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WEEK 20 2015

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Thirteen
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Ago,
This
Week
2002

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2011

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2012

Two Years Ago,
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2013

One
Year
Ago
This
Week
2014

Saturday 16 May 2015

Saturday - Not much to say, just working away on things...

Amusing: the Blue Griffon people also want you to pay to create a table. I guess the plan was to monetize KompoZer. I suspect it didn't work out. I, for one, have a lot of old table templates handy...

Friday 15 May 2015

Friday - Spent the morning working on the app. Not a very productive morning, but I found another bug, so that's something...

Just mostly cleaned around the yard and house in the afternoon, did some shopping.

Books so far:

#1 The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin #2 The Raven, The Elf, and Rachel #3 Cyador's Heirs #4 As Chimney Sweepers Come To Dust #5 Dragon Weather	#6 The Dragon Society #7 Dragon Venom #8 Wicked Bronze Ambition #9 Foxglove Summer: (A Rivers of London Book 5) #10 Hawk (Vlad Taltos Book 14)
#11 Secrets of a D-List Supervillian #12 Working God's Mischief #13 Small Town Heroes #14 How To Build a Tin Canoe: Confessions of an Old Salt #15 The Eyre Affair	#16 Lost In A Good Book #17 The Well of Lost Plots #18 Something Rotten (Thursday Next #4) #19 First Among Sequels (Thursday Next #5) #20 Prospero Lost: Prospero's Daughter Book #1
#21 Prospero in Hell: Prospero's Daughter Book #2 #22 A Call to Duty (Manticore Ascendant Book #1) #23 Prospero Regained (Prospero's Daughter #3) #24 International (Monster Hunter International #1) #25 Monster Hunter Vendetta (Monster Hunter International #2)	#26 Monster Hunter Alpha (Monster Hunter International #3) #27 #28 #29 #30

Thursday 14 May 2015

Thursday - Grey and cool, a bit windy. By midday we had sprinkle's, which turned into a light rain by late afternoon. Well, any rain is a godsend right now.

G was going to come by and work in the afternoon, but the weather wasn't good enough (although the rain would have kept the dust down).

I worked on the app. I gave up on Apple's transformation function and wrote my own - elapsed time 10 minutes. I wasted the better part of a day on trying to get theirs to work reliably. I'm sure it does, if you hold your mouth right, but time is money.

No one answered my SO question. Oh well. I can finesse that bit by using multiple 'containers' it seems. Stupid, but there it is.

Apple has a grand total of two examples for UIAccessibility BTW. One is ancient and simple and deprecated, and one is new(-ish, iOS7) and shiny and complicated - and asks if it can modify my key chain and cert's when I try to run it. No, no and no!

Did I say no? NO.

Sheesh.

Tomorrow I'll work on enabling Notifications for device rotations and such. The UIView automatically picks up rotations and the view rotates properly, but the screen layout changes wrt the hardware coordinates, which means emptying the UIAccessibility Containers and refilling with the correct updated frames for the Accessibility Elements for whatever the new orientation is. Bah.

Wednesday 13 May 2015

Wednesday - A nice day, actually.

I worked on the app in the morning, and still can't get the transform from view to screen coordinates to work right. It's mathematically trivial, but it doesn't work for me and I don't know why. I can easily write my own, but any programmer worth his salt has a touch of OCD. I'll try a couple of other things, then bag it and use a method of my own, rather than the canned thing. I understand it's changed in iOS 8 anyway, so why knock myself out?

I also did a year-by-year backup, from the web site, of all my blog files. It took a while - 13+ years, at 52 separate weekly posts per year. I put them in separate yearly folders, so I could check on them individually as they downloaded. Then I burned a CD of them and the images. I've done this before, but couldn't find them...

G came by and we excavated some more, and exposed the sprinkler lines that need to be moved and capped. Tomorrow we'll get some base, sand and pavers, weather permitting.

In the evening S and I went over to the lab for the class project. So noisy... I really wish I could do After Effects at home.

Tuesday 12 May 2015

Tuesday - A nice day, coolish, with a bit of a breeze. We may get another Alaskan storm later in the week they say.

I did some shopping in the morning, and priced some yard construction materials - ouch! Traffic was insane around town - visiting just Walmart and Home Depot and Lowe's took over two hours.

G showed up around lunchtime, and we mowed and edged the front yard, mowed the back, and started excavating for the patio and path pavers. By 'we' I mean he mowed and dug and did pick-work and I supervised...

I loaned him a pair of leather boots - people using a pick in tennis shoes make me nervous.

Book #26 was Monster Hunter Alpha (Monster Hunter International #3), by Larry Correia. Heh. And I've a couple more on order from the library.

Monday 11 May 2015

Monday - Doing bills and various housekeeping things in the morning.

Class in the afternoon. I took a pass on the project for this week, it'll be due next week. We had our last lecture, and got assigned our final project, which doesn't look too hard, and isn't due until June 1. And the instructor talked a bit about the final, which sounds pretty comprehensive. Bad news for someone with a memory like mine.

Book #25 was Monster Hunter Vendetta (Monster Hunter International #2), by Larry Correia. What can I say, they're amusing. Our hero managed to annoy a Lovecraftian 'great old one' in another dimension in the first book, and it has, essentially, put a hit out on him in our dimension - so all sorts of evil creatures are after him.

No replies to the SO post.

Sunday 10 May 2015

Sunday - Another nice day. I decided to eat breakfast on the patio.

Unfortunately the guy down the street, who just moved in, is a metal 'music' fan. In particular, of that metal variant where the vocalist essentially just screams into the microphone, not words mind you - just screaming. For hours he played this stuff, starting in the morning at about 8:30am while he putzed around detailing his car. So, I didn't do much outside.

I did measure things out back, so I can gen up a landscape plan for the 'Cash-For-Grass' people at the water district.

I did two things for the app. One was to post a question on StackOverflow about the problem.

Secondly was to try putting each row in a separate container. That actually works, but it's a hack, and complicates things. though it's not really a big deal with this app. Hopefully someone from SO will respond with a simpler fix.

Book #24, was International (Monster Hunter International #1), by Larry Correia. This is kind of a silly book, but I felt like reading something silly - "monsters are real and the government gives you a bounty to kill them (and keep it secret)". Lots of violence and mayhem involving vampires, zombies, werewolves, etc.

Apparently there's a whole series.

I should have gone over to S's place and worked on my Adobe After Effects project, but didn't feel like it. I really dislike the whole program, so I'll just take a pass or something on this particular project, maybe. Or just turn it in next week.

My brain is refusing to even think about it while wrestling with iOS stuff.

Amusing. If you want an image to link to something (as I do every week with the Picture Of The Week) the Blue Griffon people want you to buy an addon. It's actually a standard HTML item, so I'm just going to hand code it from now on I guess. Unless I download the source code and patch it....

Huh. And now it won't allow an image and link at all. Pretty effed up - I guess the BG people are either evil or incompetent, maybe a bit of both. Ah well, I'll find something else eventually.

Picture of the Week

Something interesting...

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