Attitude != progress

Conclusion: a sustained good attitude results in an irreplaceable attribute: determination.

The app worked mostly-right, but patience based on surety of my abilities, plus certainty that I don’t know everything, plus continued positive reinforcement/encouragement from one skipping a step in the process (to arrive at “Gorgeous” early), resulted in the key road-block being three completely unrelated roadblocks.

The original app didn’t care about whether a dependent was installed or not, so failed silently when it wasn’t installed, rather than the more-common bizarre codified error message;
Correcting the code to report failures (& log them in detail) also revealed a slight typoe in my enhancements;
Correcting the typoe produced hard data which could then be adjusted to produce not only accurate but quite readable PDF reports.

All of this cascaded out of the woodwork across 13 minutes after about 9 hours of debugging, starting with strace.

Up to that point, nada.

Determination is irreplaceable! (-:

Comments

new life for an old (FTX) PSU, improved life for one human

the LEDs on this 5m strip happen to emit light centred on a red that does unexpectedly helpful things to (and surprisingly deeply within) a human routinely exposed to it. it has been soldered to a Molex connector, plugged into a TFX power supply from a (retired: the MoBo is cactus) Small Form Factor PC, the assorted PSU connectors (and loose end from the strip) have been taped over. the LED strip cost $10.24 including postage, the rest cost $0, the PSU is running at 12½% of capacity, consumes less power than a laptop plug-pack despite running a fan. trial runs begin today.

every-application-is-part-of-a-toolkit at work

I have a LibreOffice Impress slideshow that I wish to turn into a narrated video. 1. export the slideshow as PNG images (if that is partially broken — as at now — at higher resolutions, Export Directly as PDF then use ‘pdftoppm’ (from the poppler-utils package) to do the same). 2. write a small C program (63 lines including comments) to display those images one at a time, writing a config file entry for Imagination (default transition: ‘cross fade’) based on when the image-viewer application (‘display,’ from the GraphicsMagick suite) is closed on each one; run that, read each image aloud, then close each image in turn. 3. run ‘Imagination’ over the config file to produce a silent MP4 video with the correct timings. 4. run ‘Audacity’ to record speech while using ‘SMPlayer’ to display the silent video, then export that recording as a WAV file. 4a. optionally, use ‘TiMIDIty’ to convert a non-copyright-encumbered MIDI tune to WAV, then import that and blend it with the speech (as a quiet b...

boundaries

pushing the actual boundaries of the physical (not extremes, the boundaries themselves) can often remove barriers not otherwise perceived. one can then often resolve an issue itself, rather than merely stonewalling at the physical consequences of the issue.

Plantagenet Penguinista

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