WEEK 7 2017
Last Week-
Sun- Mon- Tue-
Wed- Thur-
Fri- Sat-
Next Week
Picture of the Week
MAIN PAGE
Fifteen
Years
Ago,
This
Week
2002, |
Fourteen
Years Ago, This Week, 2003 |
Thirteen
Years Ago, this week, 2004 |
Twelve
Years Ago, this week, 2005 |
Eleven
Years Ago, This Week, 2006
|
Ten
Years Ago, This Week, 2007
|
Nine
Years Ago, This Week, 2008
|
Eight
Years Ago, This Week, 2009
|
Seven
Years Ago, This Week, 2010
|
Six
Years Ago This Week,
2011
|
Five
Years Ago This Week,
2012 |
Four
Years Ago,
This Week,
2013 |
Three
Years Ago This Week 2014 |
Two Years Ago This Week, 2015 |
One Year Ago This Week, 2016 |
Saturday
18 February 2017
Saturday - Well, we got some good rain.
Not an immense amount, but some...
Friday -
Thursday 16 February
2017
Thursday -
Overcast, and some sprinkles late in the day. They are predicting a
huge storm - I kind of doubt it, but who really knows.
Worked away on the app all day, mostly. It's very frustrating. For one
thing UIAccessibilityElements can't have "tags", which is something I use to
keep track of stuff. But, I discovered late in the day, they do have
an "accessibilityIdentifier" which I can use to much the same effect.
I talked to Tim in the evening, and he had uncovered some of the work he'd
done circa 2010 on the NSTARS routine, and will send it to me. Dr.
Gupta also came through on the old manual (scanned), so I have a place to
start now...
Wednesday 15 February
2017
Wednesday - Another nice day.
Not much new going on. Working away on the app in the afternoon, and a
little on STARS stuff in the morning, trying to figure out why the
executable keeps dying. I'd asked Tim if he had any more info on the
NASTRAN to STARS conversion, and he's unearthed his old PC that he did some
work on it with, and will look when he has a chance.
Also Dr. Gupta is going to send me the NSTARS manual. The NASTRAN bulk
data protocol is probably the most widely spread in industry, a
*.bdf or *.nas format can be read by a number of different programs.
In the past we had used PATRAN, and now FEMAP, and have NSTARS as well, but
people are griping about the pre-processor, PREPROCS. Well, it does
date to the early 1990's, so what do people expect for free? I'm going
to look into some free or low cost alternatives - students and teachers at
colleges, the current crop of STARS users, don't usually have thousands of
dollars to drop on a program.
FreeCad comes to mind, though it's very "beta": version 0.16 I think...
Tuesday - A nice day. I took a nice 5 mile
walk to enjoy it, in the morning.
Working away on the app. Switch accessibility, particularly re-ordering
switches, is tough. It's tough to start with, and Apple makes it even
harder with their undocumented behaviors of switches and scanning, and the
general weirdness under the hood. Making some progress though.
Having some issues with STARS, the executable keeps saying that it has
expired, despite it being a version compiled the very same day...
Some people have suggested starting a STARS user group, I said I might be
interested in joining.
I had to go complain to my neighbor across the street about the continual
noise he was making. It turns out that his boss had farmed out some
work to him - making steel gates - and he has been grinding and welding and
hammering for the last couple of days. I mentioned that I was
sympathetic to the idea of making money, but he needed to be less noisy.
My neighborhood is not zoned light industrial...
Monday - A nice day.
Spent the morning helping a college student come up to speed on some
stuff, discussing a possible laptop and software for when he goes off to 4
year college this fall. Microsoft has really made their Office
365 product attractive, price-wise...
Worked on the app for the rest of the day.
I guess I forgot that I was
using the stopwatch last week.
Sunday - Shopping. Pretty tired.
I didn't do much. I did go out to the local airfield, just out of
boredom. The old 3' high block wall between the terminal and the
airfield is being replaced by a 6' fence of steel bars. They let all the
lawns outside the terminal die during last years drought - it looks like
it's actually been plowed now. Not a great place to bring a sack
lunch any more.
I also drove out to the west side, just out out curiosity - it was a nice
day and I thought I'd look at the solar panel arrays. Some were
oriented with their rotation axis going north to south. This meant
they could track the sun all day, and in particular, e more efficient late
in the afternoon in summer. They are on the gentle slope of a north
facing hill. I was critical of this, until I realized that in
midsummer it's actually a better than a level surface in late afternoon!
The actuators only work intermittently - its a bit eerie when in the midst
of a quiet field there is suddenly a weird creaking sound coming from
everywhere and slight, almost imperceptible movement for ten or fifteen
seconds...then it's quiet again.
