Day 12 & 13 – Blogging Slack But Working Hard
13 06 2008Missed an entry yesterday, had a rough start.
Wednesday (after I posted the last entry) wound up a disaster when the power went out (as it does with increasing frequency) and scrambled the ADSL line/modem and it would seem Vista’s awareness of such things with it.
I couldn’t diagnose it, my ISP couldn’t diagnose it and I ended up getting extremely mad, swearing and then did a power cycle of everything “one more time” before going to bed.
Connection came back up. Go figure. :-O
Thursday morning I get up and no connection. Vista’s lost the plot.
I remember I have more than one machine (I just woke up, OK? <g>) and plug in another Windows one. Works fine. Plug in the Mac, works fine (funny how Mac OS X connects first time every time to a network but Windows has to be rebooted 9 times out of ten).
Back to main box. Try Vista, nope, ring ISP support, another hour (almost ready to reinstall Vista by now), nothing, very annoyed as ISP can’t resolve it either (not that I’m blaming them).
Another series of reboots and power cycles of the gear and connection comes up. Odd! Network card, everything, checks out 100% each time BTW.
Grrrrr!
OK. Been coding madly, mostly to make up for the above BS, and have the playlists working with the audio, database in sync and most of the main GUI reacting to audio events (position, time, BPM etc) updating in real time.
Before I got this far however I ripped out Delphi’s TListView control in disgust and replaced it with NextGrid from BergSoft. If you’re a Delphi developer and looking for a nice component library I highly recommend these BTW.
Works much smoother with the NextGrid, plus it allows me to embed images far easier and more smoothly than TListView so I can put in the little arrow showing the currently playing track as an extra “visual clue” to the user without Delphi’s implmentation of it and it’s associated “weirdness”.
Audio keyboard shortcuts are in - Space to play/pause, etc.
That’s about the round up. The coding takes more time than the telling. 
Normally I put down tools for the weekend to spend it with the wife and kids, but this weekend I’m making an exception and am going to code through. Hopefully posting updates daily as I do so.
Cheers!
Have you considered getting a UPS for the ADSL modem? If you just plug your modem/router into it, a 600VA model should stay online for the entire length of the blackout - or at least until your laptop battery runs out. It could allow you to keep working even when the power is out.
I haven’t done it myself, but it is something I intend to do. Have been researching it myself following several blackouts / lightning strikes in recent weeks.
Hi Richard,
I lived on the Gold Coast back when SEQEB ran things. Kind of expected on the GC but in Melbourne one expects a bit more.
Yes. I’m looling at a UPS and a generator as well. The last major blackout was over a day in length. Can’t afford to be out of action that long. So a small UPS with a smallish generator would probably do the trick.