Guess what? Proving once again that I cannot estimate time-related matters correclty, I got my copy of Delphi Enterprise yesterday 🙂 I had thought that it would take at least two more weeks for met get my hands on it but the postal service for once decided to give me a pleasant surprise I guess <g> Anyway, since I have Delphi Enterpirse, I do intend to go back to the client-server version of Blog and see whether it would make sense to rewrite it in MIDAS … Of course, as luck would have it, I’m kind of being buried alive at work with a number of projects and so it probably will be slow going for me but I do hope to know whether MIDAS is the approach I should take by the end of the week when I should have a little time for coding 🙂

Of course, I’ve already installed Delphi Enterprise (I’m impatient what can I say? <vbg>) but haven’t had the time to really play with any of the MIDAS stuff. As you may recall, I’ve already made quite a bit of progress with the client-server model using MidWare and if it looks as if MIDAS isn’t that much of an improvement over MidWare, I might just stick with MidWare since there wouldn’t be as much coding to do … I guess we’ll just have to wait and see ..

I did get around to doing a bit more work on Blog yesterday and I managed to complete all the little problems with that particular build of Blog so that it was ready for release 🙂 And since at least a couple of people had asked me about the new leaner, meaner Blog <g> and because it’s going to be a couple of weeks at least before I get my new copy of Delphi Enterprise, I decided to release Blog 1.1 with the DBISAM engine …

The download is considerably smaller now with the removal of the BDE (Borland Database Engine) and so the file comes to barely over 1MB as opposed to the almost 5MB download earlier. I’m pretty happy with this particular build since I was even able to figure out the problem with archiving … So here it is for anybody who wants to give it a try 🙂

Hmm … I hadn’t realized how much time had passed since I last made an entry here … Too many things have been happening to keep track of and I guess I just let the flow of events carry me along and simply lost all track of time and events … Anyway, I’m finally back and this actually might have been due to a guy who calls himself Nobody Special 🙂 He wrote to me yesterday and inquired whether everything was all right since he reads my journal and had noticed that the frequency of updates had been dropping off quite a bit … He also mentioned that he had a blog of his own here – I went there and found it pretty interesting … seems to be actually a fictional blog – something that I hadn’t considered …

One reason that I hadn’t updated my journal much recently was because I’d discovered that the Archiving function was broken after my transition to DBISAM and when I went to fix it, I discovered that my source had moved on in my effort to create a client-server version and I hadn’t kept backups 🙂 I finally decided to get off my posterior and do some work and so I went back to my last BDE version today and converted it to work with DBISAM again and fixed the archiving as well. And that’s the other reason I started posting again &ltvbg&gt Of course, nothing is perfect and in this new version I re-introduced an old bug in an effort to fix a new one 🙂 Originally when I wrote the archiving code, I’d noticed that the final week in a given date range never got archived though a link was created for it – I fixed it with a code change to the date range check I was using but then discovered that the archiving code was now actually creating archives for all entries from the beginning even though I might have specified a from date which was a month or so after I began this journal. I fixed that problem today but the old problem of the last week being missing is back again :p Guess it’s time for another logic check …

So what the heck have I been upto recently? Not much actually …. My health (or rather my sleep …) has been kind of out of synch recently and when I don’t get enough rest, I don’t work too well. So I’ve just been dealing with the day to day stuff of work but not doing anything much more than watching TV or reading … Plus, I’m still waiting for my version of Delphi Enterprise to come in so that I can get back to work on Blog …

In the meantime, I returned the Philips Expanium that I’d bought a couple of weeks ago, that I mentioned here in the journal, because the inability to properly select songs got to even me 🙂 Plus, of course, I hated not being able to see the song title or the artist etc. The TDK Mojo finally got released sometime last week and though I scoured the local Best Buy and Circuit City, I couldn’t find even a hint of it. So I decided to go online and while TDK’s e-shop did have it, they were retailing it for $199. So I did some more searching and thanks to CNet’s shopping site, I was able to find it at Buy.Com for about $30 less. And the best thing was, they didn’t charge me any tax or shipping and so I just got it for $170 flat!! Since then I notice that Buy.Com has reduced the price by about $5 less (the last time I checked) and so if anybody’s interested, you can probably find it for even cheaper online … Buy.Com shipped the Mojo out two days later and I got it on Friday – talk about a fast deal 🙂 I’ve been using it since then and am very satisfied – it has a large, backlit LCD display which shows quite a lot of status information and the Mojo is pretty versatile in song selection allowing me to select songs by artist, album, title, directory structure on CD (all of this for MP3’s of course since it reads the ID3 tag ….) and so I’m happy 🙂

Other than for playing with the Mojo and burning more compilations of my audio CD’s into MP3 collections, all I’ve been doing is trying to complete the latest book I’m reading – Piers Anthony’s "Robot Adept". I can’t even recall when I first began Piers Anthony’s Apprentice-Adept series – must have been close to 10 years ago actually …. I had read first three books in the series and had thought that was it but then about 3 years ago while browsing through the books in a second hand bookshop in Georgia, I discovered that Piers Anthony had later continued the series – not surprising since the man has one of the largest series that I know of by any author – the Xanth series with over 20+ books. (Hmm … I take that back &ltg&gt I just realized that another one of my favorite authors – Terry Pratchett – also has a very large series of books – the DiscWorld series … and that is around 25 books at the moment and still going strong …) Anyway, I found that the continuation of the Apprentice-Adept saga had added four more books to the series. I bought the books but hadn’t read them since I was too busy and had too many books to read anyway 🙂 So I just kept them till sometime last year (or was it this year?) when I finally began on the first book – "Out of Phaze". I read most of the book in pretty good time but somehow didn’t finish the last chapter for several months which I finally did a week or so ago. So then I began on the second book (or the fifth depending on how you look at it <g>) and been taking that pretty slow too till yesterday when I got really interested and read quite a bit of it … maybe I’ll finish it today .. who knows?