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WEEK 42 2016

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Fourteen
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Ago,
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2002

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Saturday 15 October 2016

Saturday - Another nice day, in the low 80's.

It was a friends birthdays earlier in the week, so I gave him a collection of Ramone's CD's I'd found at a yard sale a while back, and a new straw heat. His was actually older and in worse shape than mine, but held together by a pound or so of hot glue. He likes to wear it when we go out to lunch, much to his wife's displeasure, so in the interests of marital harmony I got him a hat when I got mine.

Which I've been trying to do for a while.

A good 'Dorfman' hat on Amazon is $25. If you go down to the flea market in Palmdale on a Saturday you'll find the market is, despite it's internet page and big painted sign, NOT OPEN. However, on the way back there is a Big 5 franchise which, unlike it's Lancaster sibling, actually has decent straw hats that fit my head. And his.

I had been looking up hats on Amazon and the web without much luck. It turns out that my hat size sits exactly on the border between Large and Extra Large. I've always had trouble, even with ball caps, getting a size that fits me and now I know why. Hats in Large and Extra Large are generally sized for the middle of their ranges, so Large were always a bit too small and Extra Large always too large. I measured my head, and now I know my hat size in inches and centimeters.

But I knew, from previous experience, that Dorfman Extra Large always fit... I can grit my teeth and pay $12 (I wear them out and get my moneys worth), but I refuse to pay $25 plus shipping.

His mother and daughter were in town, so we all went out to a huge late lunch, then the kids had to head down to LA for some wedding stuff, and us adults all went home for nice long naps...

Book #46 was Pathfinder, by Orson Scott Card. This was a library e-book that I'd downloaded, but not read, because I realized it was a YA. It was almost due and I casually looked into it, then ended up reading it. It involved interstellar space travel, AI's and a different kind of time travel, while adhering to the hoary old 'boy who is really a prince, but raised in rural seculusion' genre.

Friday 14 October 2016

Friday - Nice weather again. Supposedly we have weather blowing in, but other than some occasional clouds and a bit of wind we haven't seen much of anything.

Working on the app.

Today was "Make a new branch with Git from previous Commit Day", and it would have been a disaster if I wasn't a paranoid type. I backed eberything up, saved stuff in Xcode, closed the project, quit Xcode, went into the command prompt, made a branch in the CLI for the specific commit. Then opened Xcode and navigated to the new commit - and it all worked.

Except that when I went back to the main branch Xcode popped up a fatal "folder not found error". It had, somehow, deleted the entire project. Ascii files, git files, images, source code...all...utterly...gone. Not even in the trash.

I didn't think my respect for Apple could decline, but there it is. Bunch of amateurs pretending to be professionals.

So, I restored stuff from backup, and I'm fine, but I quit for the day. Hey, 4pm on a Friday is quitting time.

Thursday 13 October 2016 Thursday - Nice weather again.

Vacuumed downstairs in the morning. It really needed it.

I had G come over and do some chainsaw work in the morning. I got this firewood for free, so I can't really complain that the gardener cut it into three and four foot lengths - it would naturally be quicker and saved money for the person paying him (not me).

G got most of it done: I'd said "two or three hours" but it was done in one. He came by again in the afternoon, after school, and picked up some of the larger logs to take home and use his father's hydraulic splitter on.

I probably need to get some wood ordered, what I have is about two-three weeks worth, maybe, for cold evenings. Fruit tree wood burns hot and quick. I asked G where his family got their wood and he said "Lee's Bee's", but that they stopped selling this year. Sigh.

Between the vacuuming and the visits the cats were freaked out and hid under the bed until about 5pm.

I did some research on using Git with downloadable tools. It's doable - but it means keeping your project on someone else's server, in the cloud, in clear text. This seems to be true for the two biggest players, GitHub and SourceTree at any rate. There are ways to finesse this, but it really means extra work, and a slip of the finger on the keyboard would accidentally post everything.

Unfortunately, as a commercial product, source is not something I want to made publicly available.

You can imagine, if you want, me laughing aloud in disbelief and rage, and walking away from the computer until I calmed down. For the second time in two days.

Why is it so hard to do something so simple? Source code control stuff dates back to the 1980's I think, it should be an absolutely mature technology. [Update: SCCS was available in 1972!] Then there was CVS, and RCS, and a multitude of others. Git itself has been around since 2005, there is absolutely no excuse for Apple and Xcode not to support it, in its entirety.

So, back to command line stuff. I need to back up the project first. I do it every Monday, manually, and there's a daily backup, but better safe than sorry.

I assume that Xcode will read any changes to the local repository made by the CLI, just as if it had made them itself...but, you know, it's Apple...I'll have to waste my time and effort checking it on a dummy project first.

Wednesday 12 October 2016

Wednesday - Warm, but not crazy.

I decided to chainsaw some of the firewood in the morning, while it was cool. It turns out that while cool it was also 53% humidity. Gahhh. And that my back wasn't really up to bending, lifting and sawing. I did about an hours worth, then decided discretion was the better part of valor and texted G:

"Looking for Cesear's Firewood Service, motto: "We Come, We Saw, We Invoice". He is a history buff, he got it, and can come by tomorrow.

Working away on the app. I got the delayed animation to (sort of) work, but I've made so many changes in the last couple of week that I think some of my "fixes" are stepping on each other, so the 'directions' to the animation are bad. Some of the code is good, some not so much.

So, I figured I'd go back to the last "good" commit, start a new branch, and move over just the changes I liked.

Only...I couldn't figure out how.

Because, in Xcode you can't. You can only branch from the latest commit. I know, that's insanely stupid and mostly defeats the purpose of SCC systems, but that's what they do.

You can imagine, if you want, me laughing aloud in disbelief and rage, and walking away from the computer until I calmed down.

I think I can probably manually edit the repository to generate a branch - you have to manually create it after all, but what a pain.

I think I'll look into some of the tools and packages that can manage this stuff outside of Xcode.

Tuesday 11 October 2016

Tuesday - Nice.

Not much to say, working away on stuff.

Monday 10 October 2016

Monday - Warm but nice.

Working away on the app, trying various things to get the threads, if that's the problem, in synch.

Sunday 9 October 2016

Sunday - Cool and pleasant in the morning.

I did a bit of grocery shopping in the morning, the usual items.

The "un-wellness" I've been feeling is actually an infected molar. Ouch.

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

Picture of the Week

Solar panels in the west valley.

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