Ones and Zeros

Sometimes it’s just one thing after another.  It’s been like that in my coding lately.  I need a plotting/graphic library for an iPhone app I’m writing.  I could write one, but it’s faster if I found one that I could use.  I’d prefer to focus on my app instead of writing a library.  Lo and behold; there was Google’s core-plot for the iPhone.  Wonderful!  Looks like it’s probably quality code and appears well supported.

It was archived under Mercurial source code control system in Google’s code website area.  So I needed Mercurial.  No problem.  I found an install for my Mac, I don’t even need to build from its source.

Ah.  The install doesn’t work.  It hangs and has problems with my Python version.  (Mercurial is very Python dependent, much of it is written in Python with a few native extensions.)  So I’ll install the necessary Python version.  But it still doesn’t install.  Several experiments (and days) later I decide to build from source.

Hm.  That doesn’t work either.  I start tracing and fixing problems: wrong SDK, wrong gcc version.  Of course the build process isn’t in an old-fashioned Makefile that everyone knows, but a new (to me at least) Python build process.  That means two things to learn: the build process and the Mercurial build.

Remember core-plot?  That’s what the goal is.  Actually, the goal is my app.

I’ll spare you the details of the more days working out the problems, downloading the correction older SDK and gcc and working it all out.  I finally was able to execute the one command to get the core-plot source locally on my machine.  I think some inconsistencies in my system installation with Python and the SDK/gcc version issues threw off the Mercurial build/install process.  It’s designed for an older system release than I have.

This is one reason that software development can take longer than expected.  There’s always some “little” problem that becomes another problems and so on.  This one’s resolved, but there will be others. I try to be positive and consider it job security.

From this article:

 Jon Kyl (R-Az) told Fox News’ Chris Wallace that Republicans are prepared to fight a nominee who might stick up for the little guy, a position he called “overly ideological.”

I’m just glad that Kyl wasn’t around during the American revolution.  He would have been a Tory, ie pro-King and against all those little guy revolutionaries.  I’m sure he’d think that stuff about “governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” is just so much nonsense.

Our five-year-old Prius has a problem with it’s battery.  There are actually two batteries in the Prius; the large 230V battery used to power the electric motor as part of the hybrid drive and the regular 12V battery used to kick over the starter and power the accessories.  This battery is charged from the bigger battery through an voltage shifting circuit.

If the 12V auxillary battery doesn’t hold a charge, then the accessories don’t work.  Five years is about the life of that battery, so I’m not surprised that it’s gone now.  Unfortunately, one “accessory” is the electronics to detect the key and start the hybrid engine.   I don’t like that single point of failure, it’s bad design.

Another design problem is the location of this 12V battery.  It’s under the trunk floor on the right side.  Now if I can’t use the accesories, I can’t open the hatch at the back.  I have to  go in through the side door, flip down the seats, remove the truck cover, remove the trunk floor and anything stored in that area (all through the side door).  Then I have to work in the small space to unbolt the hold ons and connections to that battery and lift it up and out of the space provided.  All this makes a five-minute job into an hour or more.

While I’m generally pretty happy with the Prius they didn’t do well here.

It’s a really bad sign when an institution supposedly dedicated to ethical and moral behavoir is taking legalistic stands and blaming the media.  We expect that sort of thing from our worst politicians, not from a self-proclaimed institutional beacon of moral standards.

The Pope says through a spokesman that this crisis is a “personal test” for him.  He’s got that right.  But he omits that sexual abuses were personal tests for the victims too.   It’s not really about him is it?  So how will he do?

Separate from any homilies, and separate from any benedictions and statements of faith, the Church is a institution of politics and beaurocracy that’s existed for over two thousand years now.  It knows how to survive.  The only real question is if it will survive with something consistent with the stated beliefs of the Catholic religion.