So started a bit later than I should, mainly as I didn’t have a great deal of enthusiasm for it. Anyway, cracked on. Got the threading stuff I was working on working, then on to another bit. That’s about it now, if it could be threaded it pretty much now is. We’ve come a long way from the first monotonic renderer eight years ago.

Went to Pump. Did a session with Laverne. Had pretty much enough of this week it must be said. I’ve got a few bugs to trace next week and then it’s actually on to doing something vaguely interesting for a change.

Got no real plans this weekend. Have to do a home check, may be flying Sunday. See how it goes.

Work was rather dull, which made a bit of a nice change this week. Working on moving some GUI stuff to render on a thread. As exciting as it sounds, oddly worked first time though which is always quite worrying as it means it will comeback and bite me in the ass in about a weeks time. Walked Sasha. Then my wine kits arrived. I got three lots of white and a red. Together with a a bottle cleaner and a load of corks. Went for a run. It’s getting really dark early now, so had to cut it a little short. Still managed about seven miles though.

Came back, did a bit more work then sterilised two buckets and a load of kit. Poured in a rather expensive Voignoir and a Californian into buckets and topped them up with water. Added the various bits and the yeast. Now they are in the spare room starting to activate. They smell delightful.

Today is a bit of a sad day, a colleague who I’ve worked with at my current company for almost eight years and at a previous company for almost ten years, is leaving today. Haven’t seen him in a long time as he’s now in Australia. I wish you all the very best for the future Al and I hope we don’t lose touch.

So started at 6:30 and took Dillon to daycare. Then tried to start on time. Basically spent about three quarters of the day tracing one bug. In the end it turned out to be a problem with an event. So here is the scenario. You have a thread that adds jobs to a ring buffer. It also increments a job count using an atomic. So if its the first job then it resets an event. Then pushes the job on to a queue. When the job is processed it decrements the count, if it’s zero then it triggers the event. The bug was to do with the event, the increment/decrement is atomic, but there may be a context switch before the event stuff, so it’s possible the event may remain triggered. Which was causing no end of fun. Fixed that. Picked up Dillon.

Went to the gym and did Pump. Then came back and had to fix yet another event problem.

Looking forward to a dull day tomorrow.

Spent most of the morning working on a problem to do with video bandwidth. Then in the afternoon and most of the bloody evening one to do with duplicate or invalid data. It’s no doubt caused by some kind of caching / false sharing weirdness that is just there to piss me off. It’s succeeding. Went for a run, had a bath. Been feeling somewhat snotty all day. Ordered four wine kits, will hopefully get those up and going by the weekend. That’s around 120 bottles.

Going to bed I think.

Didn’t exactly start at the crack of dawn. Did start out doing some more work to do with photo exporting, but managed to pass that off to someone else when it was getting heavily into save / load type code. Then it was on to bugs again. All sorted except one to do with video bandwidth which I’m still looking into. Walked Sasha. Jamie’s knob jockeying friend came round and they vanished off somewhere. I went off to Combat, got a slightly sore foot. Wasn’t overly into it, but got through it all the same. Did a little bit more work. Now building data again.

Jamie wants to run his Sonic statue thing off the mains, it only takes batteries. I rigged up a ‘wall-wart’ power thingy but the output isn’t regulated enough. So I came up with a circuit to do it using an LM317, it only has five parts. I have four of them already. Tried to source the regulator, no problem, I can get it off Farnell for about 40p plus a shit load of postage. Maplin want over a quid for it. Or I can just buy it, on a PCB with the other parts, ready made from Hong-Kong for 99p including postage. I’ll be waiting for the postman then.

So just to catch up, yesterday we spent the afternoon in Cardiff. Jamie wanted to go shopping, so for a change I decided to head to Wales. We had a nice afternoon there, it has a good shopping centre now. Came back from there, showered and then headed over to Lisa’s. Where they spent the next five hours talking about Tesco’s. I drank six cans of lager and two glasses of wine. We were driven home in a Prius. They are fucking weird, starship enterprise and silent with it.

Today we woke up and had a bum. I made Jamie squeal, apparently I almost broke something. Aways proud of that. We went out and walked into town. Came back, showered again and off we went to the pub for a mediocre meal with Jamie’s family. The service there is absolutely appalling.

So thats it really, a busy weekend of socialising and eating. Be glad to get back to work.

So I go running. Then end up calling into a house of people I thought I may know. I then spent all the afternoon chain-smoking while wondering about how it was going to effect my running. I had twenty quid in my pocket but I knew I needed a tenner to send off this government form with. I sat at the table and filled in the form. I’d just finished it when I was presented with a photo of me and a rather ugly baby with a big price sticker on it of £11. I said it was lovely but I couldn’t pay for it now as I needed ten pounds for the form. But it was okay as I was at the bureau de change on the ship. She had plenty of Euro’s but she was just about to close. Then thankfully I woke up.

After not very much time it was time to pick up the shopping. Came back, did a tiny bit more then we walked the dogs for an hour or so. Came back and finally got stuck in. Still all about photo processing and export today. What a mighty pain in the ass that was. Went to the gym and did Pump. Did a session with Laverne afterwards where we mostly rabbited. Came back and did another couple of hours. Finally got it all working. Now about to add annotations to a new video, then it’s pizza time.

Actually had a reasonable nights sleep after I did the multi-bed shuffle and all Jamie’s devices finally stopped buzzing. So got up and got on with it. Had a load more content export stuff to sort out, then a load of content searching, that went all relatively smoothly. Walked Sasha. Went for a run just before six. Came back and then spent the next three hours trying to load a fucking texture. The content searching returns a file name. I then tried to load that file name. The great fun being that the search file name is linux based, so is case sensitive. I then had to jump through a ton of hoops to try and get it to the actual system load call without prefixing it with some shit and without changing the case. After three hours, still didn’t bloody work. Will crack it tomorrow.

Torture porn night. Have to pick up the shopping tomorrow as all the delivery slots were taken up.

So last night I got very hot, very frustrated and coughed a lot. I’d been going down with some lurgy for most of the evening, coughing away. So I’d been jamming large amounts of Vicks first defence up my nose. I’ve used this stuff a hell of a lot in the past, it causes a micro-gel to form in the back of the throat and then flushes out all the crap. It does work, you will cough a bit and your nose will run, but it never really develops into anything. The only problem with it though is when you breath it in it trickles to the back of the throat and that burns like hell. Anyway, didn’t sleep at all. Got up at 6:30 and took Sasha to daycare. Went back to bed and managed to get a couple of hours.

Work was all about jpg’s. Basically loading them as textures. I then had a load of stuff to do on content management which I can’t really go into. It’s not exactly exciting, but stuff that needs to be done. Picked up Sasha again. Went to Pump. Weights back up to a good level again now. Came back, did protein shake and a lot more work.

Time to update the server and WordPress.