31-August to 8-September, 2007
| Saturday, September 8, 2007: I got a report from Erica with a large list of animation files that she could not open. Quite a few of the errors were related to my not having allocated enough storage for the event strings. I have that fixed, but there are some other, less frequent problems file that I have not gotten done yet. The good news is that none of the problems involved crashes. Defensive programming (checking return values and array sizes) has it's benefits. Today Kay and I cleaned out the garage. This garage is not attached to the house, but rather is an industrial type garage/workshop combination that I park tractors instead of cars in. While some of the mess was from tools not put away after a project was done, the main part was just cleaning out cobwebs, dirt and dead bugs. It looks pretty nice in there now, but give it a little while, and I can get it all messy again. I also rolled a long length of 3-strand 2/0 copper wire from the old mobile home site onto a spool. At the price of copper, this was worth the salvage effort, but it was for sure a difficult task in the blazing sun high heat today. The "dog days" drag on here. |
| Friday, September 7, 2007: I wrote yesterday about Valentine calving. It happened sometime last night, perhaps as I was writing yesterday's entry. When I was feeding the cattle this afternoon, I noticed she was slow arriving, which is unusual, because that cow loves her cattle cubes. When I looked at her, it looked like she might have calved... her tail was sprung and she looked thinner. After dinner I told Kay we should go look, and we found her and hew new calf. I didn't get close enough to check the gender, but it is a lively looking grey and white mottled calf. So far, most of the calves this lively have grown fast and remained healthy, so I am optimistic. I posted a photo at ImageShack, you can see it here. I got a successful testing report from Juliette, she is excited and I am also. She created an original dance animation, disassembled that, disassembled a game animation with facial overlays, replaced the skeletal animation in the game animation with her dance steps, and was able to recompile it and obtained full performance in the game. That is a demonstration of a big part of the functional design of the tools, so of course I am proud that it works. Like any software package, I am sure there are as-yet undiscovered flaws, but the tests show the concept is completely workable. I had no more success at improving the animation frame exporter. I came up with an idea for a way to obtain the rotation conversion factors needed, but this was not far from what I had already coded into the program. So I am torturing the rotations incorrectly, and they are confessing to things they have not done, and it shows. I went earlier today to buy farm diesel at the co-op in Giddings, brought it home and stored it, and refilled the tractor. I mowed a small area on top of where the mobile home once stood, not that it was too tall yet, but to give the Bermuda grass a chance to get ahead of the weeds while filling in the bare area that was underneath it. |
| Thursday, September 6, 2007: I mowed the yard today, as well as some other yard maintenance work. I suppose someone reading this would think I loved to mow things. I don't mind, and appreciate the need for it to get done, but I don't love it. I have been mowing things a long time. When I was a pre-teen boy I learned to cut the lawn with the family mower, and to earn a few extra dollars mowing other people's yards. Later, this became a sort of a youth job, not only for me but also my younger brother. Between us we bought a heavy-duty lawnmower and an edger with our earnings (my father and mother played the role of venture capitalist for us). Of course, we didn't spend all our earnings on equipment, I spent a lot of it on guitars and amps and records (those old black CDs with the big hole in them). I got a good report from Juliette on the animation compiler, and I spent some time detailing the operation enough to have her test recombining parts from two animations. As typical of programmers, the code is finished before the documentation gets done. I suppose part of it is that during the process of designing, planning, building and testing the whole, a lot of the operational aspects just seem obvious, except to the rest of the world. I got a whole lot more done on the generic frame exporter. At this point I have the process table driven, but the table is hard-coded into the program, a later phase will be to write the configuration file parser code for it. I still have the rotations wrong, but the file is created and can be imported back onto a model. A little incremental progress is better than standing still. While feeding the cattle, I noticed one cow, Valentine, looks like she will be calving soon. Last year she had her first calf, probably prematurely, and it died after a couple of days. I cannot be sure, since I do not palpate the cows, but it is about the right length of time for her to have rebred and be about finished with gestation. We had a lot of calves born in the spring this year, and too few due in the fall. The fall calves feed off their mother during the winter, and bring a better price when they are ready to market in the spring because demand for feeder stock for the summer is greater in the spring. I suppose "if wishes was fishes" is an appropriate observation here. |
| Wednesday, September 5, 2007: I mowed nothing today. I fiddled around working on a Generic Frame Exporter plug-in to do some BVH to Sims 2 animation conversions. This afternoon, when feeding the cattle, I decided there are two young longhorn steers about ready to market as "roping steers" (for the rodeo crowd). There are still a couple more smaller, and they are the last of Chocolate Power Play's progeny. I will get that done after my mother and all visit a couple of weeks from now. Not a lot more. I rounded up a few more sample BVH animations to test with, and figured out how PayPal email invoicing works. Not that I have any particular reason to send anyone an invoice. It seems pretty simple, a lot easier than other methods of transferring money. |
| Tuesday, September 4, 2007: I finished mowing the "lost" field today. I stirred up another bee nest, but I spotted the swarm in time enough to steer clear of them, and made it by today with no stings, for which I am thankful. I have a lot more work to do on this field to finish renovating it, as there are five large piles of partially burned debris and dirt with tall weeds growing over them. after seeing all those bees, I know I have to burn each of these piles to get rid of the weeds and varmints (like the bees) before I can tackle further cleanup. It rained lightly this afternoon, and a small rain tonight. I am not sure if the evening rain is measurable, I will look tomorrow, but it appeared to have been enough to at least provide a little soil moisture for the grass. Although we have had a good year for rain, I would not like to see us go a lot longer without a little soaking. This is the time of year that is really important. It is almost time to seed some winter ryegrass. Without some good fall rains, it will not sprout, and the warm season grasses will go dormant too soon, forcing us to start feeding hay to the cattle earlier. Last year I didn't have to start feeding until almost December... by contrast, I had to start in October the year before. Two months of extra hay isn't "chicken feed". Last night I played with BVH files. There are more sources of these from motion capture than any FBX files. And they worked pretty smoothly in MilkShape. I am thinking what I want to make is a reconfigurable generic frame exporter, and tailor it at first for the FBX files. I got a few samples from a couple of different sources last night. The main problem seems to be that the different sources use significantly different skeleton styles. While each seems like it can be recast to the target, the count and parenting setup are sufficiently different as to make it a non-trivial matter. |
| Monday, September 3, 2007: I mowed today. I know it is a holiday for most people, but heck, I can take any day I want off, so there is nothing special about a holiday for me. I continued to mow in the "lost" pasture, and got a good bit done. I also had two run-ins with those pesky little ground bees, and got stung pretty good. Nothing dangerous (for me) but uncomfortable. And I have had to leave an area untouched. But I can come back and mow it later, when it is cooler and the bees are less active. Some more corrections on the animation exporter, and back to Juliette. I experimented a little with the FBX format, including downloading the SDK from Alias or Autodesk or whatever they are calling themselves these days. Magilla-Gorilla Software might be appropriate, considering all the companies they have swallowed. While the MilkShape FBX plugins do not appear to support multiple skin weights, the animation support is good, although you end up with "Model::" prepended to the bone names. Perhaps I can find some FBX character animations and write some conversion support plug-in for MilkShape, and skip all the pain or developing something with the SDK. I went out with Kay for dinner. I was in the mood for some Tex-Mex food, and that was good, because aside from fast food, that is about all we have to choose from in Rockdale. For a good steak dinner, it takes a trip somewhere else. |
| Sunday, September 2, 2007: Went to church this morning, as is my custom. I learned that a sister-in-law of some neighbors had passed, after an extended illness, in a nearby town. Visitation was today, and so we went out for lunch there and viewed the poor soul. It was not for her, whom we had never met, but for the ones left behind that we show our respects. Yesterday, I finally shamed my self publicly (well, here) into getting back to work on my AniMax compiler project. And so I did, adding the needed code and then tweaking the components (there was a bug in the animation disassembler, too) until I was satisfied and sent it out for testing. Juliette also reported back on the current animation exporter corrections, the clavicles were now dead on, and she supplied some thumbs corrections. I added those factors in and sent her this iteration. She is so good. There is a high probability of rain and thunderstorms tonight. I see plenty of dark clouds to the Southwest and hear some rumbling in the distance. I updated my rainfall chart, and based on the measurements made here, we have had a 12-month rainfall total of almost 58 1/2 inches, while at the end of last August it was 16 2/3 inches over 12 months. That is over triple the rain. And it shows in the quality and quantity of the grass we have this year. Most of the bare patches have filled themselves in with fresh Coastal Bermuda strands. Weeds are doing well also, but I am working to help reverse their circumstances. |
| Saturday, September 1, 2007: Two days in a row. Although this will be, in part, a continuation of yesterday. But then, most of my days are a continuation of what I was already doing, and I certainly hope the ability to continue remains with me for a while longer. I mowed again. First, I finished the open pasture I was mowing yesterday. The other half of this whole pasture (more or less) is in significant disarray. Two years ago, I had this area, which was mostly wooded, bulldozed. What followed was a drought that one of the locals to me was the worst he had ever seen (and this man is in his seventies). So this remained mostly bare dirt, interspersed with the unburned stumps that were left over from the clearing. This spring we had enough rainfall for me to take the risk to seed it, and with the continued good rainfall we had, the seed sprouted, as did every weed seed in the field. So I am mowing this part, too, an effort that will also have to include cleaning up the old burn piles. A few of these are grown so thick with overgrowth that I may have to spray them with diesel and burn the weeds to be able to see what I need to do. Yesterday I prepared a special test copy of my Sims2 Anim Exporter plug-in for Juliette, but I inserted the correction factor she had been working on in a location where I should have had the rotation reversed (negated). So after getting her report of the backwards correction, I redid it and shipped it off. Because she lives on another continent, this means another day went by, since by the time I read her reports and respond, it is already past bedtime for her. Of course, by the time she gets going, I am in bed. I suppose it is a good thing this isn't a commercial effort, or some efficiency expert might report this bottleneck to upper management, creating an opportunity for a reorganization. I could lose my job! Speaking of which, I need to get cranking again on the animation compiler. I have to get the Events part completed, so I can utilize the animation disassembler or the animation parser to finalize the debugging of the decomposition/recomposition process. To make me feel even lazier, the code I need to pack and unpack the strings has already been written, it just needs cut and pasted from the Animation Exporter plug-in. |
| Friday, August 31, 2007: Today is right at a month since the last site update. But maybe I can do better. At any rate, as you can expect in Texas the weather today was hot. I worked this morning mowing weeds. For those not familiar with farming, as time goes by in the warm season, the weeds get taller than the grass. Besides sucking away the water from the soil, they shade the grass, slowing it's growth. In general, the cattle will not eat most of the weeds, unless there is no choice. So, by setting a mower up at six inches or so and mowing the pasture, the weeds get cut off and the grass does not. This reinvigorates the growth of the grass, and reduces the weeds over time, because less of them are able to go to seed. So today I mowed several acres, maybe five or so. I have never applied a real scientific approach to how much I can get done, but it seems like I average between one and two acres an hour, depending on the overall grass and weed height. It tried to rain this afternoon, but after I put the tractor away the clouds left, although we did get a small bit of rain this evening. As far as rain goes, we have had a good year. We are close to double the average annual rainfall, measured over the last twelve months. August is a hot, dry month, but this year we had some rain almost every week, totaling a little under 3 inches, while last year we had about half an inch. |
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