A New Baby, Rectangles, and Ma Bell

2008.06.04 in code, personal, photography, and summer of code

Of note: the three title characters are not related in any way, except they were all a part of my day yesterday!

Firstly, and most-excitingly, thanks to Google, and mom, and dad, I purchased a Nikon D80 today! I simply cannot wait until it gets here... I've managed to read literally hundreds of pages of reviews and such and I'm very excited and happy and can't wait to see what it can do. Soooooooo excited — can'tcha tell?! The D80 replaces the Nikon Coolpix 8700 (don't immediately shrug it off because it's a Coolpix — for a point 'n shoot, that camera is astounding!) that Aunt Vivian graciously handed down to me a few years ago (first picture I still have appears to be from May 6, 2006, so pretty much exactly 2 years). That day was unbelievably important to me, because — before that, I'd never had a usable camera of my own (Kodak PalmPix for the IIIxe does not count!), and I'd just been handed something that would stay more or less attached to my hip for the next two years, recording countless memories (really, my memory is somewhat sketchy, so the pictures from this camera provide a great deal of my memory for me!) — almost 4000 pictures that I kept, in the end! (probably 10x that in total, because I use burst mode a lot!) So, while I most certainly have to thank Vivian for it, I'd say that it and I had an excellent run, especially through APAD'07 and all! This (outside a nursing home in Waterloo, ON, Canada) is probably the picture from this camera that gets the most 'wow's, but if I had to pick a favorite, I'd come back with about 150 pictures!

Second thing! I've got a much more stable, git-based workflow for working on Evas now, and I've even gotten the framework of the Evas-Quartz (without GL) engine sitting there! This is where the bulk of the summer's work goes, so I'm glad to have sat down and gotten that worked out. In addition, rectangles, polygons, and lines draw and animate properly! It was really awesome the first time I got the rectangles to draw, despite the fact that moments later they were animating over top of the window decorations... Text is working, to some extent, but I'm currently using an unacceptable text API (the built-in CoreGraphics one) which is so underpowered that it doesn't even support Unicode. I've got to move to ATSUI, but that involves reading lots of documentation and learning things I've never had to deal with before. I suppose that's sort-of the point of this, though, no? That might be tomorrow's job, since I know I'm not going to get much work done whichever day my new camera comes! EDIT: apparently there's a new CoreText API in Leopard. I think I'll use that instead!

The last bit — the Ma Bell bit — is that either AT&T recently added, or I recently noticed, the ability to download your call data in CSV (per-month). This meant I could clean up my call data grapher quite well (no more screen scraping means it actually works now — they broke it in January!)... so here y'all go. Figure it out on your own! My graph is below the jump!

Comments (legacy)

Nathan

Hey Tim,

You're right, I am running 10.5. I upgraded recently and had been on 10.3 before that.

Nathan

Vivian

Happy 'bout the new baby! Can't wait to see it in person. Punkin wants his picture taken. I know you are going to enjoy the D80 - have fun!

hortont

Hi, Dan!

Yep, things are slowly moving along!

Oh! For some reason I thought the consensus was that both Nathan and I ran 10.5, and that it wasn't unreasonable to target Leopard! I'll be more careful if that's not the case!

In this case, it'll expand the text handling code by >10x, but that's not actually a /problem/!

Thanks for dropping by!

Tim

timwizard

あつい (atsui) means hot in Japanese

The more you know!

Also, get a gravatar

Carol

I would just like to state that for the record, my phone battery was dead and i had a home friend crises on my hands. I would also like to question why i would call you to talk when i could walk up three flights of stairs to magically be there? Oh yeah and i call you lots now don't I???

lol. mango juice. that was yummy though.

oh yeah...this proves teh point yet again...BLOCK SARAH

and YAYAYAYAYAYAYYAAYAYYAYAYAY NEW CAMERA! YAYAYAYAYAY!

hortont

Uhm! It would appear that in a single sitting, Carol talked to her friends more than she's talked to me forever (though this doesn't include May!)... also I believe the quantity of mango juice spilled that day was somewhat proportional to the amount of talking taking place. ahem.

dan

Sounds like you're making good progress on getting Evas to work on OSX. One quick comment, you might want to be careful on using Leopard only technology. It would probably be a good idea to be able to support older 10.x versions as well. (As, if memory serves, Nathan won't be able to test as he's running 10.3 or something.)