Rick's b.log - entry 2024/08/18

Enough with the nannying!

Oh, for eff's sake.

If I pull a cookie right out of the oven and shovel it into my mouaaaargh! Aieee! WAH!

No, seriously, things that are fully cooked may well remain hot in the middle for a while. If somebody manages to get beyond junior school without figuring that out, they really don't deserve to be an adult.

Think of Chicken Kiev or those Cordon Bleu things which is meat wrapped around cheese that is specifically designed to melt the cheese (and thus be "bloody hot" in the centre).
<aside>I miss chicken kiev, Frenchies don't seem to like things that have strong flavours - little in the way of Mexican, no chicken pieces with garlic butter in between, no...</aside>

What is needed is a clearly visible exclamation mark on the packaging and a "This product may remain hot in the middle after cooking" message, and expect people to take responsibility for their actions, not to recall an entire product because some snowflake might burn themselves.

Really...

Mom's kitchen legacy

So what was her legacy in the kitchen?

Cookie cutters.

I could make gingerbread men of all shapes and sizes, including one that lets me give him a tie and other accoutrements. Teapot cookie? Of course. Including one with a slot so it can be slipped onto the actual teacup as a decoration. Teacup cookie? Eiffel tower? Statue of Liberty? Hearts and stars? A big pumpkin? Yes, yes, and even more yes.

No, I wasn't joking.

I now have <looks behind me> four boxes of cookie cutters.

Wait, what?

That being said, I wanted to go shopping on Tuesday afternoon when the supermarket was doing their quiet period, but, well, decided to put it all off until Friday so I spent an entire week alone and by myself. I'm slowly working my way through the kitchen. Did a bit of work in the garden. Wrote a little stock control system from scratch. Nothing much... ☺

I would have done more, but I've spent so long just feeling tired. It must be this "age" thing. I'm starting to feel less like a barely warmed zombie...recovery just in time to go back to work. Oh, joy.

Larder v0.04

The headline feature is that the System menu now has a sub menu for managing the database.

The System functions menu.

It offers the following.

The Management menu.

Importing from CSV has not changed, it expects to find "<Larder$Dir>.^.barcodes/csv" file to read from, laid out as the barcode number followed by the article description as a string. The very first line is ignored. Some UTF-8 is translated to RISC OS (Latin1 8859/1) equivalents, but this is very rough and ready.

Exporting to CSV writes a file in a similar format to "<Larder$Dir>.^.larder/csv" (intentionally not the same file). In order to make exporting simpler, quotes and commas are translated to an underscore. There is no character set translation, the RISC OS ISO-8859/1 is used.
Note that this writes the article information (barcode and description) and does not save any of the counts or expiry dates.

Articles (barcode/description) can be now be created. Enter the barcode and a short description. In order to make the code simpler, the description can only be up to 29 characters in length. If you need a longer description, add the article to the CSV file in your preferred editor and import it (barcodes can be up to 13 characters, and descriptions can be up to 63 characters).
It should go without saying that, for adding new articles, you'll need to have a full keyboard connected. I'm not going to do anything icky like T9 input via the numeric keypad.

Here is a montage of adding a new article.

Yes, I went there. ☺

Deleting an article is much the same. Enter the barcode, it'll be looked up, you'll be warned if there are items in the larder, and then you can press - to delete, or any other key to not.

Now with article addition and deletion, it is possible to manage the data from within the software. Why not try it out and delete those test entries?

Listing all articles will output a simple list of article barcodes and descriptions. It will tell you how many items are in your larder, but it won't list dates as there's already a function for that. Unlike that other function, this lists everything, even if there are no items in the larder.

Listing all articles.

Lastly, you can validate the database to check its integrity.

Validation passed!

Like *CheckMap, this will report if something is wrong but it won't attempt to fix it.

There are four tests performed:

1. Empty entry check - the articles should be contiguous, that is to say all of the empty entries should be after the number of articles given.
2. Barcode dupe check - each barcode should exist only once.
3. Barcode length check - barcodes should be 13 characters or less.
4. Item count check - each article has a count of how many of them are in the larder. If one adds up each count for the expiry dates, the total should match the article count.

At this time, there is an arbitrary limit of 256 articles. This is because the code just claims a chunk of memory (37,888 bytes, or 256×148 bytes) rather than anything complicated like linked lists and/or dynamic allocations. This can easily be changed (it is just a #define in a header file) and since the data saved to disc only saves the active entries, it can be loaded into a later build with more capacity.

Barring undetected bugs, this will probably be the last release for a while, I would like to sit out and read peacefully rather than stare at Zap. So...

Your comments:

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jgh, 20th August 2024, 17:48

MacDonald's are currently advertising in the UK saying they are cooking their burgers hotter to melt the cheese better. 哎吔!

jgh, 20th August 2024, 17:52

Exporting CSV... see mdfs.net/blib/FileCSV

A tree-dwelling mammal, 21st August 2024, 18:22

The first part of this post? I stopped reading at "meat-free burgers". A cow turns plants into meat far more efficiently than any chemical process. So just give me some ground up cow.    As for Larder, I have two questions:    1. What exactly does menu option 6 do? ("Send message to Rick") Does it page you? Or does it dispatch a carrier pigeon.    2. I tried running the software but it does nothing. I've installed all the Windows 11 updates, I even tried turning it off and on again. Should I try it on a Windows 10 machine, and if so, 32-bit or 64-bit? [1]    [1] This is sarcasm. I do actually have RISC OS running on a Pi somewhere. I also have a spare Pi Zero that I might try setting up 5.30 on, now that it supports the wi-fi. The biggest problem nowadays is trying to find a 3-button mouse.    At least you said "stare at Zap". If you'd said "StrongED" I'd have had to declare a fatwa. [2]    [2] Yay, editor wars!

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