebrating it with most of the kibbutz in the dining room, we - and everyone else in Israel - was forced to 'celebrate' with 'whoever lives in the flat'. Normally families congregate to celebrate Passover - grandparents, aunts and uncles, sons and daughters - which means that all the roads in the country are always crowded from about 6 pm until midnight.

Not last night. Israel is currently in the middle of a four day complete lock-down; towns are barricaded and the police will stop anyone fool hardy enough to travel on a road. The authorities fear that allowing multi-generational celebrations will destroy all the advances that have been made in the past few weeks with regard to minimising the number of Corona infections.

Back to the kibbutz: every year is posted a seating plan in the entrance to the dining room so that everyone knows where to sit. Yesterday evening some wag sent a message to our internal on-line forum with a map of the kibbutz and each family's location and number of people.

Above is a picture of me reading the blessing for the first of the four cups of wine that are traditionally drunk during the celebration. I don't know whether last night was the worst Seder which I have ever attended: about five years ago we were invited to the parents of my wife's brother's wife and that was an experience that I have no desire to repeat. I wrote here about this festival over the years; it is probably my favourite festival. Not so this year.

One of the major statements of the Seder is 'yesterday we were slaves [in Egypt], today we are free men'. On this basis, someone created the blessing shown on the left. Following a swift translation into English, it says

[Wishing you] A kosher and happy Pesach, in which we will move

• From darkness to light
• From slavery to freedom
• From Corona to health
• From unpaid leave to employment
• From blind hatred to love

I couldn't agree more.

Statistical methods for Epidemiologists

I wrote yesterday that I am reading a book called 'The signal and the noise' by Nate Silver about predictions; I had got up to the chapter which writes about predicting epidemics, which is a very suitable topic for these days. There is discussion of avian and swine flu, which were predicted to infect many more people than they actually did - which is just as well.

Silver talks about the simplistic SIR model "formulated in 1927, that posits that there are three “compartments” in which any given person might reside at any given time: S stands for being susceptible to a disease, I for being infected by it, and R for being recovered from it. For simple diseases like the flu, the movement from compartment to compartment is entirely in one direction: from S to I to R". Another important variable is R₀ which gives an indication of how many healthy people are liable to catch the disease from a carrier.

For 'normal' flu, R₀ is about 1.2, but initially scientists were saying that for Covid-19, R₀ is about 3, which makes it very infectious. One thing which I haven't seen yet is the major constraint in handling this disease: the number of ventilators. The rationale to handling this epidemic is to try and keep the number of infected people low enough to ensure that they don't overwhelm the hospitals. Eventually everyone will probably catch Covid-19, but if this number is spread out wide enough over time, the health authorities will be able to deal with all the cases.

Another important statistic which I haven't yet seen in Silver's book but is connected to the above constraint is 'how often does the number of infected people double?'. A week ago, the figure in Israel was 3: if there were 1000 infected people on Sunday, then by Wednesday there were 2000. Now they are saying that the rate is 11 days which is a huge improvement, thanks to social distancing and people staying at home. To use an analogy: if the number of infected people is the velocity of a car, then the doubling rate is its acceleration. The health authorities would like zero acceleration, which would mean no increase in velocity (infected people) and even better, deceleration, in which the number of infected people decreases.

The epidemic endgame rests on how long the virus can stay active after it has infected people. If all the non-infected people are kept off the streets and only people who have recovered from the virus are allowed on the streets, what is the possibility of non-infected people catching the virus from those who have recovered? No one knows as yet. What is the influence of temperature and UV light on the virus (think of an Israeli summer and its effect on skin cancer)? Again, no one knows.

Another important datum is the length of time that the virus can lay dormant in a carrier. Let's say that everybody between the ages 20-29 cannot become ill but they can become carriers. If a 20 year old is infected on the first of April, will the virus that she carries be able to infect a 60 year old on the fifth of April? On the tenth of April? At the end of April? This datum again will influence the endgame, which is when people can return to a normal life.

As Silver notes, the important data about an epidemic are known only several years after the epidemic passes. No one knows the data when the epidemic is active and so the health authorities have to make predictions in order to handle the epidemic. This book is about making predictions: how to make models as accurate as can be and how to mitigate biases (something which I have written about recently in my thesis). So, this is very much a book for our times.

Days of Corona (3)

First, I should note that relatively I am having an easy time in these strange days: I am fully employed (albeit working from home) so I don't have any of the monetary worries that a million other Israelis have, and I live on a kibbutz which in this respect is a very safe place to be. I don't even have to leave the house as we can order from the local mini-market via the Internet, and the kibbutz teenagers make deliveries.

Yesterday was even stranger than usual: at 5:30 am, the outside temperature was 25°C, so I took the dog for her morning walk wearing only a t-shirt and trousers. By lunchtime the outside temperature had reached 32.2°C and inside was getting hot too, so I turned on the air-conditioner, initially forgetting that it was still set to heat. After a few minutes I realised my mistake and set the air-conditioner to cool; soon the lounge reached a respectable 26°C. A few hours later I suddenly realised that I was getting cold: the outside temperature had suddenly dropped to 27°C, so I turned off the air-conditioner and opened all the windows.

I received - via DHL - a package sent from iHerb; unless my memory is playing me tricks, I ordered this last Saturday evening, so it arrived in just under eight days. As the kibbutz gate is closed, I had to call the guard to tell him that the DHL truck was on its way to me and that it should be let in. When I went to throw the carton in the carton rubbish bin, I noticed that the only other carton in the bin was also from iHerb; I wonder who it was. Maybe we can make a joint order next time.

Over the past few days, I have read some interesting books. The Le Carré biography was initially interesting but became less so, the further that I progressed: like his novels, the earlier ones were better than the later ones. Another book was 'The Undoing project' by Michael Lewis, which is about the two Israeli psychologists Danny Kahneman and the late Amos Tversky. I've read some of the material in other contexts, primarily Nobel prize winner Kahneman in his book 'Thinking fast and slow', which I have never finished. The only reason that Tversky didn't share the Nobel was that he died prior to it being awarded to Kahneman. I'm now in the middle of a book called 'The signal and the noise' by Nate Silver about predictions. I'm also rereading 'The Great Influenza' by John Barry which is about the Spanish flu epidemic after the end of the First World War. There should be lesson there for today.

I have just read that the British PM, Boris Johnson, has been hospitalised.

Thesis update

The only good thing for me about being at home because of Corona is that I have plenty of time to work on my thesis. Over the past week, I've worked between 1-3 hours each day, including a very productive talk with my supervisor, which I recorded. Today I completed everything that I wanted/was required to add (except something to do with the literature review), and this morning two new ideas popped up for the conclusions section:

• It would be very interesting to determine a time-line of enhancements, to try and see when each enhancement was deployed and what each enhancement does. The idea is to try and see when more essential enhancements are made as opposed to less essential. On the other hand, essential enhancements can appear at any time due to changing market conditions (this is one my major points in the introductory chapter). Doing so would of course require several longitudinal studies which is a bit beyond my capabilities at the moment.

• Should enhancements be developed and deployed in areas which are not part of a company's core business? One can argue that it is essential to optimize the core business (normally production) and that it is a waste of resources to improve non-essential functionality. This researcher believes in empowering all employees, and the improvement of non-essential functionality can free time which can then be spent on more important matters.

Out of curiosity, I also noted down for the past eight versions how many words each version contains.

Date	Number of words	Words added
06/11/2018	34,557
19/04/2019	33,891	-666
18/08/2019	42,442	8,551
09/09/2019	45,360	2,918
08/02/2020	50,282	4,924
29/02/2020	53,672	3,388
09/03/2020	56,238	2,566
28/03/2020	60,917	4,679

The version from 06/11/18 was the intermediate submission which was accepted by the research committee. There are a few reasons why there was a five month gap before the next version, which strangely had a decrease in the number of words: one reason was that the thesis underwent an almost complete rewrite and one section was discarded. Since then, "the only way is up". Note also that there have been four versions in the past two months whereas previously there had been four versions in fifteen months (this is partially because I was performing the actual research in the first half of 2019 so I couldn't write about it). After splitting the introductory chapter into two, the section which was discarded earlier has returned to what is now the second chapter which is all about ERP.

My supervisor wants me to improve the literature review chapter, not by adding more subjects or papers but by adding links between the papers. I don't quite see how this can be done.

Days of Corona (2)

I wrote ten days ago that I underwent a surgical removal of a cyst on my neck. If ten days have passed then it's time to have the stitches removed. The surgeon told me (half in jest) that next time I should try and have the cyst in an easier place to get to. The same thing happened today: the nurse couldn't access the stitches which had intertwined with the scab, so she had to call the doctor (GP) who also had problems but eventually succeeded.

So it's another couple of days of antibiotic cream covered with a plaster.

The accompanying picture is just to give an idea of what it is like to visit the clinic these days. One has to call the nurse in advance in order to book an appointment; they call back to say when to come. Outside of the clinic I was outfitted with gloves and mask, which I removed after the treatment had been completed. The gloves go into a bin, then it's wash the hands with alcogel. Incidentally, someone sent me a warning film about alcogel this morning: one has to wait a minute or two after applying before being next to a flame (cooking on a gas stove, lighting a cigarette): people have applied alcogel, lit a flame and then gotten burnt. I don't smoke and I haven't used the stove all week.

Back at home, we've just had a visit from the grandchildren: my wife and I stood on the balcony and waved to our grandchildren who were on the path outside. We can't come any closer than that. I miss them.

Counting beats with van der Graaf (2)

Nearly 11 years ago I wrote a blog entry about the used of varying time signatures appearing in the album 'Godbluff' by Van der Graaf Generator, noting that "I haven't figured out yet in which time signature the opening verse" of 'The Sleepwalkers'. Yesterday I heard the song once again and this time I made some progress in deciphering.

I wrote then that the final verse has the structure 4-2-4-4 (as also appears in "My room"), and this section has always given me the feeling of 'arriving home'. I now understand why I feel like this: the opening verse appears to have the following number of beats 6-3-6-6 (although this final 6 seems to be truncated); it's so fast that it's hard to count. The 'cha cha' section is definitely in 3/4. Looking at the first verse, if one takes the beats to be crotchet triplets, then the structure is 4-2-4-4! Very familiar.  In other words, the opening verse is the same as the closing verse but metrically is played as triplets as opposed to 'straight' crotchets. I wonder who is the clever dick who thought this up.

Days of Corona

The day after writing my previous blog was the day that I received feedback from my doctoral supervisor about the latest version of my thesis. I was quite proud of that version and so was somewhat surprised when I noticed the quantity and quality of remarks. I spent a few hours on Friday briefly going over the remarks then creating a new section on biases and fallacies by collecting material which was scattered around the thesis (the status quo bias, selection bias, confirmation bias, halo effect - I know them all). I shall have to add to this section some material about how the biases were mitigated. On Saturday I thought about writing a program which would store the various issues which my supervisor had found, along with the progress of my handling these issues. For some reason, I didn't turn these thoughts into a program.

Sunday found me sitting at the kitchen table with two computers, one of which is connected to work and the other to Microsoft Teams (for video conferencing). I had about four hours of concentrated work on Sunday after which I turned to 'standby mode'; I decided to use the time in order to write the supervision program. At first this started very badly: normally I take an existing program and adapt it to what I need, but this time there seemed to be so much that needed to be changed that it seemed easier to start from scratch. Throughout the day I worked on the program, getting it to the state that I could enter data then see what problems remained with the program. I thought it best to record all the supervisor's feedback before starting to change things.

This morning I carried on like the day before: a few hours of concentrated work (including a video meeting with six other people) then standby. In the down time, I continued entering the supervisor's comment into the program, and in doing so discovered a few things that needed improving. After I finished, I counted how many issues there are: 42! Of these, 18 are flagged, meaning that I need to talk to the supervisor about them. I'm sure there have never been so many issues, especially since I thought that the previous version was good. Some of these issues are solved easily - move one section from where it is currently to a different chapter, change a section's title, etc - whereas some (all of the flagged issues) are more demanding. I added two paragraphs on ontology and constructivism: tomorrow I will continue with this.

Just after 4 pm, I downed tools and took the dog for a 4 km walk. This went a bit faster than yesterday's walk which means that I'm getting fit again. All this sitting around at home isn't good for one's health; I found myself on Sunday eating a biscuit or a slice of bread every time I made myself a cup of tea, which is once an hour. Today I resolved to do something about this and so I sliced a red pepper, like I used to do when I didn't work at home, and munched on the slices contentedly throughout the day. I'm pleased to say that I ate only one biscuit today and that was at 5 pm, after returning home from the long walk.

The next few days promise to be more of the same: devoting time to work (I'm still in full employment, being paid my regular wage and so my employers expect that I work as hard at home as I did when not at home) and spending my down time reading academic papers and writing about them. 

One spanner in the works is that I found a copy of the 2015 biography of John Le Carré (né David Cornwell) which I find extremely interesting, especially the parts of his childhood which appear in his novels. I knew that 'A perfect spy' had a great deal of autobiography, but there are plenty of other episodes in his life which crop up in his books. The school in 'Tinker Tailor' is very reminiscent of Cornwell's primary school; a description of Cornwell's father 'always waiting for someone [a jailor] to open doors for him' pops up in Charlie's description of her father in 'The little drummer girl', etc.

Morale is high, although I miss my grand-daughters. On Saturday we were sent a video of grand-daughter #2 taking her first walk (hurray!) but apparently she's lazy and hasn't repeated this feat. Her sister is bored and wants to go back to kindergarten. We're not allowed to see them as children are likely to infect their grandparents - this is a country wide injunction.

1300 blogs and still counting

It's meta-blogging time: let's see what I've been writing about in the past 100 blogs. First of all, blog entry 1201 was written on 16/02/19 so the current rate is 100 / 13 months = 7.7 blogs/month. That's the same rate as 1101-1200, but slower than 1001-1100 and 901-1000. There aren't many surprises in the top few topics.

Position	Tag	Count
1	DBA	13
1=	Priority tips	13
3	Holiday	12
4	Health	10
5=	Andros	8
5=	Personal	8
7	Athens	6
7=	Kibbutz	6
7=	Song writing	6
10	Mobile phone	5

Strange days

Strange days have found us 
Strange days have tracked us down 
They're going to destroy
 Our casual joys
 We shall go on playing
 Or find a new town
(The Doors)

After the apocalyptic events of Thursday night, things returned to normal (or, at least, what passes for 'normal' in these days of Corona). Every evening we listen to two or three hours of news which update us regarding the number of ill people in Israel and the latest instructions for containing the disease. I went into work as usual on Sunday and Monday - there aren't many people there and anyway, most of my time I spend almost in isolation in my 'office' which is like a cubicle. Schools were closed from Friday.

As opposed to the weekend, the weather was spring-like (or even summer-like), so as soon as I got home at 4:45 (no travelling this week!), I would change my shoes and shirt in order to take the dog for a long walk. It's rare to see people on my route, so I was continuing my isolation even though I was out of the house. The news in the evening showed crowded streets in Tel Aviv as well as crowded beaches: this captured our leaders' ire. As it appears that young, gregarious, people are the main spreaders of Covid-19 (or Corona, as it is known here), even though they aren't the ones becoming ill, having them in large concentrations is the complete opposite of the 'social distancing' which the Ministry of Health is trying to create.

On Monday I participated in a video conference: we now have software which enables peer to peer conferencing, as opposed to the 'client server' software which we had been using with special projectors. As a result, six or seven people connected up: most of the time there were only four active windows with two being hidden, although I think that everyone was visible at first. Another surreal event in increasingly surreal times. We were discussing (as we do every week) changes which are to be made to the factory in Karmiel; the biggest change is the installation of two huge 'nesting' machines which perform a variety of tasks connected with wood. These machines are being supplied by a company in Italy ... with whom all contact has been lost. It is clear that there will be a three month moratorium on these machines, if not longer.

On Monday evening, there was an announcement that manufacturing companies should have a maximum of 30% of their workers present at any site, so I decided to work from home on Tuesday. I had an appointment for a specialist doctor in the morning so I could save a journey. At about 8am, someone phoned to say that the CEO had called for a 10:30 am meeting; we assumed that this would be another video conferencing call so I said that I would come to the factory at 10 am, set up the computer and stay for part of the meeting, then go to my appointment. At about 9 am, the electricity went off in our building - the electricians and gardeners were cleaning up the mess left from the gales of Thursday night - so I went into work an hour earlier.

The 'meeting' was by phone, not video, so my preparations were worthless. The CEO was asking all the various department heads how we can organise ourselves in order to meet both the demands of public health and those of our customers - mainly organisations. One would imagine that most of our customers are in exactly the same position as we are and are cutting down their operations, so receiving office furniture is probably not high on their list of priorities. All 'computerised' personnel will work from home and the factories will work two shifts with the minimum number of people working each shift (30% of a given site's personnel can be on site at any given time, so 30% will work one shift, 30% will work another shift, those that can will work from home, and those that can't will be sent on unpaid leave). National Insurance has pledged to pay 70% of the salary (up to 10,000 NIS) of workers set on unpaid leave so they won't be too disadvantaged (I wonder what happens about contributions to pension funds and similar).

I had to leave in the middle of the meeting (I wasn't actually invited and it dealt with matters which don't directly concern me) in order to drive to the clinic in Bet Shemesh. I had called a few days beforehand in order to verify that the appointment would take place - I wouldn't have been surprised had it been cancelled. There were a few receptionists in place, wearing masks, but no customers. The appointment had been set up in the first place because I noticed several months ago that I had a lump on my neck - I assumed that this was a subcutaneous sebaceous cyst. Whilst this has to be treated, it's not important (unless it gets infected) so I wasn't bothered about making an appointment in January to be seen in March. The masked doctor agreed with my diagnosis; I assumed that he would write up the examination then suggest that I make another appointment to have the cyst removed. But no, he took me to the next room, which is like a small operating theatre which is where I have had most of my previous BCCs and cysts removed. There was another doctor there who felt the lump and agreed as to its provenance. I went to make the appointment to have the cyst removed and was surprised to be handed a piece of paper which said that the appointment was for now. "Why wait when you're already here?" asked the receptionist. Well, Corona ....

Back I went to the operating room; after an unexplained wait (I could hear the doctor chatting to one of the nurses in Russian), I was called in and the procedure took place. I think that the doctor's shift didn't start until 12 am which is why I had to wait about ten minutes. During the time that I was on the table, the weather changed: from sunny it turned to rain, and since then it's been raining on and off, sometimes heavily and sometimes lightly. 28.7 mm fell by 8 am this morning, which is quite a fair amount. It also rained on and off on Saturday, and at one stage I found myself composing the beginning of a tune whose first line is "I like (love?) to listen to the rain" - I think this is going to be minimalistic as I couldn't develop the tune very much. At the moment it has a very big range - from G below middle C, a note which I can't reach in a dependable manner, to B above middle C, in other words an octave and a half. We'll see.....

Anyway, I now have a plaster on my neck, covering a slightly painful wound. I can take the large plaster off this evening and wash; not having a plaster will improve the flexibility of my skin and reduce the rigidity that I feel.

Today (Wednesday) I am of course working from home. I was busy for a few hours, but now things have settled down and I'm on standby.

Apocalypse now (continued)

Here are some more pictures from yesterday evening

This is the tree by the entrance to the kibbutz whose branches touched the electricity wires. This is what caused the first power cut.

This is a tree which fell down near the old school buildings and crushed a football net frame.

This is the tree that fell down next to our neighbours. The roots came out of the ground. Fortunately the tree lay across the path and didn't bring down the wooden balcony. This is what I saw when I came out of my house and looked right.

And this is what I saw when I came out of the house and looked left. 

At about 11pm, the winds, which had been blowing at 60-80 km/hour, relaxed somewhat, which is when the rain started falling. At first the rain was quite light, but it became heavier as time went by. I was surprised to read that only 11 mm fell; I got the impression that it was much more.

All of the fallen trees have been cut with power saws into smaller pieces, allowing them to be moved and so allow access through the paths. They'll be collected on Sunday.

All of the above shows how fragile our existence really is. We should be thankful that we have a roof over our heads and that a tree did not fall on that roof.

Another cause of the apocalypse is the political situation in Israel: three times we have gone to the polls in less than 12 months and no one has been able to form a government. There were calls last night for an emergency government to be formed, maybe one with a limited tenure of three to six months. Because the current government is transitory (the same government which was in place a year ago), they can't pass any emergency laws and they also can't make any personnel changes. An emergency government is sorely needed to pass certain legislation which would make life much easier. They can agree to disagree on foreign/defence policy, but at the moment everyone around the world is looking inwards.

Apocalypse now

I don't need to tell anyone about the steps being taken to prevent the spread of the Corona virus. The television news here has just informed us that schools are going to be closed for the next few weeks; congregations of more than 100 people have been banned. As a result, many business sectors are in trouble: airlines, hotels, restaurants, concerts, railways......

I haven't been feeling well all week: I had a slightly sore throat and a cough on Sunday which has gotten worse over the past few days. Yesterday I felt bad enough to come home at lunchtime: my head was woolly and I am coughing and sneezing frequently. I don't think that I have contracted the Corona virus as I haven't been anywhere that could have led me to catching it, but who knows. I went to our clinic this morning and was almost told off: the new rules are that the nurses will make home visits. I had a temperature of 37.7°C which is higher than what it should be but not too high to worry. After two rounds of paracetamol, the temperature has gone down, but I'm still coughing and/or sneezing. Maybe it's just as well that I'm staying at home.

At around 5 pm, the wind suddenly picked up. Predictions for weather for today and tomorrow are very strong winds and heavy rain; the rain hasn't come yet but the winds are so strong that trees are falling down all over the kibbutz. Just after 6 pm, the electricity went off ... really apocalypse now. Of course, our telephones had only about 30% charge, so it was time to bring out the candles. Our emergency light didn't work. The picture on the left was taken about 20 metres from our house: we're just out of the picture on the left hand side.

The electricity came back after about half an hour and the first thing that we did was to charge the phones as well as this computer on which I am typing. 

God knows what tomorrow will bring ....

Edit: the power went off again at about 19:45. It sounded like another tree  outside our house fell. Three people have just come in and are standing on our balcony, chopping down part of a tree. I'm typing this with one finger on my phone which miraculously has connected somehow to the internet. The people who came in are now in the garden, chopping down what is left of a eucalyptus tree. Someone sent us a video of a tree in the entrance to the kibbutz whose branches were touching a power line; the branch caught fire. Maybe I'll be able to make a photo of it.

Thesis dilemma

I wrote the following in the introduction section of my thesis:  At first glance, it might seem that ERP Enhancement Management (EEM) is merely a special case of Engineering Change Management (ECM); whilst there are similarities, there are also significant differences which are discussed in the literature review and synthesis chapters. The most significant difference is that ECM is concerned with product management, whereas EEM is concerned at root with people management. This statement implies that the topics of change management and user resistance are relevant to EEM: even the most successful enhancement on paper will fail if no user is prepared to use it. Furthermore, in the researcher's opinion, ECM is concerned with developing physical products which are used by people outside of the developing organisation, whereas EEM is concerned with software and business processes, both non-physical entities, which are used inside the developing organisation.

My supervisor wrote as a comment: Might be worthwhile looking up the definition of a product and a service and using this to support your view concerning the difference between an ECM and EEM.

I looked for a definition of a product and found this: A product is the item offered for sale. A product can be a service or an item. It can be physical or in virtual or cyber form. Every product is made at a cost and each is sold at a price.

According to this definition, an enhancement is a product as it is a service in virtual form; it is made at a cost (employee's time) and is sold at a price. Whilst in-company enhancements are not offered by for sale and are not sold at a price, an enhancement which I might develop for an external client certainly is sold at a price. I can't use this quote to 'support my view concerning the difference' because it seems that there is no difference! Even my emphasis about 'outside' and 'inside' does not cause a difference when one considers (again) the case of a consultant. One can't say that a product is mass produced and than an enhancement is bespoke - my automatic reaction to the word 'bespoke' is tailoring a suit (or a dress) specifically for a client.

Yet I am convinced that there is a difference. I think that I will have to pass this topic on to my right hemisphere in the hope that it will provide a solution to my dilemma.

Sorting out the hardware

Despite my unsuccessful morning ruining hardware the other day, everything has now more or less been sorted. My diagnosis of the computer that wouldn't boot was correct: the boot sequence had been reset. For some reason, I couldn't correct it, but my computer repairman did. I still have to configure the PCI music card which I installed: the driver and associated software came on one of those mini-discs and the CD drive in the computer can't read it (actually, the drive can't read anything, but that's another story). I'll get out my external CD drive and try and read the disk from there. In the mean time, I'm back to using my external sound card.

After wasting a fair amount of time with the television screen, I decided that we should buy a new one. Today's screens can connect to the internet via a wireless router - I'm listening to Japanese ambient sounds from YouTube playing from the television. Once I set the screen up, I discovered quickly that the new screen was displaying exactly the same error message as its predecessor did, which fairly annoyed me. My son in law was enlisted to help: he discovered that the error message was due to the satellite receiver not being able to read its card properly. He took the card out, cleaned it slightly, reset the receiver ... and now everything works as it should: the satellite on HDMI 1 and the DVD on HDMI 2. I haven't had any chance to watch anything on the DVD in the past few days but I'm sure it will be ok. I understand that I can use the screen as a display for my computer but I haven't looked for the technical explanation yet.

Sending a report via email in English (Priority)

I was asked to create a report which shows all the purchase order lines for which we have not yet received confirmation from the vendor. This is not much of a problem, but once my clients saw the report, they wanted to send a copy to each vendor, where of course each vendor sees only their orders.

Following on from my successful 'all in one HTML report', I suggested doing something similar: creating a letter with a few lines of explaining what the attached report was and then attaching the report, which is now in the form of an HTML document. Although this wasn't particularly straight-forward (the main problem was writing a query which would loop through all the vendors in order to find to whom the letter should be sent), it wasn't too difficult.

Then the problems began. "The HTML report should be in English", I was told. OK; I started researching how certain HTML documents in the system 'know' to print themselves in English. It took me several passes over such a document before I noticed that there was a flag in the procedure definition which had a different value to what I've always used; the 'HTML document' flag was marked E and not Y. Once I saw this, I was able to get the report to print itself in English.

Full of confidence, I then scheduled the report so that the letters would be sent to my client (as opposed to the vendors). He returned the letters to me saying that they should be in English. Huh, I wondered? How is it possible that that the document displays left to right when I create it manually but right to left when it is created programmatically?

I decided to read the (almost incomprehensible) documentation again (shown below) and discovered that I need to add a flag to the command which creates the document; this flag overrides the E flag within the procedure. RTFM. Even the 'E' flag in the procedure is documented. Now everything works correctly, although I'm sure that the client will find something else to be changed.