MY LIFE IN THE SMOG OF GRUNGE

Once upon a time I was living in Oxfordshire developing noxious gas analysis software for a company that rents it to power stations and other exhaust emitting industrial plants.  I am meticulous and consequently slower than most, hence why I was only earning about £12,000 per annum.  My software is, however, superior and exceptionally bug free.

15 years pass by and I have endured an unbelievable divorce that makes the Skripal Novichok affair look like child's play.  I have been a single parent and spent 18 months struggling to defend my daughter, my nephew, and myself from a hideous eviction orchestrated by my erstwhile siblings (four harpies and a Napoleonic pretender) who cruelly coerced my mother to sign the most disgusting toxic narrative for their solicitor to present in court.

The three of us eventually landed in rented accommodation that we cannot afford sitting precariously in every respect on the banks of the Haven in Lincolnshire.  The stress and anxiety, caused primarily by the Tory's destruction of the fabric of society, proved unendurable for my nephew who attempted to take his own life before being whisked off to Wales.  This left my daughter and me rattling around this house, unemployed, disorientated, and ostracised by society.

For over a year now we have taken to strolling along the banks of the Haven which is tidal and fed through a sluice from the River Witham.  The Haven meanders its way out to the mud flats and sand banks of the Wash before finally reaching the North Sea.  Part of our walk takes us round an odorous sewage works and along a littered path called the Havenside Country Park.  From here we have been watching the construction of some monstrous industrial plant on the other side of the river.  Yesterday it started belching toxic exhaust and I assume someone is very happy to see their investment burst into life.

A search on the internet reveals the new cathedral for modern man to be a multifuel gasification plant.  Apparently these gasification plants process wood, industrial waste, and sometimes human body parts.  So I expect we will soon be able to fill our lungs with the slightly smoked aroma of charred foetuses and gangrenous toes.

And I ponder the intricate harmony of the complex circles of life that bring me to being near destitute whilst staring across a cold bleak river watching body parts incinerated for profit and belching noxious exhaust which is most likely being monitored by sophisticated software that I wrote all those years ago.

Pain, DWP, Atos and ukcolumn

So now is the morning.  I get up and my back aches and my stomach feels bloated.  I get coffee and take pain killers and things evolve and I feel as if I need to go to the loo.  My lower back is aching and threatening to hurt and the top of my legs at the front are stinging and aching.  So I go to the loo and my stools are like sheep poop.  And although it is a slightly taboo topic I wonder why it is taboo.  Doctors know these things matter but we are not allowed to talk about them; It does rather brush things under the carpet (Not the sheep poop!).

And then, as I sit here and play Go I feel slightly shaky and quite worn out, I wonder what life is like.  I have nothing to do.  I don't know what to do.  I am browsing old photos from a software convention that I attended as the 'official' photographer some 10 years ago.  Hundreds of enthusiastic software developers' faces and I look at them and wonder what life is like for them.  What are they doing now?  I recall how I felt all those years ago and how rushing around for three days attending talks, taking hundreds of photos, socialising in the evenings and consuming large quantities of alcohol was all done with energy and enthusiasm to spare.  I had ridden over 100 miles to the conference on my motorbike and returned to edit and organise all the photos to put them up on the internet.  All this was done with ease.  But as I sit here and write this diary whilst resting both arms on the table I find that if I need to take the weight of my body with my back in order to lift my arm to hold the mouse to edit a mistake I am tempted to leave it until later because it is a significant effort.

I am not well.  There are 90 year olds who have more energy than me.  I am only 56.  But the significant thing for me is that I know this level of exhaustion is not right for me at the moment.  I don't mind getting old and worn out but I do object to feeling far worse than I might reasonably expect.  And just to put all this in perspective I am devastatingly broke.  It strikes me as interesting that when I mention this other 'taboo' subject people have a strange way of interpreting what is meant by 'broke'.  I know I have interpreted broke as meaning different things at different times in my life.  So how do I simply explain what my financial situation is?  And, perhaps more importantly, how do I convey the incredible negativity of it and the destructive power of my situation.

I look at these revolutions and collapsing economies around the world and although I regard myself as relatively lucky at the moment they are very close to how it is for me.  When I make references to the Holocaust people seem to think I am being extreme and exaggerating.  But for me, although it is an exaggeration, it is not so much of one that it is unreasonable.  There are thousands of people that understand we are doing very similar things in this country right now.  For the record and as supporting evidence there is the frightening case of the DWP and Atos Healthcare.  Currently there is a call for them to be investigated for corporate manslaughter and crimes against humanity.  One set of evidence is the rise of people on sick benefit who have died.  In 2010 310 people who were on sick benefit died.  That might be regarded as the baseline or the norm.  When the DWP introduced their 'medical examinations' carried out by the IT company Atos, masquerading as a healthcare company, in 2011 the death rate rose sharply.  In the first nine months of 2011 10,600 people who were on sick benefit died.  Many people who are involved in this situation are very clear that this is the result of intimidation, stress, and hardship imposed by the DWP.  A very moving illustration of the utter inhumanity and ridiculousness of this scheme is well represented in the image below from Mike Silver's blog.

When you are confronted with the insanity of what is going on it comes as a profound shock and then a frightening realisation that you wouldn't have believed it.  What is frightening is that you know other people simply will not believe it if you tell them.  You begin to understand how the illusion is maintained.  So which way do you turn?  Who can you tell when the very people who are in a position of influence are the very people whose focus of interpretation is on defending the perpetrators of the crime.  You begin to realise how the holocaust happened.  You start to see that the people who make the most noise about how the holocaust was an unacceptable and intolerable crime against humanity are the very people who are enabling it to happen all over again.

Someone once told me that they didn't trust sentimental people.  I wondered about this for many years but over time I certainly began to understand at least 'a' reason for not trusting sentimental people.  It is similar to people who deny something a bit too much.  The suspicion rises that perhaps they have a reason to be denying it.  It seems to me a bit psychological.  It seems a bit Freudian.  They cannot accept that part in them that is 'like' the undesirable attributes of the oppressor.  They actively 'hide' it from themselves and become over emotional and sentimental about the devastation and pain.  But what do these people actually 'do' about this subject that appears to distress them so much?  Very often they do nothing but continue to soak up the opulent substance of their current environment.  They are materially comfortable and psychologically secure and they cling to it compulsively.  To fend off guilt they go to church and give a pittance to charities (who are too often simply offering the service in the style of 'selling indulgences' - that issue that was central to the protestant movement led by Martin Luther in 1517 - for their own benefit).  What they don't do is face the terrible truth.  They don't concern their conscious mind with the evident paradox.  They don't object to the bits of insanity around them.  Why not?  Because to object to these small bits of cruelty and irrationality would disrupt their comfort and would appear to make no difference to the larger picture.  There seems no point in making an issue of things.  And so they carry on.  It is the very same reason why all this shock and horror at the Jimmy Savile affair will do nothing to stop abuse in our culture.  All it will achieve is to brush it further under the carpet and to make it harder to detect.

I cannot write more at the moment because I am in pain and exhausted but I will continue to put these incomplete missives up on the internet in the hope that eventually I will be able to coordinate it all.  In the mean time please set up a standing order to pay me £1 (or $1 if you are a parochial American) a month (If you are serious you can contact me via Toxic Drums contact page :).  It would only take a thousand or so people doing that to afford me a way to live and look after my daughter.  Then, maybe, I would start to get better and get stronger and be able to do something about the terrible situation that is rapidly evolving in this country.  You could also take a look at the ukcolumn which is a very informative organisation pursuing real insight and justice.

Convert Delphi project to Delphi 2010 look and feel

Delphi 2010 button "look and feel"

How to convert a Delphi 6 project to Delphi 2010

convert old Delphi project to Delphi 2010 "look & feel" to Delphi 2010

buttons in Delphi project still look old

move project from old Delphi version to Delphi 2010

I bought a new Windows 7 machine.  It's a Packard Bell IXTREME X5620 with an Intel Core 2 Quad Q8300 processor.  In general use it is wickedly fast.  I installed Delphi 2010 on the Windows 7 machine and ported all my Delphi 6 projects from my old trusty XP machine to the new one.

I noticed that in the designer the buttons were looking very up to date and Windows 7 ish but when I ran the application the form looked Windows 7 style but the buttons and other controls were clunky old XP/Delphi 6 buttons.  Very grey and stiff with sharp corners that any unsuspecting child could injure themselves on.

So I set about looking for a solution.

Select Project/Options/Application and set the "Enable runtime themes"

This does the trick.  Now everything is looking nice and modern.

Delphi 2010

Having bought Delphi 2010 as an upgrade from Delphi 6 I was expecting it to be a vast improvement.  Knowing and loving the product since it was the Turbo Pascal I have seen the changes over the years and the introduction of the Integrated Development Environment under DOS and then with the advent of Windows the virtually sublime Visual Component Library.  I have owned most versions of Delphi up to version 6 and have used Delphi 7 in someone else's office.  I was impressed with the advances in some areas and the debugging in particular.  I had a lot of experience of that because I was working for someone else and having to fix some dire code.  I don't normally have much call for a debugger with my own code.  But the help had become almost helpless.  I rely on the help because my memory is no good.  I have a good conceptual memory and I only have to understand polymorphism once and I've got it but can I recall where the ... well there you go.  I went looking for the override directive and could I find it?  No!  I'm not going to spend all day trying to make this point but it seems that Pascal is being forced into history.  I did eventually get to what I suspect is the best help by searching for Pascal Language Guide but it is seriously lacking in integrity.  I even read a remark in the help somewhere that "Real programmers don't use Pascal."  Whether that was a joke or not I don't know but if it was a joke it wasn't funny.  Pascal is a seriously good high level language.  As far as I understand it the guy who concocted C which later became C++ was basically coding Pascal so that it was unreadable.  The whole idea of a high level language is that it is easier than writing in machine code.  But hackers (as I like to call them) prefer to massage their egos by having code that "looks" really complicated.  It makes them feel cleverer.  But it doesn't help productivity.  And anyway they get away with a lot more bugs because it is nearly impossible to spot them.  Pascal was developed with two main characteristics.  One was that it was a teaching language so it was designed with very clear reserved words like begin and end to mark the beginning and end of a block of code and "English" style commands like for N:=1 to 20 do, and repeat...until  but C has to "shorten" every thing with curly brackets and weird arrangements of symbols.  It is simply not explicit and you have to have a memory for what all the codes mean.  The second significant thing about Pascal is that it is rigidly consistent.  It is fractal in a way.  There are a few simple rules and everything else follows.  It has been thought out very carefully.  But C comes along and starts making exceptions right left and centre.  After a while it is a jumble of special cases.  But back to the Delphi 2010.

I was trying to get the main form that I was designing to tear itself away from the top left corner of the space in which it's container was docked.  Eventually I found, under Tools/Options/Delphi Options/VCL Designer, that you can set "Embedded designer" on or off.  If it is on then the forms you are working with are as a multi document interface and they are stuck to the top left corner of their work space.  If you turn it off you are informed that it will not take effect until you close Delphi and restart it.  Funny but true.  So I did that and it seemed more agreeable until I realised that the form had a "Stay On Top" quality so that when you are editing the code the form is in front of it.  There seems no way to get it behind your work space so you have to minimise it every time you want to edit the code.  I found also that you can do something about the arrangement under View/Desktops.  But although it gives you the option to select the old style "Classic Undocked" (which I was so relieved to discover) it turns out that all the windows are undocked except the form in the corresponding workspace as the text editor.  So it is still stuck in the top left corner of a container.  So the frustration is mounting.  I don't get the "advances" in the code completion either.  Maybe I will understand it one day but at the moment it takes more work to manage the code completion unless of course you don't know how to program in Pascal at all.  That's a thought!  Maybe I could learn C that way.  No - it wouldn't work.

A lot of this ranting is so that a) I get to vent my frustration, b) I get to have notes on things I have found like the search for "Pascal Language Guide" and other interesting things I might forget in months to come, and c) so that there may be some useful hints and tips, workarounds and solutions for other people searching the internet.

Anders Hejlsberg was the guy responsible for designing the Visual Component Libray and he made an exceptional job of it.  He was then pirated by Microsoft and designed the .NET framework.  If any of you budding techies out there are wondering why C# ever got invented it is because the .NET environment is written in Pascal with the Visual Component Library and is basically an extension of it.  XML is largely the streaming structure from the VCL.  All down to one very clever man.  But most programmers use C++.  As the comment I noticed referring to "real programmers" not programming in Pascal suggests most people who were going to use .NET are C programmers but it is written in Pascal.  So they invented a middle ground for C programmers and called it C#.  Why not Pascal?  It annoys me.  But that is probably because I have spent so many years programming in Pascal and I am a very slow learner and don't want to learn C.  I have recently got involved with HTML and am shocked by the inconsistencies in that.  Sometimes I think it is a bit like evolution.  It has to have inherent weaknesses otherwise it couldn't evolve.