WEEK 49 2016
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Saturday - Clear and cool.
My friends went to yard sales, and picked up a couple of propane cylinders
for me for a dollar each, yay! I took them to lunch and then went home
and kept on working - garage cleaning and such - until about 4pm.
One garage task was to collect all my emergency gear together in one spot -
someone recently gave me a used but in good condition Boy Scout travel
hardcase/bin/luggage thing a while back that would be perfect for storing
this sort of stuff. This gear is just some old propane camp stuff from
yard sales, a lantern, a BBQ, and a heater. The BBQ and the heater
didn't seem to work - but the lantern did.
PSA #1: After you've run a propane
lantern for a while to test it, then turned it off, do NOT
reach over and test that little knurled nut on top that looks loose
with your fingers. (You know, that
little nut that was just 1.5" from a 2300F flame for the last 15 minutes...)
PSA #2: If you let go in a hurry and
pinch a block of ice between those careless fingers for half an hour you
might manage to avoid any blisters. It will still hurt.
PSA #3: If you relate this story to
a friend that was trained as a blacksmith you should expect gales of
laughter, not sympathy!
Stupid, stupid, stupid. My first
tool related accident in a while.
Later I 'tested' the nut with the block of ice - and it cut through the ice
like a hot knife through butter even after thirty minutes of cooling. Yikes.
Not something you would want to fall over on anything flammable or
combustible - and I don't have the little metal base stand.
The other two gizmo's seem to have bad electric ignition's. I'll get some
BBQ lighters (I've been lighting the fireplace with a candle lately) and see
if I can get them to work that way. One might also have a bad
regulator, I didn't hear any flow from it.
I'm not sure you actually need
a heater with this guy around...
Knocked off around 4pm. It was a long week.
Friday - Sunny but
cool. Standard Lancaster winter weather.
I went over in the morning and had the stitches taken out of my mouth.
A little local anesthetic, and few minutes in the chair, and voila! I can
start brushing there again, yay! In a few months I have to go back and
they'll do an x-ray and see how the bone is healing and filling the voids in
the jaw, but everything looks ok right now.
Worked on the app in the afternoon.
It's truly winter.
Driving over to the dentist's I saw the local Sheriff department people
performing their yearly rite of rousting the homeless out from the dry
wash/storm drain that runs through the west side (it may actually be
Amaragosa Creek, I'm not sure).
Currently dry, I should say. People hear 'desert'
and they think 'warm and dry', but
winter temperatures average a good 20F below freezing every night here, and
what rain we do get sleets off the hard packed desert sand and is directed
into the dry washes and storm drains, where it would wash anyone anyway -
and probably kill them.
So here, and in many other places in Southern California, the local police
make a pass in late fall and make the inhabitants leave, and take vast piles
of moldering old clothes, beddings, cardboard boxes and what not to the
dump.
Some of the homeless get the hint and leave for warmer and safer places, but
some come back to live under the bridges a few days later. And a few
don't make it through the winter, every year...
Looks like a couple of punchlist inspection tasks are left to do down in
Ventura county, I'll probably hit them Monday or Tuesday next week.
The remaining sites never called back, but we'll just show up and start
working anyway, they've had a month to get their act together.
In theory there's a check waiting for me as well, yay!
Thursday 1 December
2016
Thursday -
Clear and windy.
Still working on the app. Coming along though. The overlay logic
is so much fun...particularly when it starts getting into the animation
portions and the animations start 'stepping' on each other. Yah.
Also started looking at Windows 10 tablets online - very pricy stuff.
I have a Win10 laptop, but it doesn't have a touch screen. I talked to
my friend T about this, and he said
waiting on the purchase until after Xmas might be the best course. Which
makes sense.
While out and about I stopped into Staples to see what they had. And
they seemed to have nothing... Well, almost nothing. Lots of
inexpensive Android tablets, a couple of mid-range iPads, and then off by
itself in a separate display: a
Windows Surface 4 for $850. Without keyboard, case, or
pen. And the wrong literature, pamphlets that were for an older model
Surface 3. Sheesh.
However, as I was walking out I noticed that one of the small Dell laptops
said 'convertible 2-in-1'.
And stopped to look at it. It runs Windows 10, has a touch screen, and
that screen rotates 360 degrees to lay flush with the back of the laptop -
essentially creating a heavy but functional Win10 tablet from the
laptop. For just under $300 (and that's the Staples
price!) that might be the way to go. Sizes range from 11" to 15",
though the bigger ones are expensive.
I'll have to check reviews and stuff. The Dell
Inspiron 11" Model 3168 was what Staples had in stock.
I'll have to check and see if Win10 for low end laptops is the same as Win10
on tablets.
I asked Dave if he still had that horrible Vulcan Win8 tablet that I tried
using last Spring, but he said it died and he tossed it. I'm not
surprised - it had (deservedly IMO) one-star and zero-star ratings on
Amazon!
Wednesday 30 November
2016
Wednesday - Clear and cool, occasionally
windy.
Working away on the app. The cards now have three
separate overlays that we need to have independently appear and disappear at
certain times. So the logic is getting strange & convoluted
again.
I kind of kick myself for not starting with a state machine approach, but I
just didn't expect it to be this
complicated. It's up to about 20k LOC, including whitespace and
comments. I suspect a professional ObjC programmer could do it in 5k
or 7k, but hey, it's my first app.
S sent me some sample artwork for the new overlays, so I need to get the
logic working so she can try them out. She also found a couple of
bugs/oversights, at least one of which I thought I'd fixed and taken off the
punchlist. Sigh.
Tuesday - Working away on things, not much to
say.
Monday - Cool and windy. Another fire in the
evening.
I called a client for the District and tried to set up an audit appointment.
No call back....
I somehow got sidetracked into putting Microsoft's Visual Studio on the new
(did I buy it in March?) Win10 laptop. This was interesting. I
thought I could put the Xamarin product on there, but apparently not.
Visual Studio Community is the Windows thing, as opposed to Xamarin Studio
for OSX.
It's free, and huge. I mean
Presumptive-President-Presumptive-Elect Trump yuggge.
There must be two dozen or more supported languages and targets (no FORTRAN
though, and, while it was there, F#
is not a stripped down FORTRAN,
I checked). It took a couple of hours to install, almost
install actually, as it choked and died at the last minute on some
obscure ****.net run time library issue. Fortunately my 30+ years of
programming experience on a vast variety of mainframes, mini-computer,
microcomputers and tablets came to my aid:
I shut off the PC, then turned it
back on and tried installing again from the same download.
And it worked.
So, with all this installation going on I eventually realized that no
Windows Updates had been loaded in months!
Yay!! I mean Boo!?!?
I guess I mean: WTH?
This is a known issue it turns out. The answer is to go into the
command prompt window (as administrator), shut down the update services,
delete vast numbers of partially filled update folders, restart the services
and wait for six months + of updates and service packs to download
again. Then apply them. Then reboot. Then apply the ones that
didn't apply the first time. Then reboot. Then download some more and apply
them....and reboot...
When done everything seems pretty spiffy. Except that Task Manager was
reporting a single CPU working, for a dual core machine. This I
eventually traced to a messed up TM, as there were in fact two i5 cores and
each can hyper-thread; and if you hold your mouth just right and click in
the right spot you can see four
cores to appear in TM. Or there's a DOS prompt command one can use.
Yay.
Then, on the advice of a friend, I uninstalled the expired version of
McAfee, and installed the Windows Defender Antivirus and Firewall (and
updates!!!), and MalwareBytes Anti-Malware and finally, since it was free
for 'Cyber Monday' their MalwareBytes Anti-Exploits. Yay.
Sooooooo many reboots.......
That said, after battling with it, the bones of the old Windows I know and ....love....
....is that the word?...despise,loathe?...... show through and I
feel a bit more comfortable. I was lost without the START menu.
If I was paying a computer tech the labor time would have actually cost more
than this Walmart/HP laptop.
Sunday - Cool, windy, and wet. I need to
remove the downstairs window a/c unit, it causes a bit of a draft, but am
waiting until it's a lot less windy and cold. That may take a while,
so I'll do it next week regardless.
A bit of shopping in the morning. There were just a few things I
needed, what with last weeks shopping and holiday feasts and left-overs.
I also did some clearing out of the fridge - stuff has been building up in
there and it needed cleaning out. S gave me a bunch of home-made tamales, so
the freezer space was of the utmost importance...
I went ahead and downloaded Xamarin
Studio for the Mac. This is to get access to a C# compiler and
Mono for android development. It is also claimed, by Xamarin (a wholly
owned Microsoft subsidiary since this summer), that one can write for IOS as
well. Hmmmm. Maybe.
I read five or six chapters in a C# book. It's very C and C++-ish,
which is good. The book was a bit 'odd', and I finally looked at the
publication date - 2002! Almost fifteen years old. And obviously aimed
at the Visual Basic programmers of that time.
Well, languages don't change quickly, and I try to stick to the basic stuff,
so it's not really lost time. I have lots of newer books, and Xamarin
has a bunch of on-line tutorials for their stuff.
And I was looking at Powershell on the Win10 laptop (brought up the IDE and
did a few small things), and it's very C# derived, so it's all profitable
studying. I think M$ is downplaying VBScript, and even CMD.exe, and
going with Powershell as the base shell for Windows 10 in the future.
