Saturday - Went to yard sales in the
morning, picked up a few small things. Lunch with friends, then off to
Home Depot for some swamp cooler hardware. Then, I admit it, I just
napped. It was too hot out to do anything...
In
the evening I went over to R&S's place, and had home made pizza,
discussed the app with S, and we watched some streaming video from
Netflix. The first was a documentary, "Mile... Mile and a Half",
about a group of six people that walked the John Muir Train, circa
2010. I admit that my skin crawled at the description: art yuppies
trying to get back to nature, but it turned out to be a pretty
interesting movie.
The second "Where the Yellowstone goes"
seemed similar from the description, a group of people floating
down the Yellowstone river for 30 days, from the park boundary (you
can't boat inside the park!) to the Missouri confluence. It wasn't bad,
but compared to the first it lacked a lot of polish and lacked a
unifying thread or character. Lots of fly fishing stuff, which doesn't
(heh) float my boat. And it was too long, we finally gave up and turned
it off.
Friday
6
June2014
Friday
- It is warming up, over a 100F, and I'm going to "install" the extra
window evaporative (swamp) cooler unit this weekend I think. I'd like
to put it in the east side family room window, but that's where the
mechanical unit goes, so I'll probably put it in the western window,
next to the existing unit. It would be a bit unsightly, but since
people can't actually see it from the street, who cares?
I
wrestled with the 'CIColorCube' thing for about a half day more, then
gave up, for now. I can get it to compile and run, but the output image
is the same as the
input image, i.e., no filtering. I should mention that the official
Apple Developer's documentation seems to be wrong (and incomplete). I
found two other 'examples' on the Internet, but neither of those worked
for me either. There's a number of other ways to do this, so I'm back
to making masks and such...
Book #26 was Hyperbole and a Half,
by Alice Brosh. It is, I guess, semi-autobiographical, and humorous. I
was entertained, particularly by her description of 'simple dog', who
stupidity reminds me of my own Dad's dog, and of her mental acrobatics
used to 'motivate' herself.
This
is the anniversary of D-Day, June 4, 1944, seventy years ago. My dad
wasn't there, by the ship he later joined was, the USS Bayfield,
APA-33. The Bayfield was an 'attack transport', she carried troops to
land on the beaches. To do this she had a bunch of landing barges:
those square sided boats with a ramp in front to unload the troops.
A landing barge from the Bayfield, on the beach in Normandy.
Apparently there was a documentary made about the Bayfield
using national archive footage - some in color! - by one David
Brinkman. The picture above is a still from a movie. Sadly it seems
there are no copies available - I'd buy one if there were!
Thursday 5 June2014
Thursday
- Another day working on the app, a good 8 hours (harder to do at home than you'd think!). I'm not sure how much progress forward
there was, but I covered some ground and learned some stuff. I was
thinking of using filters to change the color of images, rather than
drawing them repeatedly in different colors, to make things a little
less confusing and code intensive. And S says she's an idea for an different (future) app that will need that kind of functionality.
Unfortunately
the methods that use the CIImage framework are rather poorly
documented, so I spent a lot more time on this than I expected. In
particular I thought I might use color filters to remove the blue and
green components to get a red image from an initial multicolor (white?)
image, and red and blue to get green, and so on. What I ended up
spending a lot of time on was the CIFilter and CIColorCube tools, which
were a bit obscure. I finally figured it out (I think) but now I'm not
sure that it'd be any improvement.
The trick with CIColorCube is that it represents every single color possible by the iOS display hardware,
that is: it's a 3-D matrix (cube) of the size
(all-possible-levels-of-RED * all-possible-levels-of-GREEN *
all-possible-levels-of-BLUE ). Each of the cube elements contains a
color and alpha (RED:0-1, BLUE: 0-1, GREEN:0-1, ALPHA:0-1). You
can then change the value for each little element, turning it to
a new color and alpha. Thus, if you set alpha=0 for all GREEN
and BLUE components for all the little elements and use this cube in a
filter applied to an image then your output image will just be shades
of RED.
This being Apple and iOS you can't actually do it this simply, you have to translate the RGBa to HSV in the middle of things...
(And
I suspect "all possible" maybe actually not be correct, it may be
the iOS hardware values are interpolated between these.)
And
you don't actually apply the filters to the image, oh no. Instead all these filters are applied to a virtual CIImage copy
of your original, which can then be turned into a CGImageRef which can
in turn can be turned into a UIImage that can actually be, you know,
displayed.. (In Apple's defense the virtual image stuff is
apparently because they
are trying to offload the image processing from the iDevice main CPU's
to the
GPU's on a separate thread, and this was the way they came up with
doing it.)
I
actually figured out what was going on when running across a reference
to a LUT (look up table) doing this sort of stuff for an old SGI system.
Not
much else going on. I thought the elementary school down the street got
out earlier this week, but the usual morning Indy 500 of teachers and
students are occurring at the usual times, so I guess not.
Wednesday 4 June2014
Wednesday - A pretty good day: a good
8 hours on the app, got the UIView animation cascades working in a
fairly consistent way and without 'nesting' them, which is almost
impossible to debug. Even made a little video of the (admittedly
primitive) prompt scene and sent it off to people. The Quicktime player
on OSX can do screen grabs of movies, even grab them from a selected area (rather than full screen),
so that's kind of neat.
Not much else. No yard work, no walk, no visits or lunch with anyone.
The
cats have realized that there are windows behind blinds, and are going
crazy exploring - i.e. crashing around and breaking and damaging them.
They seem immune to the squirt bottle deterrence, so I just raise them
a bit, allowing them to look out and sit on the window sill without all
the commotion.
The tooth is better, so I wasn't in pain the last couple of days, which may explain some of the forward progress...
T
called in the evening, on his way home to San Diego from Ventura. I
didn't even know he was there, but he was helping D & C finish up
the report on the inspections we did back in ... early April. Sheesh.
#everythingisbroken:
Tim said he was having trouble with the Time-Warner service, and on
looking into it discovered that they'd rolled out a new digital-only
service, and that the modem/adapters that came with it don't work
properly with their software. I guess he 'Dale Carnegied' the tech for
more information, and the tech said it'd be four to six weeks before TW really had a fix. In the meantime I guess millions of people in California are just scr*wed...
I
offered to send Bob a picture of Mom from Christmas 1997 (the earliest
I have in my personal photo collection), but he declined, stating he
didn't want to remember her in her declined state. I understand, it was
a horrible shock when I ran across those photographs mistakenly filed
in a folder under 2004 or something. Scans of some old film photo's.
that I made at some point apparently. The film development date is October 1998, but of course Mom passed on Good Friday of that year.
You can also see pictures of my niece J in my sisters arms, just a month old or so I guess.
I
was something of a camera enthusiast before going away to school in
1981, but all my stuff disappeared at some point while I was there: the
enlarger, chemicals, film, and sadly, archives of the negatives and
prints of photo's I took. Not that there were too many of my family
probably - at a young age you don't see the need for that, you think
things are going to remain the same forever (or for the next ten or
twenty years, which seems like much the same thing).
And while
away from home at school, and afterwards working hundreds of miles from
home there aren't many pictures I have - a few from birthdays and
holidays. This was in pre-digital times, when developing was a pain and
an expense.
Eventually I got my first digital camera and started taking lots of photo's, but that was in 2001 or so.
Ah well.
Tuesday 3 June2014
Tuesday
- Not a very exciting day, spent it working on the app, a good eight or
nine hours. Solved a little animation/rasterization problem, and
working on cascading animations using Objective-C blocks (closures).
I
missed a couple of phone calls - I left the phone downstairs and was
working upstairs, but no-one called back, so I guess it wasn't too
urgent.
Monday 2 June 2014
Monday
- Dad passed away five years ago, today. Kind of sad. I exchanged a couple of emails with Bob, he sent along this picture:
Dad, the early 1930's? Florida or San Pedro I'm guessing, from the palm tree. Winter, since he's wearing a coat.
I finished Book #25, The Martian,
by Andrew Weir. I really liked it. An astronaut is stranded on Mars,
and has to think of a way to stay alive for a couple of years until he
can be rescued. He's a mechanical engineer and botanist (anyone sent to
Mars is going to cover multiple specialties) and a creative sort of
dude, in his own snarky way. He improvises, succeeds, fails, and keeps
going. Recommended. In fact I might an actual copy for K, I think he'd
enjoy it.
I read this on the Mac's browser, btw.
My
phone has started announcing messages to me. "You have an email from
So-and-So", or "Text from Somebody". It's just an announcement, it
doesn't read the body of the message. I think there was a system update
pushed in early May, and that started it. I can't figure out how to
turn it off. K says that his droid will do it if the GPS detects he's
moving quickly, i.e. driving, but that doesn't seem to be the case
here: it does it at any time including sitting on the kitchen counter, and my phone is in 'standard' mode, not
'car'. It's not massively annoying, but it is a little puzzling.
Sunday 1 June2014
Sunday
- I started to do yard work, then said to myself,:"The Heck With It".
I've been working, I deserve some time off on the weekends.
So I fiddled around with the library download service, 'Overdrive'. I
still can't download, but I could read my book in the browser, Safari
on the Mac. So that's something. On a 27" monitor it's OK. I've read books on a small smartphone, this is easier.
Sheryl was invited to go with Kirk to a Jamboree commemoration at the
Ronald Reagan Library and Museum. Since she couldn't go I went in her
place. It was pretty cool, very interesting to visit. There was a
dinner, a guest speaker, and a number of videos and stills from the
Jamboree. The food was quite good (and free!) and it was a lot of fun. I didn't
get home until almost midnight, and my jaw hurt (should have stayed
away from the Jelly Belly's), but I'm glad I went.
The
707 that was Air Force One when Reagan was president was there. It was
spiffy and new in it's day, now it seems a bit small and quaint. The
President flying around in a 707?
Oddly the Reagan years
probably mark the high water point of American power, yet the
grandiosity and imperial trappings about the president continue to
increase. Ah well.
Picture of
the Week Photo Notes: The Angeles Mountains from Mt. Baden Powell.
