travels and images

WEEK 38 2016

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

Fourteen
Years
Ago,
This
Week
2002

Thirteen Years Ago, This Week, 2003

Twelve Years Ago, this week, 2004

Eleven Years Ago, this week, 2005

Ten Years Ago, This Week, 2006

Nine Years Ago, This Week, 2007

Eight Years Ago, This Week, 2008

Seven Years Ago, This Week, 2009

Six Years Ago, This Week, 2010

Five Years Ago,
This Week,
2011

Four Years Ago,
This Week,
2012

Three Years Ago,
This Week,
2013

Two
Years
Ago
This
Week
2014

One
Year
Ago
This
Week,
2015

Saturday 17 September 2016

Saturday - Not much going on.

Friday 16 September 2016

Friday - Warmer yet.

Not much to say - definitely a bit under the weather. Not to the fever and chills level, fortunately, but not very productive either. So, no walk. My goal is to weekly do two long walks, 7 miles or more each, or three small walks, 3-5 miles each. I don't seem to be managing it, for various reasons.

G was going to come over and mow the lawn, but I called that off. If he came I know I'd either be unable to go out and 'help' or feel guilty that I wasn't, or drag myself out and exacerbate the cold.

Feeling too dull to program and too awake to watch daytime TV I cleaned the house a bit, the main task be to pick up a bunch of debris that had been accumulating on the library room floor for a while.

When I was in elementary school in Arcata we lived for a while in an old farmhouse. There were a couple of unfinished rooms, and they naturally accumulated stuff, and the family took to calling them "the little jungle" and "the big jungle". I guess my garage would be "the big jungle" and the library the "little jungle". I do make periodic efforts to organize things, but it's hard not to just move stuff about, "churning" as a friend says.

Amusingly, as I was putting books onto shelves I found a completely unread book on Android app programming. I guess I must have bought it a couple of years ago (Friends of Library sale maybe?) and forgotten about it. I set it and a couple of books on JAVA aside, I might need them soon.

Unless we decide to blow off the Android side of things. It'd be a lot of work to translate things to a different OS.

JAVA is different from Objective-C, although they are kissing cousins, and of course the libraries they call for UX are completely different. Different, but like convergent evolution they have to accomplish the same tasks so there is also a lot of similarity. They have to detect touches, pans, pinches - and have to display text, images, video, and so on. There are only so many possible (sane) ways to do that.

The feeling I get, surfing the web and looking at articles, is that the Android package, the IDE and the rest, isn't as well put together as Xcode. On the other hand, I don't find Xcode all that well put together either (see the issues earlier in the week on the debugger) so maybe it's not a big deal.

There are options for cross-platform coding, programs and companies that say they can help: Xamarin is the one that comes to my mind first. I'm not sure how useful they are, I'll have to check.

But I'm sure some knowledge of the underpinnings will be needed.

Thursday 15 September 2016 Thursday - Warmer, nice.

I did my taxes, then took them over and dropped them into the mailbox. While I was out an about I ran a bunch of errands, to Lowe's, to Home Depot, to Walmart, to the library.

I needed some masonry screws for hanging a ledger board on the block wall, to hold yard implements. I needed thistle seed for the bird feeder, and some kitty litter. I also had a couple of house keys made - I was down to my last key. And so on - small tasks that have been building up for a while. Anytime one drives anywhere in Lancaster you can count on it taking 45 minutes at a minimum, so best to do them all while out and about.

When I got home I took a nice long nap. And woke up late, and sniffling. I am apparently coming down with a summer cold or something. Bah.

S called, the kids like the new version of the app. There was a change I forgot to make (but it's not technically a 'bug') and I'll have to fix that in the next day or so. It's a UX thing, and we'll probably try several things on that level and see what works best with the kids.

S says the parents are getting impatient for it to be available on the app store. Which, after a couple thousand hours of development, off and on for the last several years, is good to hear.

That said, I actually didn't get a lot done on the app today - feeling dull and a bit under the weather.

Wednesday 14 September 2016

Wednesday - Cool, but no wind. Maybe 85F maximum?

Indeed, I went for a walk and pushed it a bit. I didn't want to take too much time (that app won't write itself), so I made sure to average 3mph over about 5 miles, which worked up a good sweat despite the cooler weather. I'd left my straw hat behind and was wishing I hadn't by the time I was done.

Another "found CD", this time an actual CD.

Ground away on the app some more in the afternoon. I had some UILabels with text, but wanted the text margins inset. It turns out that the vanilla UILabel won't do that. You can go to the much more complicated Attributed Text stuff, which is admittedly kind of cool, or you can (it turns out) just override the UILabel and add insets to your own version with one line of code. Which is what I did. And it looks good. I also edited and added some artwork, and changed some text, and got rid of a slew of NSLOG statements, which have to be slowing the tablets down.

I let S know the newest version is ready, and she'll drop off the old tablet and pick up the newer one before work tomorrow.

I realized suddenly that quarterly taxes are due tomorrow. Bah.

Tuesday 13 September 2016

Tuesday - Cool and windy, but not as bad as Monday.

Still grinding away on the app. By dint of pure sweat and repetition - no genius involved - I've reduced the logic from about four pages to less than one, and it seems to work OK. Was it Fermat who said "Had I more time this proof would be much shorter"?

S said she pulled out the iPad at work, and the kid who had issues with the buggy version last week looked horrified, so she relented and they did other things. But the current version should be now pretty close to bug free, and the kids seem to really be taking a shine to the working levels, so I'll have to get it to her soon.

It needs work still, but the logical and interaction errors in playing are (I think) fixed.

I still cannot get the symbol table to be read by the Xcode debugger - telling me there is at error at, sat, 0H22e400ac isn't of any practical use. Hence there is a slew of NSLog statements everywhere, which I'll have to remove at some point. Breakpoints work, which is something, I guess.

I imagine there is a preprocessor switch to allow one to simply negate them before processing, but I'm not really that familiar with how to do it in Xcode. I guess I should look it up.

Book #44 was The Swarm, by Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston. Johnston was, in fact, a co-author on the other three as well. I'm too lazy to go back and update the mentions from earlier (and after all he's not the lead author and it is the universe that Card created some years ago): but credit where it's due.

This is another prequel, officially this would be the first book covering the start of the Second Formic War, not the fourth book of the First Formic War as in the last three I read. Meh. Like Hambly, Card is a good enough writer to make even not-very-interesting stuff worth a read.

I did rent and stream the movie Ender's Game (Formic War #3?)from Amazon over the weekend, btw. It was OK, about as true to the book as it's possible to be.

Monday 12 September 2016

Monday - Cold and very windy. The upduct that I'd installed a few days back was banging around like crazy, very annoying. It was 25 cents at a yard sale ($45 new), and was in perfect condition except for (you guessed it) the "close" switch. I made a new one out of a bit of old coat hanger, so all is well now.

Working away on the app. One level, in particular, is giving me fits. So it goes.

S came by and we finished resizing, and all of the sewing on the sail cover, and installation of the grommets. It looks pretty snazzy, but we need to shorten the zipper and add the bolt rope at the mast end, and it's done.

Sunday 11 September 2016

Sunday - Warm. Cooler than it has been. They are predicting some sort of front to blow in next week.

I didn't do much of anything in the afternoon.

I picked up the current Formic War prequel, but to give myself a break I read Book #43, Barbara Hambly's fourth novel on vampires, The Kindred of Darkeness. Not much new happens in this book, the plot and character's are much the same as the first three.

Kudo's to Hambly for portraying vampires as (mostly) bad guys, but I'm glad it was a county library book and I didn't pay (directly) for it. Hambly is a good writer, so it's not unpleasant, per se, but one feels a bit used at the end.

I guess I'll see if the library has book #5.

Picture of the Week

An old stump in the field.

An old stump in the desert, likely an alfalfa field years ago.

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