I’ve not written any blog posts for a while, but this is because I have been working seriously on the QuickLatin code base. The successes and failures of that effort are not of interest to others really.
One thing that I have done is to write a couple of web pages on my pages at Tertullian.org on working with legacy Ada code. Ada is a very minority interest, and even basic things cannot be found by a Google search. So I have written up a couple of discoveries. It is always useful to do so. Such bits of random information can have quite a long useful life. For instance I was slightly bemused this evening to find that one of the most popular pages at Tertullian.org this week is a long-forgotten page on how to run the long obsolete Visual Basic 6 on Windows 10.
Microsoft do treat their developers badly. Code written using their tools simply ceases to work after an upgrade or two. Backward compatibility is never taken seriously. This I have long known. I remember, years ago, writing some fairly elementary Microsoft C. I then left it for a few years, and, when I came back to it, it did not even compile with the newer compiler. But this fact has struck me again in the last week.
Meanwhile, the days are long and the heat is increasing. It feels wrong, somehow, to sit at the computer all day. As the cafes reopen, I intend to visit some of them.
A week ago my neighbour of ten years moved out . He is to be replaced by someone new. First signs are not encouraging. But encouraging or not, the task of adapting to someone new, and their habits and noise and nuisance, will have to be undertaken. I never liked this feeling of intrusion into my safe space, even in the days when I spent my weeks in hotels and naturally had random strangers in adjoining rooms. How many of us like unwanted change? Few, I would guess. Yet change is the only certainty in life. If only we all had country estates, with wide parkland around! Yet even then, at breakfast the butler would surely bring us the news that our favourite footman was to leave, that there was blight in the oaks, flooding in the meadows, a leak in the roof, and so forth. Change is inevitable, even if our capacity to cope with it varies. I shall have to take time to adjust.
Meanwhile the disruption of all our lives, caused by Covid-19, grinds away at us all, 24/7. We’re all going about our business, but we do so as if we’re carrying a sack of rocks everywhere. Even little things like masks wear away at our energy. I try to remind myself that I am not able to give 100% with all this going on. That it is important not to try. That busy people risk burn-out. That I need to allow for the strain, to schedule downtime, to consciously offload, to ask “is this chore really essential right now?” To breathe, to drift, to accept that it’s ok to do less or nothing right now, and defer stuff to better days.
Anyway, it’s summer. Shouldn’t we all try to get outdoors before the days draw in? Of course we should!
“Change and code decay in all around I see.”
Lol!!!
I don’t think you’re quite fair to Microsoft here. Granted they have their flag days and deprecations, but in general they’re *much* better about backwards compatibility than any other vendor (at least for commodity hardware; I’m not counting mainframes here).
In any case, glad to hear you’re still carrying on—I’ve enjoyed your posts for a year or two now, and wondered if you’d gotten busy.
It’s just frustrating, especially when you know that a Java 1 program would run in Java 11, 25 years later.
Thanks for the good wishes. More posts will come along once I get the Latin tools where I want them. I need to write a post urgently about the Sortes Astrampsychi as well.