Still learning Japanese (again)

So started this morning fixing up a couple of Android issues on the current project. Spent quite a long time hunting for a crash bug. Found it in the end. We’ve decided not to do any further work on the concept game after everyone who’d tried it decided it actually wasn’t a very interesting game. This happens, quite often in the industry. What you think is a great game concept on paper, may just not work and make an interesting game. It’s nothing to get annoyed or upset about, but best to spot these things early on. You can always reuse bits and pieces of it to limit the amount of time wasted. Still, new upcoming project is a real real big one if it goes ahead properly, a hell of a lot of work, but very interesting.

Walked the dog. We had a nice long walk today as she needs to lose a bit of weight (don’t we all). Finally booked a hygienist appointment at the dentist. Had to lie a bit about my last check-up date, no doubt they will moan somewhat about that tomorrow. I will then probably have to go back later next week and spend a bloody fortune.

Did Body Combat, no Sarah tonight as she has a cold. I try not to do colds. Did some more work, more tidying up Android. Then did some more Japanese course work stuff. It’s coming on, lots of flash cards, it will come.

I whipped the top off, all looked fine to me

So looked into a release build issue on Android, Java functions were vanishing when being called from C++, turned out to be proguard causing them to be scrambled. Then spent the rest of the day finishing off my tcp/ip implementation. All done and tested and running on iOS, Android and PC.

Walked the dog. Then curiosity got the better of me so I got some thin screwdrivers out and prized off the heating timer cover. To my disappointment it all appeared to be wired correctly. Also my initial guess that the yellow wire of one of the four cores was connected directly to the boiler was correct, so the pump overrun cable was all fine. So it looks like the timer is buggered and the heat output is always live, basically the relay is shot. I need to test this more and also test that the 3 port and the tank stat are working correctly as well. If the timer is gone then I may very well replace it with on in the airing cupboard to get it out of the kitchen. If possible then I can hopefully run a wire from the old timer position direct to the boiler and I can then use this as the pump overrun and switched live and get rid of the new cable I put in. I’ll then put a blank over it all. Hopefully that will then solve all the remaining problems.

Went to gym. Ate salad. Still haven’t put the Christmas tree up. But have bought the Christmas Radio Times.

Christmas must be coming, bum boys got a cold

Morning started slowly with editing Android batch files for arm7 directories to be correct. When that was out of the way, which took longer than expected due to the joys of DOS batch it was time for lunch. Sandwich duly made, I walked the dog, which of course was a cue for the heavens to open and we were pissed on.

Came back and got stuck into some interesting client / server type code, haven’t done that in many moons, made quite a pleasant day. Then went to the gym and did Combat, which was the new release, performed by Liz in a Santa hat.

Came back, ate salad. Watched multiple episodes of ‘The Hotel Inspector’, almost up to date on it now, not bad considering it was recorded in August. Still haven’t put the tree up yet, but Christmas must be getting pretty close as Jamie has yet another bloody cold. Meanwhile my body appears to have returned to pretty much normal.

In my quest for heating that works properly, I’ve now ordered a differential temperature thermocouple. Also I think the programmer is a bit buggered and the relay has jammed on the heating side, I need to pull the wiring centre apart and take some measurements.

Oh the fire alarm across the road…..by 8AM it was silenced.

Potterton Netaheat you have been retired after 20 years of virtually fault free service. (And now unceremoniously dumped in the front garden)

So started off a very long day at 6:15AM. The dog was already on the ball after checking her calendar last night, knowing it was Wednesday, she was up and ready for breakfast, wolfed it down and was ready to get into her harness in about three minutes. We sat in the car and discussed North Korea’s missile launch while we waited for the car to defrost. She got to day care at 6:50, I was back in bed by 7:15.

Was rudely awaken by two smiling boiler fitters at 8:30. They came in, I introduced them to the kettle and coffee machine then left them to it. They turned the water off grunted a bit and got on with it. Deciding that it was pointless trying to go back to bed I started work, well I started iPlayer anyway and caught up with another episode of Merlin anyway.

Today I was working on OsX (iMac) again, found the issue with the audio, wasn’t audio related at all, but was to do with memory alignment, OsX requires 16 byte alignment as it uses multimedia registers. Also fixed a few issues with minimise/maximise. Got one of our apps working fine on iMac which was great. Also did a few more bits on the upcoming mobile game update.

Boiler men were finished by 2PM. Okay, lets see. Boiler fitted, the inside of the flu has been jammed with expanding foam and not the neatest thing in the world. They told me my three port valve wasn’t working properly and when there was a call for heat only it was also going to the water tank. They also told me for maximum efficiency it I should run the boiler on max. They filled all the paperwork out and buggered off (I even paid them).

Now here’s the reality. The outside flu is tidy, the inside looks like it was done by a 3 year old. The actual boiler fitting is fine. There’s nothing wrong with the three port valve, I tested it on heat/heat&water/water and the valve moved between all positions just fine, I assume they didn’t have the controls set correctly. In the paperwork they said they flushed the system and then added inhibitor using the brand name ‘Fernox’, this is complete bollocks. How do I know this? Well they chucked the used container of cheapo Toolstation inhibitor in the kitchen bin. Running the boiler at max temperature setting, again, as far as I can tell complete bollocks. Every bit of research I have done says a condensing boiler gets more efficient when the return flow is below 55 degrees, so chucking the water out at 86 and then hoping for a 30 degree drop across all the radiators is a bit much. Also they only drained the system from the boiler level not from the under the lowest radiator, this left half the system full and not flushed. This also introduced an airlock, meaning I’ll be bleeding radiators for the next six months as they will contain more air than my ass after a decent curry. So would I use them again? Too bloody right I would. I paid about five hundred quid for fitting which included all sundries, testing and paperwork. Plus about three tubes of expanding foam. At the end of the day British Gas wanted an extra £1500 for the exact same job (okay, except the £7 I had to spend on a length of cable). They may have done a better job of the finish and may have even drained it properly but at the end of the day, it was the same boiler. So I paid a bargain bucket price for the bear legal and safety requirements, which is exactly what I wanted. I couldn’t have done it myself as it wouldn’t be legal and I don’t have a fucking great drill for the flu. Also I don’t have the testing gear necessary. So overall, very happy, just need to rebalance the radiators and adjust the output to the minimum required to reach the required temperature. Oh and bleed all the fart air out of the radiators.

After they went, I decided that as it was only minus six outside it would be a great idea to go out and run 12 miles. So I did. I then came back and picked up the dog. She was very happy. I was very happy. I had lunch. Did a bit more work and finished a bit earlier due to the early start.

I then cleaned out the cupboards where I’d removed all the stuff yesterday for the condense pipe and put all the stuff back in. More wine turned up today, and dog food. I’ll try not to use that as nibbles. Had a bath, drank wine, ate salad. Dog is at the vet tomorrow for her shots. I’ve got Friday off, I won’t get excited.

Today was bloody brass monkeys

So back to the Android pak in pak problem, which thankfully was fairly easily solvable in the end. So now it can load a compressed file from an asset file. Then it was on to more mobile update tweaks. Finally got on to doing some work on OsX, OpenAL, was an ass.

Today I waited in for the cleaners, after a couple phone calls they turned up just before five. Which means madam didn’t get her walk. So after they left I took her out and by god was it cold.

I had a follow up call to do for a dog, I quickly checked on the website and there it was, after six months the new owners returned him. This pissed me off somewhat, the dog was lovely, the owners however were a pain in the ass. That poor dog, which was in a nice home with what he thought were his forever family has now been taken back to the kennels where he will get to spend the next however many weeks in a cold kennel until he’s hopefully chosen again and has to go through all the trauma of trying to settle in again. Okay, his recall was a bit poor, he pulled on his lead and tended to bark a lot when left alone for eight hours at a time. Were you expecting the perfect dog? I hope you have a quiet dog free night.

Didn’t go to the gym. Had a bath. Had a glass of wine. Didn’t even eat salad, had something hot. Boiler being changed tomorrow.

Pak in Pak

And another unexciting week begins. Well it could get exciting I guess, wait and see.

So started off tracing a bug in the mobile update. Then played around with a few bits on it. Took dog out for a walk fairly early as I wanted to get a full afternoon in. Had lunch, it’s a chicken salad sandwich, it always is.

So back looking at Android in the afternoon. This was this pak inside a pak problem again. To recap, Android has all it’s data in an archive, I’ve already stopped archive data in the archive being archived. For the stupid amongst you that means nothing is stored compressed inside the main compressed file. Now I had all this working, but by god was it slow. After several hours I traced it to wonderful recursion, for every file it wanted to open inside the child archive it actually loaded the entire archive. So it looks like the solution is to get the file position in the parent archive and then open that as the child archive. The fun now is how to actually get that file position, which will require no doubt diving through a load of structures which will all be endian swapped. Still that’s fun for tomorrow.

Went to gym. Did Body Combat. Only one more before Christmas apparently. Came back, did another change to mobile game update. Sat down, ate salad. Cleaners coming tomorrow, boiler being done Wednesday. The excitement may never start.

On TV last night, Alan Sugar said “I’ve done everything. I’ve seen everything.”, I suddenly thought, “I bet you haven’t done anal.”

So today was spent tweaking all the stuff I did yesterday which they didn’t like. That’s the games industry folks, lots of iterating stuff. Still the reviews keep coming in and all of them are positive. We even have fantastic ratings on the app store.

Walked the dog. Had a salad sandwich. Went to the gym, did pump.

Then started looking into an Android issue which Al is having. His Java VM keeps locking up and producing very weird errors. He’s managed to reproduce it using a command prompt and just running ant.bat debug. Whacking ctrl+c seems to make it go bang and start erroring. I thought it was leaving a JVM running somewhere, but couldn’t find any sign of a process. Looking through the build.xml though there are some interesting comments in there….Al pointed out he’s running JDK1.6, where as I’m running JDK1.7. Now looking in the build.xml file there is a section in there that reads the JDK version number and then forks the JVM if it’s below 1.7. This is what appears to be causing the issue. If I forced it to fork and then hammered ctrl+c, indeed on subsequent runs it gave me loads of Java errors. Opening a new command prompt made no difference. But then I found running ant.bat clean sorted the issue. So it appears to be forking the java app and then interrupting it is causing garbage in the output directories. Couple of solutions….upgrade the JDK or run ant.bat clean (I can probably force all that anyway).

Jamie has been dressing the dog in various scarfs and ties. The dog does not approve and keeps trying to bite them off. I said to Jamie, “Stange isn’t it they never attack their own collar, it must be just like wearing a watch.”. Jamie replies, “yes if they take it off they spend all day wondering where it is.” To which I quip, “and they can no longer tell the time.”. God I’m a comedian.

Must be bath time. Need to ring mother, better open some wine then.

And then nothing interesting happened

This morning I wasn’t rudely awaken by the radiator gurgling, which means yesterdays balancing, although taking ages, was indeed fairly successful. All the radiators now seem to be getting nicely hot, the waters hot and the boiler isn’t coughing it’s guts up.

So work today was mainly Android again, sorting out a couple of issues to do with compressed files inside pack files. It turns out they aren’t compressed anyway. Sorted out a couple of other little issues. If there are no changes of plan tomorrow I have to look at some audio stuff on iMac, which will be a first.

Walked the dog. Went to the gym and did combat. Managed my 700 calorie exercise budget. Working late on a few things. Then will eat salad and watch crap TV. As I said, nothing really interesting happened.

Zombie zombie zombie

So spent this morning with quite a hang over. This again is probably due to eating cheese rolls, every time I eat them I get a bad head.

Worked on Android again, file system on Android is a bit odd, all your assets are inside a pak file (which is basically a zip), but we happen to use pak files as well, so you end up with a zip inside a zip which isn’t really a very good idea if you want anything to load within the same decade it started. So now I’m doing a little tool that will take our assets and then unpack the pak file and just put the loose contents in, so just a posh copy.

Walked the dog. Moved the cleaners. Well, not physically, just changed the day so they don’t clash with the new boiler fitting. Went to the gym. Front grill thing on car appears to be loose, like me it’s falling apart, but unlike me it’s only three years old.

The mobile game is out. I don’t want to mix work with personal stuff, I know I babble on about what I’ve been doing during the day, but I do keep it very abstract, I never go into any details for obvious reasons. If you like comics and a certain TV series then you can probably figure it out. It’s had all good reviews so far too…

Time for a bath and may be another hangover in celebration.

The 5:30AM Sausage Roll incident

So today was spent finishing off testing Android atomics, then creating Android projects for a couple of our other games. This actually was all fairly successful. Had to do a couple of Android changes on one of the games, nothing major.

Walked the dog, she’s always so much easier to walk for a couple of days after she’s been to day care.

Had an odd occurrence this morning, woke up at 5:30, couldn’t get back to sleep. Was too hungry, so let the dog out for a pee then grabbed a sausage roll. Then went back to sleep, no problem. So there we go folks, the cure for insomnia is pork based products.

Got a few more Android bits to do tomorrow, then need to do a bit of research into probability.

Went to the gym, ran, exciting isn’t it. Ate salad (with sausage roll). It’s torture porn night, so will have a glass of wine later. I think the mobile game is announced tomorrow.