Skyfall

Didn’t start at the crack of dawn, mainly as I don’t do that shit anyway and I didn’t finish until 3AM. And then when I finally got to bed, Jamie was as horny as hell and demanded his version of kinky sex, well it would be rude to not oblige.

So today was mainly about tidying up, finishing off and testing. So that’s exactly what I did. Last minute bug fixing and testing.

Took the dog out for a walk and for once it was a pleasure. I think she did actually learn something yesterday at doggy day care.

New motherboard for pfSense box has arrived. It’s still in the box, hopefully look at it the weekend. Went to gym, ran, not very exciting. Ate salad.

Then at ten to ten I went upstairs to Jamie and said ‘lets go then’, to a rather shocked Jamie, who had completely forgotten that I’d got tickets to the new James Bond film – Skyfall. M32 had a junction closed, so we were slightly late, the good point about this was we missed all the ad’s for Gordon’s Gin. We had the posh seats in the ‘Director’s Lounge’, if you are going to the cinema then do it in style. My mother would never have taken me here. The film itself was easily the best Bond I’ve seen in many years, it was pretty much non-stop action all the way through. Really enjoyed it.

So, probably one more day on the mobile game and that will be it.

Doggy Daycare and Cleaners all a big success

Okay, so I woke up at an ungodly hour, one which should have been the end of a good evening, not at the beginning of a good morning. Dog didn’t really know what the hell was going on, she went out for a pee then ran back upstairs to bed. She was then slightly confused when I started to pour her breakfast out. She decided to strike while the iron was hot and came downstairs and ate it. She then dutifully went and had a poo and got rather excited. She got bundled into the car in the dark and driven to “Paw Stretchers”. Where she shot out of the car got attached to a man with a lead and didn’t look back. I drove home and went back to bed.

Today work wise was mainly fixing a few bugs and doing play testing, all went according to plan really. Fixed a few things, tested lots on iPod and PC.

New cleaners arrived, one called Mandy, one called something else. They spent about five minutes unloading their van of various containers of ‘stuff’ and a couple of hoovers. They then proceeded to do cleaning type things for the next three hours, which wasn’t bad when they are only being paid for two and a quarter. They didn’t get round to the dinning room but did everything else. I must admit they actually did a really really good job, I was very impressed. Now they’ve got on top of a few things it, (hopefully) won’t take so long next time. So that’s “Welcome home cleaning”.

By the time they went it was time to pick Sasha up. So sat at Aztec West traffic lights for twenty minutes then arrived at doggy daycare. Sasha was led out by a rather cute looking guy. She had apparently spent three hours running round in a field, followed by various other activities. I was disappointed that I wasn’t given a painting that she had done to stick on the fridge. She’ll be going back next week. She’s been asleep since.

Did a bit more play testing. Due to my foot being bad, no idea, some sort of ankle twist, I gave the gym a miss and had a bath instead. Caught up with a magazine. Ate salad. Sat down. Jamie keeps asking if I’m going to plough his buttocks, well as long as he doesn’t hurt my ankle.

Going from A to B

So started fairly early, well normal time, I just didn’t read BBC news for an hour first. So back on to routing, Al was moaning about a couple other frame rate cases. So did more research on HPA (a variation on A-star) but all involved building graphs and lots or preprocessing which I didn’t really have time to do. So came up with a simple solution which would involve a bit of manual work but would give me good results and importantly not use much memory. What I did was dump out the maps to a text file. Mark walk-able squares with a 0 and non walk-able with an X. Simples. Then manually went through the text files and grouped all the closed off areas, so for instance a closed off bit at the top of the map would be allocated section 1, then the next 2 etc. I had up to 16 areas that could be grouped. All I did then was add additional routing hints. So to go from one area to another you would just do 0:3:2; meaning to go from area 0 to area 3 you needed to go via area 2. All other areas could be disregarded in the A-star search. This reduced my maximum search nodes down to about a sixth of what it was. Total memory requirements…512 bytes. Ok, so manual editing, but it’s only a couple of maps, gives great results and only took about one mug of coffee per map.

Walked the dog. Finished work vaguely on time. Did a home check and went to the gym. Ran, only thirty eight minutes, on a short week this week. Did a home check for a kitten. Sat down and ate salad. Actually watched quite a bit of TV without any distractions.

Sasha is off to doggy day care far too early tomorrow morning. New cleaners starting. Need to order stuff for new pfSense box. New server seems to be running fine. Think I’ll have some fruit cake, may be a glass of wine and an early night.

More routing – It’s over there not there

Got up. That was an event in itself. Spent most of the morning, well the bulk of the day actually doing research into routing and trying to optimise the search of the mobile game. I looked at quite a few different ways of improving it, but most require additional trees and memory. That’s one thing I’m very short on, so ended up just tweaking heuristics. Still got a bit more to tweak and tidy up. Get a good run on it tomorrow I think.

Walked the dog, I think I’ve decided on our new winter route. This is mainly tarmac based due to bad flooding down the nature reserve.

Went to the gym, did Body Combat. Couldn’t really be arsed to do any further running.

Came back, did some more work. Also moved the server to it’s new case that arrived today. It looks very smart and eats about a third the power of the small form factor HP. All working okay. Next is to do something similar to the pfSense box.

Tried to get dog sick out of a carpet, that didn’t work.

Feeling very tired. Thing I’ll try and have an early night.

I’m a lumberjack and I’m okay

Started off this morning pruning a tree. I now have a garden full of said tree and no where to put it until the wheelie bin has been emptied. I reckon it’s a good two loads worth. Asked the neighbour if she minded if I cut one of the uprights out over her side so I could reach it, I got the response “Do want you need to do Tim, the things a pain in the bloody ass.”. I don’t think she minded.

After that we went up to Cribbs and walked round various toy-shops. Didn’t buy anything. One toy shop had a couple of storm troopers outside and a rather fat Jedi. Inside though there were quite a good number of cute male staff, far better quality than Toy’s R’us.

Came back, had lunch (boiled eggs, It’s a Sunday). Then Sarah and Shaun came round. We sat down and had coffee, followed by more coffee and chatted mainly bollocks about boilers, bathrooms, work, ailments, cars (breaking down rather than driving them) and dogs. Mainly as ours was trying to leap up and kill them.

Afterwords I got my new steamer out, steamed things. Tiles mainly. Then decided that wouldn’t it be great to clean the over door glass. The inside of it. Two hours later, half a tub of something I had sat in the back of a cupboard for ten years and said steamer, it’s now actually transparent. It’s something I’ll replace sooner rather than later anyway.

Then I briefly hoovered and played with gadget No.2, the carpet shampooer. This was great fun, the colour of the water when emptying the tank was darker than my soul.

Found the memory card with all my honeymoon photos on, so stuck those on the i-Mac, then finally got round to doing mothers photo album thing. That’s only been pending since June.

Was going to buy some shoes off Groupon, but they have sold out. You can never have enough shoes.

Set up the iPhone5. It’s an iPhone. It does stuff I’ll never use. Siri is quite amusing though, I said, “Tell me about sex with camels”, It did a Google search for ‘Sex with Carols’. Also rather amusingly I asked “Tell me who I am?”, it responded with, “I don’t know who you are, but you can set that info in settings.”. It did correctly tell me though what armadillos taste like, always essential info, when you end up in a Central American Synapsida restaurant and they have run out of Pizza.

Right, bath time. It will be nice next week to not have the entertain plumbers. Well it’s not like I put on a show or anything, I didn’t open the airing cupboard to Chris Tarrent sat on a stool, saying, “Just 15 questions between you and 3 litres of inhibitor.”. I digress.

“How does the dog hold the golf club?”, “I have no idea.”

The morning started off pretty well. Jamie wasn’t wearing any pants which is usually a good sign that some vague action could happen. It did, well for me anyway, I didn’t recipricate. Then he asked what the dog was planning on doing today, I said that she was planning on playing golf as she wanted to get her handicap down. He then asked how she could hold a club. It was far too early and I was still out of coffee so couldn’t be arsed to come up with a witty response, so just said I had no idea. He went off to work, obviously thinking intensly how a dog could play golf without opposable thumbs. However she would have managed it, she would have still played better than me.

I went and did a house check for a kitten, all fine. Then I picked up a sim-card for my iPhone5 and did the shopping. Both rather dull activities, oh, also got some crickets.

Ate lunch, toast and cheese. Then assembled my new Bissel carpet shampooer. It looks very impressive, now need to find somewhere to keep it. Also got one of those steamer things. The new batteries for the doorbell turned up together with some new garden tools. I may take them to the bedroom later.

Walked into town, bought some drain cleaner, walked back again.

Visited mother, which was a good time to catchup on FaceBook. Mind you she has got back into baking again and does make a rather mean fruit cake. I cleaned out her Magnaclense (had to get a boiler reference in their somewhere) and increased the pressure on her boiler.

Came back, did the accounts and bits. Also got this rather nice little bluetooth keyboard iPad case thing, which I’m typing this up on. I’m very impressed works really quite well.

So all done, just going to fry the chicken ready for dinner, which is something I can’t spell so won’t bother as the spell checker doesn’t seem to be working. Then a quick bath I think, may be some wine.

Bought three lots of coffee beans so going to have a few testers. Getting very used to having it black now, makes me stoned.

Lots of fun house/garden work to get on with tomorrow. I think Sarah is popping over as well to test out the new coffee machine.

Euclidean heuristics Vs a modified Chebyshev

So today it was back on to the mobile game and optimising some routing. It uses an a-star search with a modified Euclidean Heuristic, modified in a way that’s actually doing it wrong, but it does give reasonable results. I was doing length squared rather than length, which gives you quite wildly different answers when added together with the normal distance cost, even if you square that. So instead I decided to do it properly and change it to a Chebyshev. So the normal costs are just the distance either in a straight line or diagonal, then the heuristic is just a max of the absolute distance in x/z plus a couple of bits to handle the diagonals. It works quite well for some routes and not so well for others. Proof of the pudding will be in the iPhone4 testing. I’ll chat to some of my work colleagues who have a bit more experience on this.

Walked the dog. Went to the gym. Did body pump and a bit of running. Came back and carried on working, only just finished. I’m feeling very tired, time for wine, bath and bed. Oh my carpet shampooer and steamer have turned up. Will play with those the weekend.

Not a boiler man in sight

So today it was straight on with a couple of issues with the mobile game. Got those all sorted. Then it was back on to GDB and Android.

My iPhone5 arrived. It’s an iPhone, I won’t reach orgasm over it. It looks a bit big. I need to get a nano sim for it as it won’t activate without one.

Took the dog out, Jamie’s day off so he came as well, which didn’t work out well as there was a delivery while we were out.

Got a new quote from boiler man no.3, this was for the same boiler as boiler man no.6 but was £1600 cheaper. Okay, so I have to do my own electrics and get Paul to check it, but that’s not going to cost £1600. Haven’t had a quote from no.5 and no.1 has vanished since I basically mentioned he didn’t really seem to know what he was on about and wasn’t gas safe registered. Anyway, boiler man no.3 has been given the job, it will hopefully be done the beginning of December. I’m still waiting for a bathroom quote from the same man.

Made some good progress on the whole GDB thing. I can now compile in VC2010 and it produces all the correct files in all the correct places by using a vast amount of scripts. Only a couple of bits to solve now.

Went to gym, ran for seventy seven minutes. That’s around 45 miles this week.

Looked into balancing radiators, they could do with doing again before new boiler is fitted as they haven’t been done since all the insulation was added.

Anyway, Midsomer Murders now, followed by torture porn night.

And tomorrow I promise no more boiler talk.

Boiler man No.6

Started this morning far too early as Sasha had her induction at Pawstretchers doggy daycare. They had 59 dogs there, she failed to eat any of them, so she’s going back for a full day next Wednesday. That’ll get her out the way of the new cleaners anyway, so hopefully they will last more than a day. On the way back in the car I didn’t put her anti-reverse colour restraint-escape-device on, half way down the A38 she’s sat in the passenger seat staring at me.

Came back, did a couple of updates on the mobile game. Then gas man No.6 arrived. I was slightly disappointed as he wasn’t a tosser. He measured the place (not intimately, just worked out the volume) asked about loft and cavity wall insulation, looked at the tank. Then sat on his laptop for ten minutes making pointless small talk. To my surprise he was only a grand over priced. Mind you did quote for a smaller boiler than any one else. Then he made a couple of fatal mistakes….first was to say he’d give me the same discount that was available last month ‘if I signed up today’, hmmm. Second was to say that if a normal plumber did the electrics they wouldn’t be 17th addition approved and therefore wouldn’t get a part-p certificate but I could get it checked for about 300 quid. That bits horse-shit, and I bet half the British Gas engineers are only gas safe safe registered and not NICEIC approved, it’s questionable if pump overrun cables require part-p certification anyway.

So enough of bloody boiler men. I may just say fuck-it, spend 1500 quid on another holiday and just use some of Jamie’s blubber as a giant candle.

Then continued with getting GDB to work. I think I’ve come to the conclusion that for it to work it really has to be under Cygwin. I looked at a few other shells but they just didn’t work. So in the end I’m just working to get vs-android output everything in the correct place so I can launch a bash shell and call ndk-gdb. It ain’t pretty but it will certainly do for the time being and is better than what we have currently.

Went to gym. Ran for seventy seven minutes. That’s over a marathon distance already this week. It isn’t very interesting and the tread-mill keeps electrocuting me every time I touch it.

Finally got to the end of the Abu Dhabi GP. Not a bad one. Suppose it’s bed time now. May be have a banana first.

Oh, apparently my iPhone5 has been dispatched. That can sit in a box until I can be arsed to sort out a micro sim card for it.

Boiler man No.4 & No.5

So two more boiler men today. First one was nice enough but did want to remove half the pipes in the airing cupboard, including the main heating feed and expansion pipe, to me that seems somewhat pointless when you could just connect a hose to it and blast it.

Next one was this evening and arrived an hour late. He was a little bit ‘in your face’ and you felt like he was invading your personal space but I grew to like him. He knew what he was on about and did mention that the gas pipe was probably 22mm up to the cooker, that opens some interesting possibilities. I’ll need to yank the cooker out and take a gander or try and look through one of the air bricks under the house.

Had a quote back from No.3 and just now No.4. No.4 as I guessed would be a bit pricey if he wants to change half the pipework and do the dreaded power flush. No.3 however (which is Rob Sarah’s friend) came in with two very competitive quotes, which may be cheaper if the gas pipe checks out. I need to do the wiring for this one, but it saves a few hundred quid and I can get Paul to check it.

Anyway, enough about boilers….Spent the working day doing a few things on the mobile game and then trying to get GDB to work. After lots of buggering about I finally got it to do source debugging. I certainly need to do a lot more work on it though before it becomes useful.

Talking of bugger about, very good sex first thing this morning, even if it was with Jamie. It woke him up anyway, he even participated at times.

Walked the dog, another unexciting road tour today, it was very cold. She is going for her doggy day care induction tomorrow, so will see how many dogs and people she can attack.

Moved the server into the cabinet, connected up the printers two it and it’s all still currently working. Ordered a new case for it with integrated PSU, that should sort out the power up problem. Haven’t ordered the replacement pfSense stuff yet, will see how the week goes.

Went to gym. Ran for seventy six minutes. Now watching the Abu Dhabi GP, I may get through all of it by the end of the week.

Mr British Gas tomorrow, I’ll be very disappointed if he’s not a tosser.