January 2021

sat jan 2
I’ve been hot on the trail of an ‘upgrade’ to C3PR, and I made a bunch of big changes to the code, all at once. When I got it re-compiled, I didn’t exactly expect it to work the first time, but I thought it would at least start up. Instead, it’s telling me:
“ppcamera exited without becoming ready”.
Thanks a lot.

sun jan 3
One NULL pointer later, it still didn’t work, so apparently, I’ve made at least two mistakes.
Turns out: I have a Thread that begets a Thread that begets a Thread. And on startup, the Mutex that protects them from one another wasn’t ready in time.
That was easy.
You’re welcome.

thu jan 7
I was peacefully working wood in the basement, when Mary came downstairs to tell me about the riots in DC.
“What?” I said. “Are you shitting me?” I put down my bottle of glue and went upstairs.
We were glued to the TV for 4 hours. Holy shit!
This is great!
This is fabulous!
This is the best thing that could possibly happen to America right now, and it couldn’t have happened at a better time.
Stop the Steal? They sure did.
Got any questions about police use of force? It’s black and white.
You gotta bottom out before you can bounce back, and America has bottomed out.
Two words: Forensic accounting.

fri jan 15

wed jan 20
It’s been a long time since I cried, but I teared up a couple times while watching Biden take the reins. I couldn’t help it.

fri jan 22
Well, I must say: Blogging is not going well this month.
Not that there’s nothing to say.
Not that there’s nothing going on.
Not that I’m not doing anything interesting.
I just haven’t felt like it.

I’m like Trump: I don’t take well to defeat.
And every time C3PR has defeated me, I’ve found a way to defeat it back.
Physics? Check.
Math? Check.
Mechanics? Check.
Linux? Check.
GUI? Check.
EtherCAT? Check.
Vision? Heck!!  Vision in slow motion is easy. Vision in real time is hard.  Real hard.
This has been killing me. It made me sad. It made me mad. It made me want to …

Break it up into 2 threads. Separate tracking from post-processing, and only run detect() when cT fails. Pre-shrink the dipMat, run only the dT on gpu, and adaptively overrun the trigger.

“Yup,” I said to myself, “That oughta do it.”
So that’s what I’ve been doing.

sat jan 23
I’ve been doing some woodworking, and I’ve been getting carried away.
Who’d’a thunk it?
It started with the re-bar table-on-wheels I made for Mary last month. It looked a little lonely where we’d parked it against the wall, so I got to thinking about how to spruce it up.
“It needs a matching book case,” I decided.
“And some drawers! Gotta have drawers!” (said a voice in my head)
”Maybe we can wrap it around the corner and re-do the pantry!”
”It needs a plug. And a light! Made out of re-bar!”
”Oooh! And how about we make it so the table rolls right into it, and it ‘docks’ into place!”
How cool can you get?
How could I resist?
You probably think I’m kidding.

thu Jan 28
I needed to wire up some plugs and switches in that bookcase I mentioned, and I wanted to do it with a particular kind of wire, so I went to the hardware store to buy an extension cord I could cut up. They came in 6, 10, and 14 foot lengths, and they cost 7, 8, and 9 bucks. I bought the 10 footer, because – hey – the ceiling is only 9 feet high. And I saved myself a buck!
Naturally, by the time I used it up, I was a couple feet short, and now I gotta buy another extension cord. Sigh.
So I‘m asking myself: should I save myself a(nother) buck? Or should I just buy the long one? (I saved myself another buck)

sun jan 31
Sadly, my computer is fucked up.
You know how old folk have a ‘reputation’ for computer illiteracy? Can’t solve the simplest problems? “Help, I can’t get up.”
Well that’s me. And I can’t, for the life of me, get my photos up to the Cloud lately.
I don’t know what the problem is. It’s either me, or it’s my computer.
Must be the computer.
You’re missing out.

I stumbled upon the best movie I’ve seen in a long time.
The History of Future Folk. On Netflix.
Stick with it. Seriously.