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WEEK 34 2015

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Saturday 22 August 2015

Saturday - Hot again.

Wen to yard sales with friends in the morning, then lunch.

In the evening I went over to S's and she showed me how the clever little kids were able to outfox my UI. I'm kind of impressed, it reminds me of the interns we'd have back in the day, who would always manage to break our code in ways we never dreamed of.

Anyhoo, I figured out what Snapshot missed copying, and fixed that with a manual copy, and a couple of other things. I think I spend something around 25%-40% of my time just working around Apple's roadblocks...

It's supposed to be cooler tomorrow, and I asked Roger if he wanted to hike Libre Mountain, but he reminded me that we're down to LA to watch the Taiko drumming tomorrow.

Book #41 was Seveneves, by Neal Stephenson. It was pretty good, the moon get's destroyed by some unknown agent. The bits of rubble collide and form after a couple of years enough bolides to make it to Earth. The rain of rock incinerates and destroys the Earth surface, and the only survivors, after various tribulations, are seven women, who resort to parthenogenesis to re-constitute the human race.

It is, in fact, two books. One is the immediate future, the other takes place 5,000 years later, as the people in orbit attempt to terra-form a destroyed Earth. From anyone else this book would be a tour-de-force, for Stephenson: not quite up to his usual standards. Too much exposition, and the people aren't particularly intriguing.

I read it as a Kindle book checked out from the LA County Library.

First book read through since Week #30. I've been busy, and not wanting to abuse my eyes in the evenings.

Friday 21 August 2015

Friday - Hot, but not crazy.

Somehow I bollixed up the version of the code I'm using, and have to unroll it. I tried Snapshot, again, as as before it won't compile and complains of missing files. Sigh. One more obstruction from Apple.

I'm trying to use their buttons, but they're being jerks about it. Now, on top of their immensely annoying and useless auto-arranging they've stacked a "size-class" option, that you have to turn off to move buttons programatically. I wish they'd work on broken stuff, say Snapshot, and leave off effing with the development process, but I suppose that's not going to happen.

Thursday 20 August 2015

Thursday - Typical weather.

Keeping busy, working on this and that.

S texted me a picture of a game state a child was somehow able to get a tile into. I have no idea how it happened, but it's a bug. Also I forgot to set the time delay on the buttons for the version on her iPad to a long press, it's still short. When I'm debugging I prefer short, of course, but she needs it longer so that she can correct and help the kids...

Wednesday 19 August 2015

Wednesday - Typical heat, maybe 102F. And a bit of fire-smoke tinting to the air, though I can't smell anything. There are reports from as far away as Utah of people seeing smoke from the California wildfires.

Of course, compared to British Columbia we're pikers, twenty or thirty wildfires compared to their hundreds....

Working away on the app. I added the long press gesture recognizers to the speaker buttons, but the home rolled buttons don't have the up|down animation feedback that buttons generated by IB do. Apple likes to screw with you like that. Lot's of what can only be described as corporate passive-aggressive b.s.

There were several other changes, and late afternoon S came by and I showed them to her, got her feedback, and finally loaded the new version of the app on her machine for testing.

Tuesday 18 August 2015

Tuesday - Average hot, again.

I did a nice long walk, 9 miles, by leaving early: 6:30am. It was still very hot and a liter and a half of water wasn't enough.

That weird heat rash reappeared just above my socks afterwards, but this time I had no sunscreen on, so it isn't that. Fortunately it's mostly pain free, but it is unsightly.

I finally gave up on placing the buttons on the subview, and just attached them to the main view. I would gut out the debugging, but the code needs refactoring soon anyway, so it's not really worth the time it would take.

<sourGrapes> It' would have been harder to write code to interact with them the other way, buried down in subviews, anyhow... </sourGrapes>

Monday 17 August 2015

Monday - Average heat, hot but not like the weekend, maybe 103F or so.

I did a bunch of grocery shopping, as I was out of a lot of stuff.

Then it was grinding away on the app again. This time it was adding buttons to replay the verbal prompt. For some reason this turned into a bear, with the buttons refusing to fire properly. Clearly something was intercepting the touches, but i don't know what, the buttons are on subviews about four or five layers deep, and they all appear to have their user interaction modes set appropriately, but...

Apple screwed me over again. There was an update pending, bugging me for several days. It looked like an iTunes update (21st in 24 months according to Wikipedia!) so I finally agreed to let it install. It turns out that it was a wolf in sheep's clothing, a complete update of OSX, to 10.10.5. Which burned an hour of my time in the morning.

Sunday 16 August 2015

Sunday - Hot. 108F, even hotter than yesterday.

I didn't do much, inside or out, just too hot.

Not much else to say. It was in the mid 80's at 6:30am, I didn't go hiking....

I did give the tomato plants some fertilizer. A couple of plants from the batch that I used were left over, so earlier in the year I gave some away to a friend, and planted the last in an old flower pot. All of those plants are bearing fruit, which means it's some sort of soil exhaustion causing mine not to fruit. I haven't amended the planters in several years, so that's probably the culprit.

Picture of the Week

horses in the fog

Some horses on the strand, north of Morro Bay.

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