No
app work, as it's a weekend and the hands need recuperation time. I did
talk to S over lunch, and we hashed out some more ideas on how to do
negatives properly, so that's an advance.
A few small household
chores. The new vacuum filters arrived, I ordered them last week when
the heretofore excellent Hoover bagless started having trouble picking
things up. But this is not a vacuuming weekend, yay!
I went to yard sales with S&R in the morning. I didn't get
much, but it was something to do, and I'm feeling restless.
In
the afternoon and evening I didn't feel well for some reason. We went
to the Chinese buffet in Palmdale for lunch, which has pretty decent
food (for a buffet), but maybe there's a lot of MSG in it or something.
Anyway, I felt a bit feverish and achy and didn't go over to my friends
for Pizza night.
I think that's happened with that buffet
before, but it's still better than the one in Lancaster, where I
couldn't even make it out the door afterwards before the stomach upset
started.
Friday
23
January2015
Friday
- Middling weather.
Worked
on the app for a bit, but was feeling uninspired. Also it was noisy
out. So I did a bunch of documentation stuff, with the idea of being
quickly able to re-create the app, or a similar app, as needed. At four
pages and 25 steps of documentation I still don't have everything in...
But I do have some new ideas on how to handle things, so that's good.
Book #5 was
Dragon Weather,
by Lawrence Watt-Evans. This was another book on my shelf
that I
can't remember ever reading, the paperback edition of 2000. It is
fantasy - sword and sorcery stuff - but not particularly romantic. You could
think of it as an early precursor to GRRM's Game of Thrones
books, if not quite as unrelentingly violent. I enjoyed it enough to
put holds on the sequels through the public library.
Jimmy, relaxing. Stay
classy man...
Thursday 22 January2015
Thursday
- Gray and overcast again. Glad I got out to see the comet last night!
Kind of a slow day, just working away on a few app related things, not
much to say there.
I
took my usual walk, 4.25 miles, at about 11am, and averaged about
3.2mph, which is good for me. I have an urge to up the mileage, but
it's best not to rush these things, perhaps next week I'll add a mile.
So far legs and feet are feeling OK about things.
After that I
need to increase the distance still more, and also need to start
carrying weights, to mimic a pack, and start some climbing and
descending work. Maybe a mountain hike every week?
I can't take it too
easy, getting into shape, because crossing the Grand Canyon is a real
workout.
Assuming we take the Bright
Angel Trail
down to the campground near near the Phantom Ranch, that's about 9.9
miles. It's about a 4,000' elevation change, and typically you assume a
1,000' elevation change is about as much work as a mile, so the one way
exertion is about 14 miles worth.
Assuming we take the North
Kaibab Trail
up, it's 13.8 miles and nearly 6,000', call it 19 miles of exertion. It
looks like a bear. The good part is that when you get to the top you're
done, unlike the first leg...
Wednesday 21 January 2015
Wednesday -
Sunny and mild, great weather.
I
worked on the app for a bit, switches and the model/KVO stuff that I
was talking about the other day. I'm not sure I want to use
notifications, but I have a better idea of how to do things I think.
Went out to lunch with S.
She's struggling with coming up with a user interaction strategy that
satisfies her. Essentially she wants to avoid "matching" and also avoid
actions that are antithesis to the prompts, which is difficult with
negation topics.
I've stuff to research, so it isn't too big a deal, we'll get there.
In
the evening I went out and finally saw Comet Lovejoy with binoculars,
then took a few pictures with the T3i. It was directly overhead, no
more than 5 degrees from the zenith at 7:30pm I'd say, and while pretty
faint still noticeably green.
I
did this observing from my side yard, crouched down so as to avoid the
direct glare of street lights, and can't say that I saw the tail, just
the comet head. Still, that's something. I did remember to take a 'dark
frame' so maybe I'll see if I can 'stack' some of the shots and get a
noise free picture with a bit of tail in it.
Tuesday 20 January 2015
Tuesday
- Gray and overcast. I actually checked the weather site to see if it
was going to rain...
Just to add insult to injury my brother emailed to say that up in cold
and wet Hyperborea he
was able to see the comet. It's already passed closest approach to the
Earth and is heading away again. Bah.
Work
on the app continues. I don't know what's happening with the memory
leak, I can't seem to replicate it in a small program, so for now I'll
just ignore it. I even tried putting in different types of seques, and
adding all 48 sound tracks without replicating it.
Working Properly:
You can clearly see the base memory usage, the "staircase" allocation
of memory for three sounds, and the deallocation and
return to base memory usage when the game page is left.
It's not the final version anyway - for that I'll make an entirely new
version from a clean slate with whatever massive changes S wants. When I
start that I'll keep a careful eye on stuff, profiling each step of the
way to check for this kind of problem.
Meanwhile I have other tasks to accomplish, using switches
and cleaning up the code otherwise.
I
spent quite a bit of time reading up about MVC layouts, in
particular KVO methodology because I want to move code out of the View
Controller and into the Model. But it's so baroque - I suspect that the
inventor of OO programming was a descendant of Rube Goldberg.
Case
in point: lets say you have an app with two light bulbs displayed.
Whichever you touch turns on, and the other turns off. Simple, right?
Over at Programmer's
StackExchange someone gave an example of what the code layout
would look like:
And remember, this is just a diagram, not the pseudo-code or code
itself!
In
other news I received an urgent message from an old client, apparently
they were having problems with the time-card system I'd come up with
back in 2010 or whatever. I took a look, looked at the screen shot of
the code during execution, and was pretty sure it was an data input
error. After we talked the client was able to verify that, so
everything was cool.
Actually I'm a bit impressed by my old
self's attention to detail - I was able to zoom in on the exact section
that was giving trouble, because of a printed debug page option I'd put
in, and in fact the error was caught by the section of code dedicated
to trapping erroneous input data.
For writing in VBScript, it was a decent job, if I do say so myself.
Monday 19 January 2015
Monday
- Another reasonably nice day out.
Back
to work on the app. I'm trying to track down a memory leak, and it
appears to be a system cache of the memory set aside for the audio
tracks (a 32K Malloc for each sound track, each time the game page is
loaded). I fiddled around with Instruments,
Apple's logger and profiler, and could see the extra instances being
allocated and not being let go. But, as far as I can tell, I'm doing
things right.
I'm using ARC, and these are Apples standard
sound object players, so they should be released by the OS when I leave
the game page and view, but they aren't. Since they are (supposedly)
controlled by ARC I can't even do an explicit "[soundplayer01 release];"
without generating an error message. At the (online magazine) Dr. Dobbs
a writer
mentioned that iOS7 has a very similar 32K cached memory leak in the
network stack allocation, and in my code the location of the sound file
is described by a URL, so maybe that has something to do with it.
I
created a couple of small audio apps using almost exactly the same
methodology, but they act properly, so I'm scratching my head. It
occurred to me that I used a slightly different release mechanism for
the game page in the small test cases, a modal 'dismiss' rather
than an 'unwind'
- I'll fiddle with that tomorrow and see if it makes a difference.
It
was actually clear in the evening, but I wanted to get to bed on time,
because I'd been up late the last couple of days, so I didn't get out
comet viewing.
Sunday 18 January 2015
Sunday
- Not a lot to say. Our mild weather continues, without any storms in
sight.
I didn't do anything on the app, time to rest my hands.
I did go out for a nice walk in the afternoon, 4.25 miles, since I
didn't get out on
Thursday.
Hazy night skies are continuing, so no comet viewing. It's the dark of
the moon too, and it would otherwise be perfect (except for the seven
or eight streetlights within 300' of my house).
Picture of
the Week Photo Notes: A snow
covered Reno, Jan 2005.
