travels and images

WEEK 24 2015

Last Week- Sun- Mon- Tue- Wed- Thur- Fri- Sat- Next Week

Picture of the Week

MAIN PAGE

Oxnard Weather Underground

Lancaster Weather Underground

Martinez WeatherUnderground

Thirteen
Years
Ago,
This
Week
2002

Twelve Years Ago, This Week, 2003

Eleven Years Ago, this week, 2004

Ten Years Ago, this week, 2005

Nine Years Ago, This Week, 2006

Eight Years Ago, This Week, 2007

Seven Years Ago, This Week, 2008

Six Years Ago, This Week, 2009

Five Years Ago, This Week, 2010

Four Years Ago,
This Week,
2011

Three Years Ago,
This Week,
2012

Two Years Ago,
This Week,
2013

One
Year
Ago
This
Week
2014

Saturday13 June 2015

Saturday - Very hot - some in-town weather stations were reporting 106+, though the airport station KWJF officially only hit 100F. Lot's of afternoon cloudiness, though no thunder this time.

I did yard sales with friends, picked up a couple of things, books, a safety vest, a pair of wire strippers.

Then we did lunch in Palmdale, at Mahli's, hit PetSmart and Trader Joe's. Then home, and I crashed for the afternoon. Still not 100%...

My peaches are already ripening - I need to net the tree soon.

Friday 12 June 2015

Friday - Hot. I had to spot water the lawn in places, front and back. Another dry thunderstorm in the afternoon.

Well, I finally got the step-select thing working the way we want for the app. I had to write some logic to manually control the focus - for some reason, after a selection, iOS resets it to the very first accessible item by default. Which is goofy. Think of any online keyboard you use, say for Hulu or Netflix. Does the search screen cursor reset to "Q" every time you select another letter? And there were some other app-specific behaviors to program.

Good to get it done, if just in a sample testcase.

Thursday 11 June 2015

Thursday - Hot again.

Still fiddling with the switch controller, and interfacing it to our app, or at least a very stripped down version. Lot's of fooling about, reading documentation, trying things out. Apple's examples are pretty much useless. Made some progress.

Kind of wiped out in the evening. The cold kind of came back, so I'm running low on handkerchiefs at this point. Also went through a box of tissues.

Wednesday 10 June 2015

Wednesday - Hot. I did a quick run in the morning to pick up a few groceries at the 99 cent store and Walmart. I also picked up a pepper plant, since I have a space open where the sow bugs ate one of my tomatoes, root, stalk and leaf.

I was also going to pick up another scale filter, but HD wanted $16, and Lowe's wanted $20. Huh? What? I don't think so...

We had a thunderstorm roll through in the afternoon. Jimmy hid under the bed. No rain, alas.

I worked with the external Bluetooth switch controller in the morning. Even getting it to sync was a chore at first, but I figured out, mostly by trial and error, the correct ports and "Y" connector placements. Once I had it working as a single switch I went on to making it a two switch setup, one switch to "step" through items, then another to "select" an item. Gahhh. A job that should have taken five minutes took hours.

S has clients with disability issues that are really looking forward to trying it out, she says.

Tuesday 9 June 2015

Tuesday - It's getting warmer, but still a bit windy.

App-wise, just wrestling with things. I got the RJ Cooper bluetooth switch controller we bought last year out of storage, and plugged it in to charge. And read the directions, several times. As obscure as I remembered. Well, tomorrow I'll try it out...

I then did some more single switch programming. At first it wasn't working, no 'focus' would show up in the new test app I'd just written. This was weird, because it worked in the case I'd written a couple of weeks ago. I played around with compiler switches, and put it on both devices, getting more and more frustrated. Finally I realized that I was using a UIImageView for a subview, rather than a UIView. Changed that and things worked fine...

That stupid scale filter fitting is still leaking. I just put a bucket under it and will use it to water the tomatoes.

Book #31 was Oregairu, Vol. 2, by Watari Watari. Amusing.

Monday 8 June 2015

Monday - Hot. About 100F. The old swamp cooler is doing just fine cooling wise. That darn filter is still leaking though. I changed out the ferrule and hose, we'll see if that drys it out. Otherwise I'll have to get a new one, the seat might be bad. Annoying. They're about $5 too...

Sheryl's handyman was off on another more important job, so I called up G for help and we picked up all the wood from her house, and also took all the overflow bags of yard trimmings and such that would fit into the Explorer. Trash day is tomorrow, so it'll all go away then.

G mentioned that his dad was able to get the old lawn tractor running, and into a single forward gear. Well, good. That mowing deck is messed up, but the little trailer is probably nice for moving things around a 2 acre parcel.

I tried out the new iPad Mini.

When I went to put the app on it all sorts of things objected. I messed with it for a good 45 minutes, carefully following the written procedures for adding another device (you can have up to 100 per year) without any luck. Finally, desperately, I logged onto the Developer Member Center, to use my developers ID and chat to someone - and after a bit of fiddling (they don't make it easy to use the MC) - upon logging in I was greeted with the message that my membership had expired in April! Huh.

I was able to pay up, and then could put test apps onto the new iPad without any problem.

It would have been nice if they had originally given that reason in Xcode rather than the terse and uninformative 'Ineligible Device' message, but hey, that's Apple.

They had sent me an email about my membership, but to my TM account. Which should have been fine, since I'd set up and tested forwarding to my personal Gmail account. At some point that just ... stopped. So I was blindsided. It's what you know that ain't so that gets you.

Oh well.

The good news is that the answers to yesterday's questions 1&2 are good ones. They fixed the stupid screen coordinates thing, so now the accessibility focus frame rotates with its view. And everything appears where it should, location coordinates are indeed understood as 'points' and not 'pixels'. Yay!

The bad news is that the WWDC 2015 conference is going on this week, so in a few weeks iOS 9 will be out....

Sunday 7 June 2015

Sunday - Another nice day. A bit warm.

I needed some dry cat food, so I made a morning run to Walmart for that and a couple of other small items. S needed a piece of plywood for her Small Free Library so I picked her up and we stopped by Home Depot and picked up that as well. We found a nice piece in the scrap pile, but it wasn't marked so the pleasant lady as the register gave it to us for free. Probably a good quarter sheet of 1/2 ply, so $15 or $20 bucks. S schmoozed with the lady - she likes to do that, telling her all about the project, so I'm sure that helped.

We then stopped by my place and used the radial arm saw to cut it to size.

I also picked up the iPad Mini from S, along with it's (different) charger and cable. It's...small. Mini, even. I'll have to add it to the list of approved devices tomorrow, so I can try out my code on it.

My two big questions are:
1. iOS8 had major changes from iOS7, what happens with the stupid VoiceOver screen-coordinates thing?
2. It's Retina, so do my layouts designed for 1024x768 pixels automatically transfer over to 2048x1536 'points'? They should, but this is Apple...

In the afternoon I put a water deposit thing into the swamp cooler, and tightened up the leaking inline filter. I'd been expecting the small seep to dry up, but there was still a steady leak. And I hand watered various dry spots on the lawns - things were pretty bad here and there, because I hadn't been paying attention while sick. I'm back to 80% now though...

S has a pile of wood from a cut down willow tree (borer's got to it) right where she wants to put the Small Free Library. She has a handyman coming over, so he and I will load up the Explorer and toss it over my fence at the house tomorrow morning. A few pieces are pretty big, so it's a two man job.

Picture of the Week

t-hacha-p

A billboard with a picture of old Tehachapi on it.

Last Week- Sun- Mon- Tue- Wed- Thur- Fri- Sat- Next Week