Well, it's February 1 and you know what that means?
time to review January 2009.

The month began with a lot of days absent perhaps
do to emotional low points and other what nots with
work and the shifting emphasis on my own thought process
rather than site writing. 30 or 40 percent of those
days have journal entries despite the lack of blog
posts.

I began using the twitter service to track my progress
on various projects and estimate other time factors like
how much sleep I was getting. That has yet to be plotted
and there are issues with obtaining the data from the service
but I'm sure I can work something out. The habit of using
a command line tool has proven useful for quick note taking.
I think it would be a good idea to diversify the use of such
things.

Also, there are a stack of comic ideas to be transform
into final product sitting on my desk.

Regarding electronic design I was able to run kiCAD
to look at files for the RepRap device

the image comes from the post Halt the Superficial In which
my epiphany about my focus shifted from creating outward work to
honing inward skills. This is why this month had a great deal
of coding and conducting business research.

"I wanted to spend my time working on things I
knew I could succeed with that would also be
independent of people's opinions. I wanted
to pull things off where I
knew no one could argue with the result." 

And so movies felt like a waste.

More notable progress was the first time I
had servos running.

The code was pretty crude. And it remains so to this day, but
I did discover some other leads I was going to follow.
The main reason I agreed to join the ROV Team was so that I
would have motive to work on the servo code.

I've only been a bit lax with it lately because I took on
the Class Schedules Project in full force in order to get
familiar with java and the processing API. The issue there
is that I took on the Class Schedule project with the intent
I'd see it through to the finish. But the ROV team would
probably like to see a full working demo of the motor
control system. This is perhaps a management error on my part
but its hard transforming from a work on everything sort of
personality to a stay focused on one forever type.

Though my emphasis isn't on the site I wrote the
short Restaurant Rob script. Each time I post a script
it takes a while to reformat the text into something I can
post on my website. I had forgotten the name of the program
I used. (turns out to be fs for Format Script) As I mentioned
creating unix tools I can call from the command line is the
new tactic for organization.

The 20th marks the first major progress on the Class Schedule
program. A project designed to hone my abilities sand collected
parsing and presenting software. I knew I was going to write
some planning code but before I did I had to dust of my java
skill set and see how far I could go. I code every night and on
weekends for a solid week on the thing before I think that the
code is a bust because I wasn't seeing the enrollments change.
The 29th held that surprise but I was also writing about moving
on though I didn't feel the thing complete because I didn't have
the full time line there nor a way to automatically download
the data on its own prompt.

Turns out the thing works anyway but by this time I have
neglected the Servo Code Project to the point where i kept
forgetting I had to get that done for those guys.

If you scroll down that page you find quite a lot of code. That's not
even the parser.

Being able to share the things I make is important
to me. that's why when I couldn't get my polar program
to show up on my wordpress page I was pretty
frustrated. I want it to flow smoothly there.

I'm proud
of the little thing. It's something of a tradition
to write something like a polar grapher every time I learn
a new graphical system. The original ones date back to
the days in which I wrote in BASIC and took the C++ class.

It's worth noting that the main code responsible for
all those patterns is only about 9 lines long.

 
// Draw points
   for( int i = 0; i < N; i++ ) {
     // Polar Equation
     a = 275*sin(w_delta*i+phi); // y = A sin(theta)
 
     x = a*cos(i) + H; // convert polar to rect coordinates
     y = a*sin(i) + K;
     rect(x,y,5,5);    // plot points
   }
 
   w_delta = ((float)mouseX)/width;
   phi_delta = ((float)mouseY)/height;
   // rotation is done with shifting
   phi = phi + phi_delta;
   w = w + w_delta;
 

The rest of the code just makes the display nice.

The month concluded with a basket ball game and
a trip to the bar (for the first time in my life)
This concludes a fairly well done month.

I had forgotten to mention made use of the dotproject
and managed to use java to pull data from sql databases.
A skill that should pave the way to a much more exciting
data viewing lifestyle. And aside from all that I made sure
to get out there and play with boomerangs on sunny
open fields as well as make time to hang out with
friends whom actually call me back.

It's been an alright month. There may have been some
tough moments but looking back I've come a ways with
the coding... something that never would have happened had
I been making movies instead!!!

Trade offs. It's all trade offs.