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WEEK 35 2015

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Saturday 29 August 2015

Saturday - Not much to say. Still hot, though not quite as beastly as the last couple of days.

Not much to say - I did some chores in the morning, cleaned up a bit around the house, did laundry. Did some reading in the afternoon.

Friday 28 August 2015

Friday - Hot again, 104F officially, 110F on my patio. This is about the same as yesterday, but the humidity has crept up into the teens and the a/c wasn't working as well. By early afternoon it was well over 80F up in the office and I knocked off for the day.

I was able, by running the a/c continuously on high, to keep it at 80F downstairs. I added another insulated panel I had around to the south-facing kitchen window (the house is now officially a cave). At 9pm it was still over 90F outside.

Mostly I read iOS stuff in the afternoon - using 'git', gesture recognizers, in-app purchasing stuff, and how to properly implement #ifdefs in Objective-C. Gahhh. I was able to put the modified version of the project into 'git', fairly easy once you get a decent tutorial and a terminal window, and it seems to work ok. Not that I could really test it, as it was just too hot in the office to work in there.

How to do things is a bit amorphous to me right now, but the thing about in-app purchasing is to allow the distribution of a "LITE" version, that users can upgrade to a "PAID". The consensus is that this is the best way to maximize visibility and sales.

By using an "#ifdef" you can set certain things on/off in C and Objective-C, and one of those things can be levels, which are set by a flag in the plist file that the user can't modify (without rooting his device). The company can modify the plist file using Apple's in-app procedures, to change the flag from 'LITE' to 'PAID'.

And 'git', as well as providing version control, should allow me to test the different 'targets', i.e., executables.

And there's a separate 'Framework' you download for in-app stuff, and settings, and lots of this and that. All still fairly unclear, but people do it, so it's doable.

Book #43 was The Architect of Aeons, by John C. Wright. What to say? This guy gives 'space opera' a whole new makeover. This is the fourth book in the series and Wright is still sparking off more new civilizations, peoples and ideas than most authors do in their entire career.

Some 'inside baseball' stuff that, truthfully, I don't really follow, from about a week ago.

In a rather strange turn of events Wright was apparently betrayed by his own publisher this year. Tor, his publisher, has had their author's win the yearly 'Hugo Award' for Best Science Fiction/Fantasy every year for the last 20+ years. Of late these winners have been fairly obviously a politically correct leftist slate. Someone objected, and proposed a slate of "conservative" or "old style" writers, including Wright, a practicing Catholic. This caused a huge uproar.

The interesting thing about the awards is that anyone can nominate and vote, as long as you're a paying member of the science fiction society. Then, each year, the attendee's at the World Science Fiction Convention (Spokane this year) get to vote on the winner among the nominee's in various categories - for another fee.

This year, when awards time came a week or so ago, the conservative "Sad Puppies" slate was mostly shot down. But it was clearly a plot - the emcee was in on it and led a cheering crowd in which the voter's chose 'No Award' rather than award to the people that the fans at large had selected. And the number of people voting 'no award' was said to be almost exactly 2,500 - almost as if someone, say a publisher with a vested interest in controlling the awards, had paid them to vote that way...

And Wright was one of those authors shut out.

I don't know, I wasn't there, and I haven't been to a SF convention since college. It seems sad to see a fun and cheerful thing corrupted, but I guess that's life.

Thursday 27 August 2015

Thursday - Very hot, about 110F according to my patio thermometer. That instrument, I admit, runs hot by about 5 degrees with respect to "official" temperatures, which was about 104F. I'm not sure whether it is in fact wrong, or it's my local climate running warm wrt the airport. In any case it's been a long hot week, and it isn't abating yet...

I didn't get out for my walk, after getting up late. Tomorrow, or maybe a hike on Saturday in the mountains.

Other than that, just working on the app. I painstakingly went through the code and found the bug from yesterday. I really need to get GIT going, having to code in such a manner that you can unwind a day's changes by hand is pretty tedious.

I did a couple of things with image compositing, to "gray out" parts of some images and am pretty satisfied with that.

Well, not really. I'm compositing at about six or seven places in the code, which is sloppy practice, though even my old iPad2 hardware can do it. So I want to rewrite the whole image handling thing, because it would then allow me to rewrite the gesture recognition part and outsmart the 5 year olds... I'd need a NSDictionary to lookup the modified images instead of the original, and code be able to read the base images and save modified versions once in a temporary folder for every turn before play.

Regression piled upon regression...

My friend T had mentioned the other day that the picture of the week was huge: too big to fit on the screen. Checking I found that it was 1024x1500px. Huh. So I resized it to the usual 800x.

Wednesday 26 August 2015

Wednesday - Low hundreds probably, but cooling off early, due to some high clouds.

I worked on the app most of the day, made some progress, then made a mistake and tried to use 'Snapshot' again to recover. And couldn't. What a waste of time. I can see the snapshot, but I can't export it for some reason... I guess I need to take a couple of days and learn 'git'. I used to know 'sccs and 'rcs', so maybe it won't be too much time and effort.

It sucks, because I'd implemented a whole bunch of changes and wanted to give a version to S to test out on Thursday. Oh well.

In the evening we went over to the fair - my friend entered her caramels and we all watched the judging. There were a lot of entries for a walk-up competition - nine, but she placed third in a pretty competitive bunch. We met up with some other friends and wandered around and looked at stuff.

I finally got my fair corn dog, so I'm happy...

Home late and in bed at 10:30, mentally and physically tired.

Book #42 was Storm Front, by Jim Butcher. This was the first in the Harry Dresden series, a 'warlock in modern Chicago' fantasy kind of sorcerer/detective noir, but OK. I think it was adapted for the small screen and ran on TV for a season or two. There are a bunch of sequels in the system, but I had to get inter-library loan to send me the only copy that the entire LA County library had of the first book, a paperback....

Tuesday 25 August 2015

Tuesday - Supposedly it hit 100F, but there was a cloud deck and it didn't really feel like it.

I took my long walk in the morning, 9+ miles, and while my feet hurt on return there were no blisters and I wasn't prostate on the couch afterwards. The clouds and mild morning temperatures (I stated at 6:30am) helped a lot, and I had an overall pace of about 3mph, pretty good.

Then it was app work, trying to get the gesture recognized to see two simultaneous gestures, and implement them in a certain order. Harder than I expected, actually.

Monday 24 August 2015

Monday - Temps in the low 100's. Not too bad. They are saying there is a heat wave in store for Southern California this week.

Morning was mostly doing chores that didn't get done over the weekend.

Afternoon was work on the app.

Sunday 23 August 2015

Sunday - Hot in Lancaster, over 100F, but we were down in Little Tokyo, where it was mild, maybe 85F.

The drumming was nice, and they've set up the tents appropriately now, so everyone: performers and audience, has shade. The desert dwellers were amused at the emcee's exhortations to the crowd to "keep hydrated in this heat". 85F is the nighttime temperature in Lancaster...

Not much else to say. I took some pictures with the cell phone, but I need to get them off of it before posting here.

Picture of the Week

horses in the fog

Some horses on the strand, north of Morro Bay.

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