Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   riot of tiny nanoclimates
Wednesday, February 11 2009
Today temperatures were supposed to reach into the 50s for the first time this year, so this morning I was outside cheering the melting of the remnants of the ice dams when I happened to notice something troubling on my main (homemade) hydronic solar panel. One of the panes of glass had developed a crack. I went up to look at it, wondering how it had happened. Had the weight of the snow broken it? Had it been the wind? The crack ran mostly horizontal to the lower edge of the pane, about six to eight inches above it. It had clearly started at one of the metal clips I'd used to secure it in place. These clips are coated with epoxy, but evidently (at least in this case) the clip had applied too much pressure and initiated a crack. It wasn't too difficult to repair the crack; I used some ultraviolet-curing glass cement and special plastic tape designed for repairing and sealing greenhouses. Still, it wasn't the sort of thing I wanted to have bouncing around in my mind. I like to think of glass as maintenance-free and environmentally inert, at least as long as there are no golf balls or bullets flying randomly through local air space.
While down in Hurley temperatures managed to reach 60 today, they only climbed to 57 at the sensor on my laboratory deck (a good place for a temperature sensor, since it is shielded from the sun year-round except for mornings near the summer solstice). Still, it felt like spring time and was wonderful to see the snow melting into ugly black-flecked ooze like a Wizard of Oz witch. Something about the reaction of incoming warm air and local winter air gave rise to a riot of tiny nanoclimates. Just walking down to the greenhouse, I passed in and out of three or four masses of air, all of them dramatically different temperatures.
Gretchen headed down to the City today to partake in a comedic fundraiser for an animal rights cause. I remained behind to continue teaching myself Objective C. I'd already done what I could to understand a basic "Hello World" program, so I decided to modify it and make it into my sort of "Hello World" demo. For me, "Hello World" has always taken the form of a graph of a sine curve as plotted by a sequence of characters (usually asterisks). To pull this off, one needs to be able to nest two loop structures and concatenate strings. For example, here's the result of the sine curve Hello World in Javascript:

The code looks like this:

Tonight, though, I also got sidetracked trying to figure out how to convert an integer into a string. In Objective C, the loops were easy (they were exactly like Javascript or PHP loops), but integer-to-string conversion was completely non-intuitive and difficult, and I had to wade through a lot of Google search results to find the answer: [[NSNumber numberWithInt:myInt] stringValue]. As for concatenation, it was a similar mess. You'd think an advanced language like Objective C would find a way to make string concatenation easy (if only with syntactic sugar), but no, it remains a non-intuitive headache.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?090211

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