still existing

Good grief, well that’s been ages, moved house, got skint back to school again last week.

Once again here I am trying to fit in far too much.

Some paid work on the horizon but not for a while yet, still having to concentrate on getting my living/working environment sorted and getting rid of the old place.

After having a conversation with my course co-ordinator and a rummage thru the timetables, it seems I only need two more units to get an ordinary degree, and as there’s two that I want to do running on the same day, I’ve decided to go for it, whether I’ll go on an d do the honours or not,is still to be decided. I would need six more units and there’s only two or three that I think would be of benefit that are also at the right level. do I really want to spend the time, maybe it’s time to cut and run with the ordinary?

Anyway for now , I’m going with the Advanced Web Technologies and Animation for interaction, both very useful and relevant though it remains to be seen if I can cope with two units at once as well as everything else.

Two projects on the go, one in PHP and the other a fairly straightforward ActionScript/XML quiz, the important point being that the intention is to build something totally in script, using OPP and making it flexable, extensible…blagh blagh

Both the units should be handy with the Web tech being relevent to the PHP project and forcing me to actually do it. The coursework for the Animation involves a portfollio piece, you know like the one I have still notgot round to finishing since leaving colllege, this means I’ll have to revisit some older work as well, maybe even finish some of it, all good.

Better get on then.

Development suspended

Bought new house

Needs loads of work up a scaffold in the rain to stop the water getting in, no time , no time!

hmmm well

Seems this has gone the way these things do for those of us who have far too much to do. what with… well.

still making progress tho , need to go to the start of the rampulator and work on the UI and the verification, the drawing part is working really well now, of course once I got that working the motivation went a bit. There is less incentive now as I don’t have to deliver anything Repeat after me… Finish Stuff, Finish Stuff, Finish Stuff…..

Made a start on incorporating 360 panos and the first results are promising, I’ve been disappointed with the quality of conversion from equirectilinear to cubic though, more to work out there.

Also been working on communication between AS and JS, sort of a feasability study for someone, A basic level right now, awaiting instructions.

Listening to: Suzi Quatro on the Radio

Events are moving along

Whoah well, it’s been a while hasn’t it,? been all over the place. the graphics side of the rampuator all works rather nicely although it could do with some refinements. need to move back to the verification next.

I Seem to have bought a new house in the meantime which needs a lot of work, as if there wasn’t enough to do!

Fiddling about with some new Utility classes and have sort of sussed out the creation of custom events, well got them working in a clumsy sort of way at least. It’ll be a while until a full understanding is mine.

oh my curves.

Well it’s been a wee while since I wrote here. Made some progress and now have the drawing part of the application working, still some work to be done on the scaling.

The reall difficulty was finding out how to  dynamicly place the control points for drawing a segment of a circle, there seems to be a slight offset from the beam curve which I will have to tinker with, it may be the exact positioning of the first beam that is causing the problem, wee shall see.

As from tonight, I won’t be getting the chance to work on things for a while, who knows when I will write more.

Sums

I now have most of the maths for the ramp calculator sorted out, leaving only the rather tricky fitting of the transition pieces onto a single sheet, this isn’t essential and I can now move on to thinking about the drawing part and the field validation.

I’m concerned that working only in Meters may confuse, my own preference would be to work only in mm as I’m used to but I think that may make things worse, in the US of course they still use imperial measurements and it seems most folk seem to use them here as well…. when was metrication again? 72? 75? how hard is using a base unit of 10? oh well, progressing such matters it seems is even slower than my own.

So I must put any Unitary confusion aside and get on with the rest of the show, I can always come back to it.

It’s hard not to tinker with the visual appearance as well when in fact I need to put that aside knowing that I’ll change it all later anyway.

Pretty much got a handle on using the display list now and yes after a bit it does make more sense, if I can get all other areas to that level then I’ll be doing pretty well I think.

I’ll be bringing in quite a bit of static text at some point, in the way of descriptions and explanations, I need to have a strategy for presenting that without distracting and without hiding it away somewhere in a cupboard. This will also be a good opportunity to do a bit with xml and perhaps even PHP/SQL, (Mental note: Don’t get too carried away here.)

So the next stage will be having a crack at drawing using information from the variables already saved, I’ll come back to the verification later. I’m looking forward to this bit but unfortunately won’t get that long to spend on it over the next week, tally ho!

Move along there, nothing to see

Well I got a little done there while I was away, mostly on the calculator methods for the ramp material calculator. There’s quite a bit of maths to go in there before I get visual results. had to (re) rack my brains to work out the length of part of the circumference of a circle, but that was the hard bit I hope. The rest just involves adding and multiplying for the most part.

I’ve used several different methods to break the calculation down into small parts for clarity, this also helps me think a bit more about structure within a class/object.

Progress is slow, but there is progress I need to appreciate the incremental nature of creating these things more, rather than expecting quick results. I also need to remember that the main objective here is learning to make these things well rather than the applications themselves, they are the vechicles for my education.

Post soundtrack : World on Three

packages, shmakages

I’ve abandoned the idea of using named packages for now, it’s holding me up. I will re-visit it later when I’ve got some other stuff up and running.

written to Words and Music on Radio3

Document Class V’s package path…. aghhhh!

Well I’ve had a right frustrating few hours tonight when i really should have gone to bed.

Seems I just can’t stick a Document class into a named package. Putting the code on the timeline, I can create an instance of the Class no Problem, defining it as the document class gives me.

5001: The name of package ’shared’ does not reflect the location of this file. Please change the package definition’s name inside this file, or move the file. /astest/shared/Tester2.a

No matter how much I muck about with the class path or package naming.
Can’t find any documentation making it clear, Seems other people have had the same stumble The trouble is I get really sidetracked by these little hitches, thinking there must be some solution instead of just working round it.

Can’t give up now – well not yet.

Concievied as a Motivational tool rather than a blog. I hope the very act of recording progress here will move me forward. I will assume nothing of the reader, not even existence. There is no need to explain what has gone before or even where ideas, quotes and the like come from. I already know that and you don’t exist.

Having finished Exam and coursework, there is limited time to pull things together, I’ve learnt so much over the last few years but have had trouble joining it all up in order to create end result. A lot still has to be done. The time that I have to do it is limited, a few months before I have to start looking for paid employment again, whatever that may be and those few months disrupted buy the other things I have to do “up north”. At that point, I will once again not have the spare time to progress, unless of course the employment encourages progression.

So here we go…….

This posts soundtrack: Sparks interview on the radio.