It has been many years since I wrote software code for a living, and maybe ten since I last dabbled.
The dabbling was building a database of stock and futures prices using Groovy and the lightweight H2 database. I had a fairly robust application and a good block of historical data when I ran into a couple of problems. The goal of the database was to calculate the relative strength of a stock or future against its peers, as described by Tom Dorsey in his book Point and Figure Charting. At that time, I couldn’t find a Groovy or Java application that allowed me to calculate the results I needed – bad planning on my part as I couldn’t get my head round how to write the code. The second problem was that H2 changed their database structure and for the life of me I couldn’t work out how to migrate.
As a result, the project just sat there with nothing happening. I’m still collecting the raw price data, but right now it sits in flat files on my hard drives and backups.
About three years ago, I dusted off my coding gloves and used Python to manipulate some health care data for a project I was working on. Now Python as I suspect most reading this know, is incredibly powerful and has a host of open source libraries available to the developer. One of those libraries matplotlib has a whole set of finance utilities. I looked at the library, and put my notes aside but the thought of it never really left my mind.
This past week, I pulled out the old Groovy scripts and looked at migrating them to Python. I rethought exactly what I had been looking to do that first time and scaled back a lot of the calculations that weren’t really necessary. The refactoring ended up being much easier than I expected. And fast. Over 200,000 rows into a SQLITE database in about five seconds!
I also found some interesting and illuminating thoughts in Jeremy Du Plessis’s book The Definitive Guide to Point and Figure. I still need to think through the calculation routines based on his writing, but I may not need matplotlib after all!
It’s nearly two years since I wrote about my iPad purchase in the Brave New World post (May 2022 – Richard Freeborn).
In that post I talked about the keyboard, and how, without email I was able to be quite productive. I am still using the iPad for writing, usually with Scrivener because that’s where my fiction lives these days, but there are a few differences.
About six months ago, I bought a Macally bluetooth keyboard. It’s a full size keyboard with a separate numeric keypad. I hadn’t realized how much I missed that numeric keypad until I had it back again. Another feature of the Macally keyboard is the ability to connect up to three devices and switch between them seamlessly, with just a quick hoy-key combination.
It was very easy to connect the keyboard to the iPad, and much as I still liked the Magic keyboard, being able to sit and type with the correct posture was wonderful. It’s on these occasions that I make use of the separate iPad mouse, which to be honest doesn’t get much other use.
What I haven’t managed yet on the iPad is a heavy editing session where I have two or three or more chapters open in panes on the screen so I can make updates and corrections – like putting consistency into hair or eye color. that’s pretty easy to do on the Mac Mini with a 20+ inch monitor. Not so easy on the iPad where you don’t have the ability to pop out and rearrange documents. To be fair, when I get into those big editing sessions, there’s usually a pile of papers strewn across the desk as well!
Overall though, I’m still very pleased with using the iPad as a dedicated writing device for places away from my office. And I’ve still avoided configuring email!
Our homeowners association is in the process of having community owned street lamps replaced so they can be managed by the City and our local power company.
This afternoon, despite all the paint lines and marking flags, the contractors managed to hit a gas line, and I’ve never seen workers move so fast!
I called the gas company and reported the leak, and by the time I got off the phone, the fire department had two units in place and closed the road into our part of the sub-division. It wasn’t long after that the gas company arrived – four trucks and vans and lots of equipment. Within an hour or so, the leak was fixed. Work resumed on replacing the street lamp, and the fire department went off to do other things. Most of the gas company trucks remained, I’m guessing just in case there was another leak.
I often complain about utility and emergency service responses, but this time, they did a great job, and kept us all informed.
There are six more lamps to replace, and hopefully those last ones will go smoothly.
A short post this week to let everyone know Sisters in Arms is now available at all eBook retailers.
Women who put it all on the line when the shit hits the fan. Military, family, or thrown together by chance doesn’t matter. They join, they cooperate, and, when they run out of options, they fight.
Tales from feudal Japan to modern day Angola. A slink through the Parisien woods and a strut along the Seattle streets. A Babylon that we never knew to a war-torn hell we should all fear.
A baker’s dozen of stories about women owning their place in the world.
Sisters-in-Arms | Universal Book Links Help You Find Books at Your Favorite Store!
About this time last year, we returned from a trip to discover a pair of birds had nested on the blades of a fan on our patio. The nest was well established and one of the birds looked very comfortable, presumably keeping eggs warm.
I never managed to identify the birds, but the eggs hatched and we had three babies poking their heads up and cheeping urgently.
Unfortunately, we then had three days of rain, thunder, and high winds. The parents couldn’t get to the nest, and the chicks died. I also learned that sudden and loud noises can kill birds that young. And we had loud noises. My neighbor is still trying to fix electrical and plumbing issues after a lightning strike!
When it was clear the chicks were dead, and the parents weren’t returning, I removed the fan blade, and laid the birds to rest on an east facing slope.
This February, as we prepared to make a trip, I decided we didn’t need a repeat of last year, secured bird repellent spikes to the fan blades, and off we went.
We had been back about a week when I noticed a pair of birds ducking in and out under the roof toward the fan. Waste of your time, I told them smugly. And then I looked, really looked at the fan blades.
You guessed it. I had left about a six inch gap between the fan housing and the start of the spikes, and that was enough for the birds – I think they are finches – to build their new home. I don’t think they’ve laid eggs yet, but I am going to keep my fingers crossed we don’t have a repeat of last year’s rain and thunder.
Next year? I’m still working on that plan.
Have you had those nagging little pop-ups and messages from Dropbox?
They started with me last week. First about upgrading to the next level, and secondly performing a reinstall for the new version of Dropbox. I ignored the first as I’m barely using half of my current space allocation. I did accept the second, and then the fun began.
Dropbox shut down and went through the usual install and relaunch cycle I expect when installing new versions of applications on the Mac. This time there was a wrinkle. I got the message Dropbox was moving my files to a “secure” location.
What? Where?
Previously the Dropbox folder was located in my Documents folder, and now appears in Finder under the Locations heading. No indication of where, if anywhere, it resides on the hard drive and all you see in Get Info is Dropbox. Not exactly helpful.
Fortunately my technical skills haven’t completely rusted away, so it was into Terminal. A search through the hard drive found Dropbox and all my files in the folder Library -> Cloud Storage.
Satisfied, I had my files somewhere I could find them, I forgot about it until I accessed one of those files. I think it was a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet. At that point I got a warning message and the request to allow the application to access Dropbox files. And this has been a consistent event when I first open a file for the first time in the new Dropbox structure. Grrr!!!
I expect there’s a reason for this change, but it would be nice if Dropbox explained what they were changing and why the need to move all files to some obscure location.
Or it might be some tech-weeny’s bright idea of cool where no-one thought to question the consequences.
For those of you who supported the Thrill Ride kickstarter, a big thank you from me, and implied from everyone else with stories in this year’s issues. The kickstarter funded, so expect to see the first issue – Sisters in Arms – within the next few weeks. This issue includes my story A Cousin’s Outing.
It’s been a while since I submitted anything to the top science fiction magazines, but I have stories under consideration at Asimov’s and Analog. Unfortunately at the moment Fantasy and Science Fiction isn’t accepting submissions, but when they open again, there will be several stories in the queue for them.
Elsewhere, I’m making good progress on the third Jacob and Miriam story, and that’s on track for publication at some time in the second quarter of 2024. More news on that closer to the publication date.
We are into the last hours of the Thrill Ride Kickstarter where I have two stories in this year’s issues.
Check it out and support this great magazine.
This past week my writing study and reading intersected in a way I didn’t expect.
I’m coming to the end of a nine-week class on dialog, and wow, has it been illuminating. In parallel, one of the fiction books I was reading was Beyond – the first of Mercedes Lackey’s trilogy about the founding of Valdemar.
I enjoyed the book but something felt off, and not quite right. I couldn’t pin down exactly what it was. Not then, but later when I finished working through the lectures on the dialog class, I had a glimmer of an idea.
This week’s topic was narration, and how a writer can use it to give the reader information, and to paraphrase, there’s light narration, heavy narration, journal narration, and whole book narration. The assignment was to find examples of each type.
And there was my answer. Beyond isn’t just heavy narration, the whole book is mostly narration, and that was what disturbed me.
The thing with whole book narration is it tends to keep the reader at a distance, and I wasn’t expecting that from Mercedes Lackey. When you read the other Valdemar books you are deep inside the character’s head feeling their thoughts and emotions, and I kept waiting for that in Beyond.
I read the book almost in one sitting and know I’ll go back and read it again, so although I wasn’t expecting this approach, I suspect the next book in the series – Into the West – will have the same style.
This time I’ll be ready for it. And probably read the book in one session.
Back in July of last year (System Upgrades – Richard Freeborn), I detailed the results of changing out our router and the improvements we had as a result.
Since then, I’ve been working around increasing issues with my MacBook Pro. The speakers died some time ago, and plugging in an external speaker wasn’t too much of an issue, especially as the general sound quality was much better.
The track pad and bluetooth were another problem. The track pad developed a mind of its own, sending the cursor all over the screen, or just not responding. That meant a separate wireless mouse. Again, not a big problem. What did bother me more is that the bluetooth keyboard would for no reason stop working. When I investigated further the MacBook had turned off Bluetooth, and the only way to get it back was to shut down and restart.
And then there were the software updates. About a month ago, Microsoft informed me they couldn’t upgrade Word and Excel because the operating system was too old. Can’t be, was my first thought, and then I did some research.
The MacBook Pro was nine years old, which explained the pieces failing every so often. I really didn’t really want to buy more hardware at the moment, but hardware has a mind of its own, so I was back at the Apple store looking at options.
My first thought was an iMac, but it looked to be older Apple technology. I didn’t want to bite that hook, and a few months later see the release of a whole new iteration. I’ve experimented with using the iPad on travel trips, and it works well, so I didn’t see the point in another laptop, which led me to the Mac Mini.
The immediate drawback appeared to be no keyboard, mouse, or monitor. Wait – I’ve already added those onto the laptop, and one thing we have in the house is plenty of spare monitors. No camera? Again, we have those sitting on a shelf not being used. So I ordered the Mac Mini. It arrived two days earlier than scheduled and as soon as I plugged in the keyboard, mouse, and monitor, it asked me if I wanted to connect to another Apple device and copy from that.
Now, Apple has tricked me before this way with my iPad, but I was prepared to give it a try, and surprisingly the Mac Book and Mini talked to each other and about five hours later everything was up and running on the Mini. I had some problems with license counts on some applications, and the Mac Book Pro NTFS app doesn’t work with the Apple M2 chip. Both took a little time but were easily resolved.
Total time to upgrade and iron out the kinks? Less than a day. It’s the easiest upgrade I’ve ever done.
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