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WEEK 23 2015

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2002

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Saturday 6 June 2015

Saturday - It started out warm and sunny, as if we were going to have a day in the 90's, then clouded up. In the early afternoon we had peals of thunder and some light sprinkles. Huh.

Jimmy hid under the bed.

I still haven't got the new iPad, because S was sick in the evening!

Book #30 was Sleeping at the Starlight Motel, by Bailey White. An amusing and kind view of Southern eccentricities. Short stories and essays - recommended. I intend to take a least one of her books to the beach this summer....

I fiddled with my 2D Animation class final project a bit, trying to export a movie, without any luck.

Quicktime export to a *.mov just doesn't work (maybe a conflict between the 2010 CS5 AE and the 2015 Quicktime executable?). MP4 export to a *.avi is missing the sound. Class is over, and I plan to re-purpose the 16GB USB drive the project is on, so I thought I'd make another effort. Oh well.

Maybe it'll export from S's machine. If it isn't too horrible or huge I'll post it here.

I sampled the opening clip from The Pacific, Episode 2 for the beginning, where the soldiers ashore see the battle of Savo Island out at sea. I never saw the series when it came out, I'll have to see if it's streaming somewhere.

This is,the 71st anniversay of D-Day in Normandy. My father's ship, the USS Bayfield, APA-33, was there, though he was not aboard her yet.

From Wikipedia, the Bayfield on D-Day.

I fiddled with the app a bit too.

A thing I wanted to try was setting the backgrounds of different projects, all open at the same time in Xcode, to different colors to make selection easier.

You can't set colors on a single instance of Xcode on a per-tab basis it turns out.
And if you do manage somehow to open multiple instances of Xcode they all share the same plist settings file and, again, all the backgrounds change to the same color..

Bah. Amateur hour never ends at the Apple Developer's Division it seems. Someone needs to go explain fork-exec() to them, and how to keep temp settings in a PID referenced file.

Another issue came up with Yosemite: my /home folder & files was gone! After an initial panic I discovered that it was there, but not visible in finder. WTH?

I assumed I'd done a bad install, but it turns out that Apple did this deliberately in the last two revs of their OS, supposedly to 'help' users from deleting it by accident. Which is, of course, bald faced nonsense - there are a multitude of better ways to set things up to prevent that. At a guess, what they really want is to force you to use their tools, iTunes, iPhoto, etc, to access your personal data. Locking the user in is a time tested way of holding market share.

Rules to live by:

Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.
Never attribute to incompetence that which can be explained by greed.

You can do it still, BTW, it just takes another couple of steps: finder -> Go -> home.

Anyhoo.

One question I had was about my code automatically detecting if VoiceOver is on. If so the app should act differently. The answer is yes, like so:

[[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] addObserver:self
                                         selector:@selector(voiceOverStatusChanged)
                                             name:UIAccessibilityVoiceOverStatusChanged
                                           object:nil];

- (void)voiceOverStatusChanged
{
    if(!UIAccessibilityIsVoiceOverRunning())
    {
        //do something
    }
}

Friday 5 June 2015

Friday - Kind of an average/warm day. Still kind of under the weather, but trying to move ahead on things.

Worked a bit on the app. One new feature is that Xcode now automatically saves edits and changes. It didn't previously, and I've become accustomed to making changes, testing them, then saving the project if happy, or quitting and causing a discard if not happy. Arguably the new way is better, but it's not right to randomly change things like this - Apple should make a design decision and stick to it.

Not knowing of the change, I tried something, and when it didn't work, quit and reopened my project. And it was still broken! And since I'd quit and re-opened the project the 'undo' buffer had been zapped as a consequence and I had to go through the code and module by hand to undo my changes. With this change and the unreliability of Snapshot I've already experienced I guess I'm going to have to learn git.

S said the new iPad Mini came in, and I was going to go over in the evening to see it, but even four hours of programming wiped me out. She & R graciously accepted my no-show when I told them I was coughing non-stop and had mucus running down my face...

Thursday 4 June 2015

Thursday - Another mild day. Even clouds about...

Life is cycles. In 2003 my blog mentions that one of my very brave kittens, Phoebe, had recently become a scaredy cat. Jimmy's done the same thing - when S came by the other day he was just an orange and white blur streaking upstairs to hide under the bed. When I had company over Memorial Day he was the cat hiding behind the refrigerator.

And it's the twelve year anniversary of my buying the Explorer - it's been an amazingly reliable workhorse, though now it's pushing 250K and I try not to overdo things.

I did a bunch of dishes, left over from being sick, and worked on the app for about 4 hours, all I had in me. Still coughing up light green gunk, unfortunately. Every few years I get into a 'rocket/feather' situation sickness wise - getting sick in a hurry, like a rocket going up - then only slowly getting better, like a feather coming down. Sigh.

The peaches are changing color. I need to net that tree, which should be easier than usual, as S and I trimmed it's branches back in late winter.

I'm going to call Book #29 Oregairu, Vol.1. This is actually an unauthorized translation of a Japanese 'light novel'. It's an honest unauthorized translation by a fan organization - if the writer requests, or the publisher makes an official English translation available they take it down...

Anyhow, I watched the anime on Hulu and was amused and sought out a translation. A high school boy in japan - a loner with a really bad and cynical attitude (a far worse thing in Japanese culture than in American!) - is forced by his guidance counselor to join the 'Service Club' and help other students with their problems.

His solutions are usually laughably horrible, it's a bit like watching 'House' deal with people.

Wednesday 3 June 2015

Wednesday - A nice day. Cooler than it's been.

Feeling somewhat better.

S came by in the morning and I drilled out a base for a little project she had, something for the Little Free Library she's setting up.

After that we did a bit of shopping in the late morning, then I went home and passed out for two or three hours. Obviously not 100% yet.

Researched some stuff on iOS in the afternoon - gotta get back to that app. There are bills to pay...

Memory management and device orientation detection. The latter is a lot more complicated that it needs to be. And Apple has made huge and contradictory changes from the way they were doing it since the last version:

In other news, we ordered an iPad Mini using iOS 8 for my use in development, alongside my own iPad running iOS 7. Golly gee, I wonder why we needed that?

Tuesday 2 June 2015

Tuesday - Dad passed on this day 2009. It doesn't seem that long ago. The shock is mostly sadness now.

My final project was a video game intro using After Effects and Flash based on the Naval Battles for Guadalcanal. I had questions I'd have liked to have asked him...

Still very sick. Fortunately it's a cold, not the flu, so Dayquil (vintage 2013) kept it mostly in check.

I did have to oil the bearings in the swamp cooler as things were getting rather 'thumpy'. While I had the side panels off I also replaced last years artificial pads with new Aspen pads that I had in the garage. This helped with the airflow a lot, and it was quieter too.

Since I was too beat to work any more than that I read Book #28 Monster Hunter: Nemesis (MHI #5), by Larry Correia. This one follows the adventures of Agent Franks of the Monster Control Bureau. Franks is short for Frankenstein, but he's a good guy. Or, at least, fighting on the same side as the good guys...

Monday 1 June 2015

Monday - A nice day. Still sick as a dog, but I took the final (and pretty much bombed it). Tried to turn in my final project, and it had issues on the school computer, but the instructor let me just turn in the whole project folder and said he'd try to repair the links and generate the required *.mov file. The class computers were really acting up, which made the final interesting.

And, it occurred to me much later, I'd forgotten to turn in the next to last homework problem too...

Not a pleasant afternoon.

Each of the 10 h/w assignments was a 'score', and the final was worth two. So of twelve scores I'm missing one (even though I did it!), turned one in incomplete, and whiffed pretty bad on the two score final. Still, all I need is a 'C-' to be eligible for another class.

Went home and crashed for the rest of the day.

Sunday 31 May 2015

Sunday - Another nice day.

Unfortunately the tickle in my throat turned into a full blow cold by Saturday evening, and I had to deal with it all day while also trying to finish the final project and get ready for the final tomorrow.

Picture of the Week

The pavers in place, mostly done.

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