Alan's Place

My cooking skills are improving – and I’ve got the cuts and burns to prove it A couple of pictures to make your mouth water:

   
  Top Right: Mexican Bean Stew with cheddar and parsley mash
Middle Left: Vegetarian Lasagne
Middle Right: Vegetarian Roast; too hungry to wait so ate it
Bottom: Fish Pie

Politicians

If you read back through my earlier posts you will see I tend to knock politicians for various things – this time it’s about the ‘do what I say, not what I do’ attitude of certain people who should know better. Normally I don’t really care as it just gives the other side ammunition for their school boy (sorry ladies) antics in the commons when, it seems to me, they do nothing but have a go at the other side. These are supposed to be Professional people.

My main reason for this part is that the rules should apply to everyone. When I hear of idiots risking themselves and others by partying, meeting or whatever else you want to call it, during a lockdown and getting fined for it, I don’t have any sympathy for them. If you do the deed then you should take responsibility and pay the price – but no one, except the Monarch, is exempt from the law and it should be applied without favour.

Computers

Again, if you read the About page or some of my previous entries, you will know I write computer programs and have done since the 1980’s. I’m currently working on a fairly large project developing an App for SharePoint, using the JavaScript programming language. Last week I built and published a version to the test server and things started going wrong.

The App consists of a number of main list, supported by other lists containing lookup data such as Country.

For some unknown reason, with this build, some of these lookups stopped working; to complicate things, just three out of the ten main lists that use them could not link to the lookups. These lookups, and the lists that use them, are part of the original design and coding and have been working throughout.

Now computers are funny things to program – they always expect the people building them and the users to be logical It’s something I thought I was, but I could not find what had gone wrong; even by switching off the various new parts one at a time.

Fortunately I always clone the development after doing a published build. This allowed me do go back a version and take a copy, with the idea that I would add each of the changes made in the new version in turn, testing until I found the piece that broke. Sounds simple doesn’t it. Six ‘add and test’ cycles later I had added all of the changes without finding anything wrong – the code worked as it should and the lookups were working across the board.

Strangely enough, once I got past telling the system what I think of it in no uncertain terms, I remembered that this is why I started playing with computers in the first place. I have a brother, Glenn, who is 21 years younger than me. He was studying Computer Science for his GCSE’s. Back then the computer he used was a BBC Micro Model B which had a 32 kilobyte memory and a cassette recorder to save programs to. I still have mine in its original box. The language programs were written in was BBC Basic, and basic is the correct term compared with todays computer languages.

Anyway we went to visit the family one weekend and Glenn was up in his room where I found him working on a computer program. I asked him what he was doing and he explained, telling me he was having a problem with a piece of code not working. I looked over his shoulder as he was explaining the code and pointing out where the issue was. For some reason two of the lines didn’t look in the logical order and I told him that I thought they should be reversed. He made the change and it worked. That evening, after he went out, I went to his room and wrote my first program – a simple program to put ‘Hallo World’ on the screen – I haven’t looked back since and it’s been fun.

Stay Safe folks