OK, back to the project ...


Yes, that much is true, but (having taken a closer look) I now realise that the context of captions may vary as they apply in various cases. That is, to various objects (such as menu bars, form labels, browse titles, text in summary outputs or reports ... and all the rest).

And as the impetus for all this effort was a suggestion to have the system accept labelling in languages other than English, who knows what nuances may apply! So, although some rationalisation may be sensible, it won't reduce the amount of apparent duplication by much.

All that implies that anyone wanting to rescript (another word that I may have just invented) the captions in their entirety will be tasked with entering (or editing) something like 3,000 records. These are often just a single word, whilst others amount to a string of four or five words.

All that may not be as daunting as it first appears, though, as such an endeavour would be surely attempted in easy stages. That is, one cup of tea at a time!

Having recently spent what has sometimes felt like an unhealthy amount of time on it, I hope to have the latest revision of the famous TaskMaster program ready to be reissued soon.

As anyone who has ever been involved with software projects will know, these things are never truly "finished". At best you simply get them to a stage whereby they are good enough to ship. At worse you simply give up ... or even bin them!

Anyway, although other self-imposed deadlines have come and gone, I now feel sufficiently on the home straight (the last lap, whatever) to declare that I shall have done enough by the end of the month (year, decade)!

During excavations of the code, I have come across (and hopefully remedied) a few mistakes. Some of them must have been laying there since the before the dawn of the present century. One in particular affected the algorithms involved in PM scheduling. It was a bit esoteric (and probably rarely used, if at all), but would have produced incorrect results. For which I can but apologise. After all, it has to be right, or else what's the point of it all!*

Now I am wondering how best to refloat the thing. In the jargon, it must still be classed as Beta - especially as there have been so many changes that conflicts (aka daft bugs) are bound to have crept in. So (rather than ask Huw to paste it up in the Downloads section just yet), I believe I should zip it off to a few of my loyal users first, to see how they get on.

What I need is for the program to be tested ... threshed about, even ... so I may have a go at fixing the bugs, responding to comments about usability, and adding any worthwhile features as may be suggested ... and once all that has been taken care of, get it republished properly, as it were.

If anyone else would like to have a go, feel free to get in touch via PM or email.

* As Niklaus Wirth (the creator of Pascal) said:- "In our profession, precision and perfection are not a dispensable luxury, but a necessity"!

TM 0912 is being sent out to certain loyal users for testing and comment before I ask Huw to tack it up for general availability.

I notice there have continued to be downloads of the previous version. This is a shame really as although superficially the "same", the new effort has been extensively re-worked, with many detailed improvements, extra databases etc.

Not to mention the user-configured captions facility (see the posts above), plus simplification of the "risk-based PM model". It is effectively a new (well, let's say refreshed) program. And although earlier ones can still be supported, they are now effectively obsolete.

Anyone having an interest in trying the latest program need only to get in touch. Especially as I am looking for thoughtful testers willing to provide feedback!

I’ve just had cause to venture back in time twenty years. Yes, how amazing (sad?) is that?

I expect I’ve told the story before (?) about how Chacko Zard and Boboy Legara knocked up a database system in Riyadh to meet the MOH’s famous MAMISS standard after successfully being awarded one of the notorious (back then, that is) "regional biomed maintenance contracts" [long sentence].

Although they had produced quite a reasonable system in an amazingly short period of time, I think it would be fair to say they had reached a state of "writer’s block" until I came along with my Tronomed demo disc, plus a few ideas of my own. Most of which were noted on my trusty (then) Z88, by the way [wish I still had it ... remember PipeDream ... might have to fish one out from eBay).

Looking at it all again now, it is gratifying how right we got the underlying principles. But (as I keep saying) maintenance is maintenance, after all. The basic structure of many of the database elements (equipment codes, parts stock numbers etc.) remain essentially the same as those I still use today.

For the life of me, I can’t remember where I got that 5.25” Tronomed demo disc from. But the "Tronomed EM/dBS Engineering Management System" was released way back in 1987 by dPC Consultants of Fountain Valley in California (they later sold out to some other company). Looking at it again just now (under good old DOS, of course), I would say that it would still be useful today.

Only later did I develop sufficient dBASE skills myself to be able to (attempt to) reverse engineer the program. But in fact I never did, as we (I) went on to develop variants of Boboy’s original code over the years, according to where I was (and what I was doing) at the time.

So ... does anyone have a fully enabled example of Tronomed hidden away some place? And (or) any other "classic" equipment database program, for that matter? Cash is (or, at least, could be) waiting!

I’ll save reminiscences about PM procedures (that is, how we approached them) for another day ... but suffice to say, "there’s nothing new under the sun"!

But (lastly) I may as well mention also that I'm looking for programs "of our type" for the Psion Series 3a PDA's (oh yes, another classic) and even (and dare I say it) the Psion Organiser II (outed in 1986 and still going strong ... indestructible, in fact)!

What's all this got to do with the "New Project"? Well, a guy [a member of this forum, I should add] has asked me to put together a "how to get started guide" (which look like becoming a series of guides), and I was just checking the "history" to figure out how (or why) some of the design decisions were taken!

I've been meaning to post an update for a while. The latest issue of TM is "out there" with selected users (that is, those who I am aware of), but feedback has been, shall we say, slight.

If anyone wants to have a play, and act as a Beta tester, feel free to shout.

Meanwhile, I've noticed a number of snafu's myself, and put these right.

If I don't hear anything more after ten days or so, I shall ask Huw to tack up TM 1001 (the latest revision) in the Downloads section of the forum.

Meanwhile, I want to move on and spend a bit of time on data importing routines, but I'm planning to open a few thread on that topic.

Just to let it be known that Huw has kindly tacked up the fruits of my recent labours in the Downloads section.

As usual, feedback, suggestions and bug reports are welcome ... by PM or email.

I have noticed that a major SNAFU occurs in the TM download currently available from this site (TM 1002). Simply put, it looses the stock number at the top parts slot on the Jobs Records form. No folks, this is not meant to be a "feature", but is a dumb mistake for which I can but apologise. Naturally, I will sort it out when I next find the time to sit down for a coding session.

Meanwhile, I may as well mention that recent minor revisions have included the automatic creation of the Notes and Diary datafiles if these are not found during start-up (that is, by deleting these files you can effectively clear them of data).

And on the back-burner is an idea or two about the need to be able to sync updated data between systems on more than one PC. Not as easy as you may think, and it will need more than a few cups of tea to get right.

Sorted! (it took me just under an hour to run the bug to ground)

If anyone has been affected by this bug, let me know if you need the latest update.

Meanwhile, I'll leave my semi-conscious RAM to mull over how to tackle the "data syncing" problem. No doubt one night soon I shall awake (about 03:15, usually), bursting with some crazy scheme or other. That's what happens when you drink too much tea before crashing out!

I now have two buddies who have expressed interest in having a go at Spanish labels (see my post under this thread dated 27-Sep-09). Although, having said that, I don't hear from them very often. Perhaps they have lost the will to live on this one (if so, that is a feeling I know only too well)!

Let them remain anonymous (after all, they know who they are), but suffice to say that one toils away in Mexico, the other in Uruguay. But it's kind of interesting that Spanish has been the only language of interest (as far as I am aware).

Meanwhile, there are three things on the "to do" list now:-

1) The "revised data syncing" issue mentioned above.

2) The addition of a "log on/log off" feature on the Jobs Records form.

3) Investigation of network working.

Regarding item 2) ... the idea here is when working at the workbench (and perhaps, if folk are anything like me, working on two or three items at once) being able to "clock on and off" of a particular job at any time in order to ultimately arrive at an accurate cumulative total of the time spent on the job (for onward transmission for billing records, etc.). Not everyone needs this level of complexity so it will need to be configurable. That is, able to be switched on or off as need be.

Regarding item 3) ... as I don't have my own network, and rarely have one available to me when working at other folk's premises (and don't really have an opportunity to "play" then, anyway), I'm now hoping to get TM lodged on a friend's server to see how it goes, as it were. Then if further tweaks are found necessary (and I already have a few clues about that), that may well be worthwhile effort.

The "good" thing about laying out my plans on here, for all to see, is that it then helps to enforce some sort of discipline on my own part about actually getting down to it and doing the work!

Following a happy weekend of coding (well, most of the time) ... here is the current status of my endeavours:-

Item 1) have made a good start on this one.

Item 2) was an easy revision and was completed some time ago.

Item 3) nothing yet on this one.

Regarding the "data syncing" routine ... the idea here is to be able to easily update data in various directories on a master computer from work done using other computers (a laptop taken to site, for instance). My implementation uses a simple (to the user) .zip file containing the latest data updates which can be passed as a packet to the master computer (via email attachment, memory stick, or whatever) and picked up for processing from there.

That may sound straightforward enough, but there's a fair amount of work needed to get that sort of thing working nicely.

I'm not sure when I'll find the time to carry this on. Unless I'm wide awake during the night (which happens from time to time)!