My Last Week at North Mid.

Did some work on an Arcomed infusion pump, but was unable to complete as it needs a new battery with none in stock. Did an HP PageWriter. Then started on a dropped Kontron Micromon. Plenty of re-bending and Aralditing! Ordered up a part, and then reassembled awaiting spares. Then did an Ohmeda Biox pulse oximeter that has been waiting around far too long. Its power connector was hanging out, but emphasis was on the old S&W defib cart it was mounted on! Did an old Laerdal Suction Unit. Battery pack tested out OK. Finished off with three Porta-Nebs. And finally a Therapy Equipment suction pump started by another tech. So that’s my last of 80 days work at the North Middlesex Hospital. Now clued-up on Arcomeds, if nothing else!

Fiat Cinquecento bought through eBay. I find the design of these great little cars very appealing. It goes well too, although the engine is only 900 cc. Another example of “less is more”! It’s now with my daughter and her family.

Coding Plans

Thinking about my coding plans now that winter is turning to spring! Rather than butcher FTM to produce an FTM Lite, a better plan would be to concentrate on VTM. VTM runs readily run on Windows 98 platforms and lets the Windows API take care of memory problems! And nobody is going to be interested in FTM anyway, as even the VTM interface already appears dated compared to web-based systems. FTM Lite is an interesting idea but it would be better to start from scratch (using Clipper?), and there may not be enough time for that. So it would be a good idea to bring VTM up to the latest FTM changes and take it from there! So the policy now is to code in Visual FoxPro 7.0 until I get VFP 9.0. FoxPro 2.6 is still good for prototyping, of course.

Noticed that my VFP C20.exe is only a third of the size of the DOS version. And that it generates its own Foxuser too. So that’s good news as well. Seems to hold true for VTM -v- FTM also. I imagine that VTM makes greater use of functions within Windows itself. Also no need to doctor the final .exe with Disk Edit. All good news. Perhaps I will even combine VTM with New Spex.

So, for the time being I will carry on development in Visual FoxPro 7.0 on HDD No.7 in XPC. Perhaps it's time for a name change for TaskMaster and Spex combined. How about dataSpex?

The Windows version of C20.exe.

Two Arcomeds and a Porta-Neb on the bench.