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WEEK 15 2017

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Saturday 15  April 2017
Saturday - Did a few chores around the house, lunch with S&R.

I gave S an iPad with some of the new stuff on it, so she can review and see what needs changing.  We're missing the iPad Mini - I thought she had it, she thinks I have it, so we'll both need to search around a bit.  All the cleaning I did several weeks ago has me not knowing where everything is...

Friday 14 April 2017
Friday - Working away on things. The app.  I'm playing around a bit with FreeCad which is interesting...and frustrating. It's sort of a poor man's Pro-Engineer or Catia, but very beta...

Taxes, for another thing.  I needed some deductions, got them, sent them to the accountant, whose computers then crashed...  So right now I don't actually know how much I owe.  The Obamacare fine can't be zeroed, for one thing. So, hundreds and hundreds of dollars illegally collected by a non-constitutional law.  Sheesh.


Book #15 was Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge, by John Ringo and Larry Correia.  I think Ringo got permission to write a novel set in the 'Monster Hunter International' world created by Correia.  It's pretty well done, though the protagonist is a bit of a Mary Sue. 


firewood
About half a cord of wood now.  I'll get the boys to split the bigger stuff.
Thursday 13 April 2017
Thursday - Some sun, occasional high clouds, and a great deal of wind.

Indeed, I was in the office in the morning, working on the app, and it was 25mph and gusting to 30mph, roaring under the eaves. 

And the nut across the street was outside again, cursing and swearing loud enough to be heard over the storm and through my closed doors and windows and over the radio. Fortunately he left after an hour or so of vocal exercises, which is nice when one is trying to concentrate on something like the app.

I worked on the app all day.  This was a continuation of yesterday's stuff, fixing some bugs and refactoring the whole Reward Screen thing.  By 5pm I was mentally exhausted but it's working pretty well.

I still need to do a bit of cruft removal, to make sure the new object is the thing always doing the work, that was one of the things that bit me yesterday, some old inline stuff was still active and interacting with the new stuff. As I pulled the cruft out and ran testcases things would break in strange ways...

And then add in my new touch-and-hold algorithm for the buttons. It works great for temporarily fading the Reward Screen, so it should be good for buttons as well.

And add in a no-touch barrier screen during dealing animations.  If you move something during an animation the code gets very confused.  S says, after reviewing a bunch of user reviews therapist apps, that the Number 1 thing causing people to abandon or not buy an app is it crashing or working wrong, so...important.

So, things to do before a Beta release:

Other stuff for commercial release:


By the way, Budd's been very helpful during this persnickety process:

Budd helps with the programming
It's a form of extreme programming. 
Guessing which parts I typed and which parts the cat typed is left as an exercise to the reader :-)


Tuesday night I washed and soaked some small red beans, and all day Wednesday had them in the slow cooker.  I added a couple of leftover brat's, a ham hock, a couple of Hebrew National dogs, an entire onion, an entire bell pepper, and a bunch of seasoning mix.  By mid-day the house smelled wonderful, and dinner was pretty awesome (if I do say so myself).  A lot more flavor than last time, although I actually forgot to add the pack of gumbo seasoning I'd bought.

This evening I had some left-over's on rice, still darned good!  I also have frozen about four small baggies worth - my freezer is getting pretty well stocked these days!


I've been wanting the equivalent of Google Sky for a while on my iPhone, an augmented reality type of thing.  It was always fun on my old Android devices.  It finally occurred to me to ask my brother Bob what he used.  He texted that he used SkyGuide by fifthStarLabs.  It was only $3, so I downloaded it and tried it.  Seems like what I want.  Indeed, after about five minutes it notified me that there was an ISS overpass happening in five minutes, so I went outside and watched that.  Woot!

Wednesday 12 April 2017

Wednesday - A nice day.  Glen came by in the morning and turned over the vegetable beds for me, added in some chicken manure and potting soil.

He found a bizarre looking grub in the bed while doing that and showed it to me.  I assumed it was a dead tomato worm but when I described it to S she said it was a Japanese Beetle, very damaging to plants and lawns, and what I had sprayed for a couple of years ago. Yuck.


Ground away on updating the app all day.  I wanted to work in the garage and yard, but really need to finish things with the app and get it out to Beta.

Trying to add the new stuff, and "objectifying" it at the same time. Sigh. Still, it was mostly working by 6pm. the 'completion' block stuff doesn't really do exactly what you'd think, and it always takes a bit more work than I estimate to make it work right. In general messing with the animation queue and its timing is always a bear.

The compiler was giving weird error messages, so I spent some of my valuable time verifying that it was an Apple screw up in parsing their Framework libraries.  It's been around since at least last September, multiple OS releases.  Fortunately it doesn't affect the code, just a warning of duplicated Framework libraries for handling images.  Amusing to see the Apple can't get their own stuff to work right...

Tuesday  11 April 2017
Tuesday - Worked on researching things in the morning, then coded up a little sample app with the things I want, and got them to work OK.  Tomorrow is the fun part, adding them to the spaghetti code that I call an app...


I screwed up and left my car on the street, on a street cleaning day, $38 down the drain for a ticket fine. Bah.


Ran out of whiskey, started on that gifted bottle of bourbon.  A very different taste, I'm not sure I like it, but it's very different from the whiskey, a much stronger flavor though the alcohol content is 80 proof, same as the whiskey.

Monday 10 April 2017
Monday - Reasonable weather.  Windy now and then.

S wants a different transition for the "reward screen", apparently the current transition, which moves off screen, is too distracting for some kids, they keep asking "Where did it go?".  Perfectly reasonable, really.  So we'll just fade away, kids watch a lot of TV and are used to that.  And once again, I need to fix the long press progress animation. Also add a "touch and hold" option to something, which Apple can't be bothered to include as a standard UI element....

In other words, lots of looking at impenetrable documentation and aged and incomplete tutorials...  Yay.

Sunday 9 April  2017
Sunday - Another warm day. A really nice day actually, temperatures about 70F, just a light breeze now and then.

Doing more firewood stuff.  The boys are available, so we all met up at S's house and used an axe and some wedges to split the huge boles that were left there by her tree trimmer, and used the chainsaw to cut up a bunch of other stuff.  [And by 'we' I mean 'them'!] A nearby vacant house had some dead limbs in the drive and S had gotten permission from the owner to collect that, so we cut that up as well. And policed the smaller debris there as well.

Then we brought it over to my house and stacked it, though they kept some of the bigger stuff and will split it and return it to me at some point.  Now that the fireplace season is over I have plenty of wood...


That pretty much took up the entire day, so I paid the boys, went in and took a long hot shower and some ibuprofen.

Picture of the Week


Windmills to the north of the Poppy Reserve
Windmills on the slopes of the Tehachapi's, looking north from the Poppy Reserve.

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