2022-06-30:

Fri:
More learning about Flutter today. Figured out how to open a dialog box and ask to choose a folder. Had to use an external library to do it? Doesn't seem right.

Had a very long meeting "oh we won't need the whole time" yeah it took an hour and a half for FAX. I hate fax, let it die already, please!

Monday I'll be able to look at it myself, yay.

Did the shopping, saw my parents they made it home in time.

Came back here, checked sites.
Found- er, "legally acquired" some Flutter resources, maybe I can start making sense of all this garbage. Found a book on it, and some tutorial videos in the form of a course, I'll look the book over first, will probably be faster than watching hours of videos. I went looking for them because on one of the websites I visit there was a course being offered for like 90% off so I said, huh, maybe there are books on this stuff I could take a look at. So I went looking.

Then did some Remnant. Didn't do the DLC we were searching for a particular weapon. I got some nice armor instead and a trait and a flaming sword. So a good night's work I think.

Watched Dr Strange 2. I think the first one was a little better, actually.

Sat:
Weeding! And moving things around more. 3 more bushes put in back, squeezing them in there. Moved some more berries to the back too. Fairly nice out but I did get pretty hot.
Ordered Oliver's medicine. Had to send a new check in, because of the bank change. Unlike some people who don't think "oh yes there's new stuff maybe I should tell the company that's trying to take money from me." They don't take credit cards for some bizarre reason, they keep a check on file and bill you that way.
Checked sites. My IRA stuff went in. I made money, yes!
Played some CrossCode, got through the second half of the temple. Two more to go? Still don't really know what's going on in the game. Don't know who I am yet, or why the person trying to kill me is trying to kill me.
Then over to Sean's. Got through the next adventure, thanks to the combust spell. But we did decide on some things, and stuff happened, so it was fine. I now have a bunch of things I want to do in town again, so we'll have plenty to do next time as well.
Watched the second fast and furious movie, staying way too late.

Sun:
Mostly messed around with trying to print various parts of the gift. I'm not going to say it went smoothly.
Checked sites, watched videos.
Huh, the best print I got shows I did it wrong. I reversed two parts, there's a joint and I put it in the wrong place. So the part needs to be bigger, wider around, and the geometry fixed. Giving up for today, but at least I think it can work once I do get the part right. It's so odd, did I get the width of the part wrong? I thought I made it extra big but it's still too small. Weird. Even extending the sides it doesn't close all the way around the thing. The length is completely correct though. How did I get the length right but not the width?
A little bit of CrossCode, I don't know, it's annoying me more as it goes on. Maybe it was just my general feeling at the time.
A little reading. I wish I could say I did more Flutter stuff but no, I wasn't that fired up today.
I did do some cleaning though.
Got ready for tomorrow. Gonna do that faxing stuff, looking forward to it!

Mon:
Loaded the faxing build so I can start looking at that. The server I pull software from is really slow today. Usually it takes a few seconds to get a release, it was taking a few minutes!
The oneDrive people want videos or screenshots, need to do that at some point today as well. Did that as well!
Finished the fax tests, that looks good apart from a crash the first time. Oh, and maybe the confirmation page thing is messed up?
Also looked at the copy pin stuff which adds fax. Neat.
Totally failed to understand any more Flutter. I don't know if the book is helping or not. The way they do things is so bizarre. You look at the code, and they've got things broken up so much a single line of code can be a half dozen lines. And look at this:

<some earlier code>
ExpandedButton( child: Text('+'),
onPressed: () {add('+');},
color: Colors.blue[50],
),
],
),
),
],
),
),
],
),
));
}
}
This is how the code ends. How are you supposed to keep track of all those different bases? Some have commas, some have semicolons, one is doubled, some are straight braces, some are curly braces. It's insane. Just trying to make the UI (An area for a picture to go, and put a couple of buttons underneath it) is getting me nowhere. You know how I would have done it on the Mac? Dragged a couple of things around in the WYSIWYG editor and told it "this is what I am referencing when I reference "X". Done. No code at all. Look at this:

 Widget myLayoutWidget() {
      return Container(
        margin: EdgeInsets.all(30.0),
        padding: EdgeInsets.all(10.0),
        alignment: Alignment.topCenter,
        width: 200,
        height: 100,
        decoration: BoxDecoration(
          color: Colors.green,
          border: Border.all(),
        ),
        child: Text("Hello", style: TextStyle(fontSize: 30)),
      );
    }

It looks like 14 lines, but this is technically a single line of code. Look at the commas. They've just broken it up into 14 lines. For "readability" I guess but who was the genius that was creating this "system" that looked at that and said, yes, that's exactly what I wanted. Oh, and what does it do? Make a green box with "hello" inside it. That's it. All that code for a green box. Routines so complex and that take so many variables you have to break them into a dozen lines just to try and follow what it's doing. Maybe I should just go back to writing Swift code on Macs, and forget cross platform stuff. It's just I can't do that when there's nothing to do around here, and I wanted my stuff to run in more than one place. But having to deal with this? It's crazy, given what I can do on the Mac side so easily. I can't imagine trying to come up with my paragon character programmatically, it would take 20 pages. Just for fun I searched for "complex flutter layout" and I think people have a very different idea of what "complex" means. This is complex:



This is not.



That bit of color and a few icons takes 340 lines of code. You can see it yourself here. If you dare. It's the comment on top that cracks me up: "/// Purpose of this code is to show how a complex UI can be done"

Unbelievable. If there's some Flutter guru out there that can reasonably say they could make my UI in Flutter, well, you're a better programmer than I'll ever be. Or more patient. Or something.

Then went to after work place. For FIVE HOURS. To just transfer 3 drives to SSD. One machine, the one that I thought would take the longest, took the shortest. It worked fine right way. The others gave me a different error every time I tried it. Oh, couldn't finish, try sector by sector. Oh, couldn't copy sectors. Oh, not enough space. (The drives I am copying to are BIGGER than the old drives, there's space) Finally put the one into my duplicator and the other into the one that worked and tried making the clone that way. The duplicator took two straight hours. I was walking out with the last of the people playing netball having gotten it into the machine. At 9:30. I'll have to go back, the middle one I couldn't get to work at all. It blue screened on boot. Even though it made a perfect clone, seemingly, it was "device missing" or some crap. What? It's a clone of the drive. It's exactly the same. Boot you stupid thing. Recalling these are three of the same model of machines, they should have worked exactly the same way. Thanks, Dell.
I hate windows.
I got home at 10:00 and went to bed. YAY!

Tues:
Let's see if today is as crappy as yesterday!
Went to vote, they were actually around now. No one was really there, so I breezed through it. Somewhat oddly I thought there would be more people to vote for. The site I initially looked at seemed to indicate that. I researched the people, picked my vote, brought it along. But there were only two positions on the ballet. Huh? The first one had a name I had written down, so I filled that in. The other... Who are these people? The person I wanted is not on the list? So I had to quickly look into the first name (you're welcome!) saw she seemed not to be horrible, and filled that name in. Done.
No oneDrive yet, started to look over a new set of test cases but Christina got the VBS (the visual part) so she said not to look at it yet until she added a few based on that.
We also had a meeting about bugs, that took about an hour.
So there. She did send me the updates but I will look at them tomorrow. I was actually making some kind of progress in Flutter today.



How about that! I got it to look somewhat like the original version at last. It's still a crap ton of nonsense code but at least it's a crap ton of nonsense code that does what I want it to on the screen. I got it to read the folder of pictures, display them one at a time, the buttons at the bottom work, it knows when it hits the end of the array, so it's actually getting somewhere. Still, when you have to struggle to make something as simple as this looks instead of the logic of your actual app and what it's actually supposed to be doing, maybe the system you're using isn't really ready for prime time? There really needs to be some kind of editor, made by google, that's cross platform and can help you lay all this out. Because I haven't found one. I hate to think about redoing my Paragon app in flutter, it has like 6 different tabs, text boxes, buttons, all over the place. Nightmare code time, the closing braces alone would be six pages! The actual logic is going well, once the thing displayed like I wanted. Next up is getting it to read the keyboard so you can hit the number keys not the buttons if you want. (I looked up how) I think I know how to move the images when you reach the end. With a bunch of error checking I think I can do everything I need to and finish it off pretty quickly. I mean it's not a complex thing I want to do, but it can be handy. Neat.

Saw the guy down the street, sent his passwords to his Son In Law as requested.

Came back here, did the stuff I didn't get to do yesterday, like have dinner and clean the cat boxes. Checked sites, got ready for tomorrow so I can do xbox stuff.

No calls, but I will call the lady I got the SSD for, hopefully this clone will go easier than the last one!

Found out my solar collector exploded. The bottom wood rotted out, and the glass is separating too! It just came out, so it's all messed up. I'll have to rebuild it I guess, maybe? I do like it...

Wed:
It works! No, not anything work related, you crazy? Still don't have the onedrive app, two weeks later. No, my thing! Yeah, I got it 80% of the way there! It shows the pictures, you can use the bottom buttons or the numbers on the keyboard. It shows the next picture, it shows all the pictures. It even sorts all the pictures into the right folders! Yes! I was pretty stoked to see that work. Getting the key thing working was a pain, I still don't know how "hacky" it is the way I did it. All the sites I read seemed to do it differently? I mean it's a fundamental part of, I don't know, every single program in existence? Maybe should be easy to see what the keyboard is doing? I don't know. Anyway, it does react so I guess it's okay.
It needs more error checking, for example I don't check if it's a picture which I think I probably should? But the "happy path" works great. It's even fast. Granted I only have 5 pictures in the test folder but it moves them pretty much instantly.
Huh. Pretty neat to go from never having used the language to an almost complete app in a couple of days, working on it part time. Still can't stand the way it does things, and I could be doing it all wrong. Need to watch those videos.

A few work related things today. Tried to load fonts onto a machine for Kevin for his "print out the left side" business from two months ago.

A little fax stuff. Looking over that test plan from yesterday, made a few suggestions.

And then over to do another SSD install. Once again it couldn't do it the first time because of unspecified issues, but even though chkdsk found no issues with the C: drive, the second time it worked? Huh? Sure, why not. That only took about 25 minutes, exactly as predicted based on past experience.

Then home, sites, no calls.

Tomorrow is the first day of looking after the kitties and bunnies and birdies day. Gonna get up early and do that. So I need to go to bed early. Yay!

Thurs:
It works! Between all the meetings I had today I did manage a bit more work on iSort. Now it looks like this



This puts it much more in line with the previous version, putting a copy of the image under the number so you have some sense of what categories are. It also error checks so it doesn't try to display non-images, and shows the number you picked if you go back next to the image. Not bad.

Work wise, like I said a lot of meetings today. Also the guy came to take some of our scrap machines away making room in the lab, and some people came that could get our new device up and running. The one that had no software. So it works now.

Had another good haul, two yogurts, more fruit pies, another small salad I had today, and a ton of sandwiches. I brought a bunch to my parent's house after work. I had gone there before work, of course, everybody's fine.

Also got cat food after work, as I used the last can this morning. I still had two boxes there was no rush but with the shortages it's not good to wait.

Got back here, checked sites.  One call to make. Looks like Saturday morning is booked. I'll head to my parent's house, then out from there. Go home and have lunch, then go to the SSD lady.

Looking forward I have berries to pick, so I'll make a pie with one of the two bags I have left from last year. More weeding, and I have to go finish that stupid SSD job. I'll probably do all the fun stuff Sunday as the SSD will probably take at least 3 hours, if I include driving and copying it with my duplicator to have the best chance.

Shopping tomorrow, feeding the everybody, and we may get something new to test. No more June. We're doing game Friday, more Miracle adventures. Feeding everybody over the weekend. That would seem to be it.

Happy July everyone, the days will get shorter, hope you're ready for it. See you next time.