Bill Roper's Journal

The annual New Year's Day font sale at Comicraft has already started up. This is when you can buy any font in the catalog for the same number of pennies as are in the new year's date, so this year it's $20.26.

I have limited myself to two fonts this year. It is easier to limit myself when you consider the number of Comicraft fonts that I've already tucked into the collection. If you're doing graphic design on your computer, having choices of display fonts is a fine thing.

The Amy & Me cover uses the Comicraft Merry Melodies font and the Story So Far font to good effect.

Anyway, in and around your New Year's Eve activities, it's worth checking out. :)

I had expected to be tired after Windycon, so I arranged to take Monday off. This was clearly the case, because both Gretchen and I managed to keep falling asleep during the second half of Tracker last night as we were watching it on the DVR. Well, the good news is that it was recorded, so we were able to watch it tonight and understand who the heck this character was who had popped up by the end of the episode.

The other reason for taking Monday off was that I *also* had Tuesday off for Veterans' Day and connecting everything together for one long session of getting things done seemed like a good idea. I have many things to get done.

The first was catching up on the convention laundry. I popped that into the washer before heading out for lunch and a couple of stops to grab stuff for dinner. When I finally got home, it was nearly time for Gretchen to go pick up Julie from school, so the right order of business was to put the load of wash in the dryer, fire up the studio computer, and install the new version of Cubase and the various plugins that I had picked up from Universal Audio with the latest upgrade.

This is easier when the computer fires up. After a bit of messing around, I realized that it wasn't just the computer being stubborn. It was everything plugged into the particular power strip I was poking at, which was apparently dead, dead, dead.

(Now thinking about it, it's just possible that the GFCI had triggered on that outlet, but thinking about it some more, there are two power strips plugged into that outlet and I'm pretty sure the other was still delivering power, based on what lights I saw on the assorted bits of equipment. These power strips / surge protectors are about as old as the studio, so having one fail isn't a great surprise.)

Anyway, I ordered a new power strip / surge protector that should be here tomorrow and will then start trying to figure out which plug needs to come out of the wall, because all of the cords are running under the console. In the meantime, I figured that I would unplug and remove the old Focusrite Octopre unit that's going to be replaced by the used Apollo 8 unit that I bought from Jeff Bohnhoff. Unplugging was easy, getting back up off the floor less so, getting the unit to slide *up* and out of the rackmount was simply not happening without a second person there.

Before dinner, Julie was down in the basement and was good enough to push the unit up so I could extract it. Then it was finally time to *open* Jeff's unit, which had been sitting in its package for weeks. That was easy enough. The unit looks to be in excellent condition and has now been installed into the rack. Assuming that the new surge protector arrives tomorrow, I'll get it plugged in and wired up.

And maybe I'll install Cubase 15...

It is clearly time for me to take some vacation days. Most everyone else is at work. :)

We use Gradle for our builds and to automate a number of tasks. One of those tasks is fetching the project files for JDeveloper from our Artifactory, which has the advantage of keeping developers who are less familiar with how things *ought* to work from accidentally checking in changes. Unfortunately, this gave me a problem over the last few days, because I am working on a big, ugly merge. I had loaded the JDeveloper files for the combined project, but the merge had left me with a ton of compile errors and JDeveloper was doing its little trick of "I can't see this perfectly good code over here" during the compile, even after I fixed things.

I decided that the right thing to do was to switch to the JDeveloper files that just look at my group's source code, get that fixed, and then go back to the integrated project. It was a great idea.

Except that Gradle would insist on compiling the code on the branch before it would let me download the JDeveloper files. That would fail (which was not a surprise; it was why I was trying to get the JDev files downloaded) and when that failed the process was done and the JDeveloper files were not downloaded.

Swearing ensued. Asking the build team for a fix ensued, but our U.S. guy is on vacation in India and the rest of the build team is in India as well and didn't seem to grasp the problem. I eventually sent one guy a screenshot of the directory listing showing that I did not actually *have* the JDeveloper files on my machine in this directory. This didn't get me a solution to the problem, but it made me feel better.

I figured I would take most of today off if I didn't get a solution. And I didn't. I answered some emails, went out for a nice lunch with Gretchen, came home, and went upstairs to take care of a few things.

And then I started researching Gradle, because I really know very little about it.

I figured out that what I needed to do was to tell Gradle to pretty please, don't run a compile when running this particular task. I still haven't figured out how to put this in the build.gradle file, but I did figure out how to get the files downloaded by changing my command line options. To wit:

"gradlew loadJDevFiles -x compileJava"

And look! I got my files.

I sent an email with the solution and went off to spend the rest of the day in the studio, because I deserve a vacation.

Starting now. :)

(More about the studio later...)

The optical drive arrived today on schedule. It only took a few minutes to get it installed, the new computer buttoned up, and then I was able to take it to the basement.

It took a while to work through the Windows 11 install, because it kept wanting drivers that needed to be downloaded and there was no computer here to do it with, the old machine having been disconnected. Eventually, I got bright enough to bring my laptop to the basement for the driver downloads which allowed me to stop going up to the second floor. :)

Anyway, the good news is that I got the Universal Audio software installed and it promptly detected the Apollo interface on the other end of the Thunderbolt cable. I am now in the process of reinstalling all of the other software that makes things run down here.

And then there is the copying of the audio files. I had intended to bring them across from the old machine, but I think the BIOS battery there has given up the ghost, so it is not going to be booting up until I replace that, hook it back up to a monitor and keyboard, and fix those problems. But everything is backed up to the NAS in the office, so I am now entering the second quarter of a projected twelve hours of copying files down.

Whee!

But I should be able to get things up and running again tomorrow -- depending on how much software still needs to be installed. :)

It was back to work this morning. With some help from one of my coworkers, my new Linux VM is *almost* correctly configured. It is, at least, capable of being used to do work. :)

I have now posited that there is an "escape room" theory of computer user-interface design. The object here is to hide the controls that are required to perform a particular function so that you must carefully search the entirety of the user-interface to find the correct menu selection or button to press to get your work done.

I am not sure why this is a good idea.

Today, the pain from my kidney stone went away (happily!), but my lower digestive tract decided that it wanted to get in on the fun. And I think I am *still* trying to pass some more small stones. The net result was that I got less done than I had hoped to today. The bills are paid, but the taxes still aren't finished. But I don't have that much to do, so I should be able to finish them up in the next couple of days.

Except...

The wired network connection to the office has gone down. Now the work computer (on which I am typing) has Wi-fi, so I have fired up the Wi-fi, gotten on the VPN, and will actually be able to work for work tomorrow.

The old desktop computer (which I still have not finished moving off of) does *not* have Wi-fi. The new one does, but this isn't much help at this very moment, although it's giving me a strong incentive to finish moving everything over.

In the meantime, I have ordered a new Wi-fi dongle for the old computer. It should arrive tomorrow.

And then maybe I will be able to get some work done while I figure out what has to be done to fix the wired connection.

(The wired connection looked ok in the basement when I investigated there. The network socket on the upstairs end has been under a lot of strain for some years. I got K to get down and unwire the socket from the wall. I eventually managed to get the socket out of the plate (where it had been misinstalled in a way that was creating the strain), but I think I killed the socket in the process, so that is going to have to be rewired to see if it was the source of the problem.

I *think* there is a spare socket in the basement. However, there is no time to do the wiring now, so...)

I got less done on the taxes today that I had hoped, but made some progress. One of the sources of delay was that I had promised Julie to clean the dust out of her computer. She was concerned about the amount of noise that the computer was making and believed that the dust was the problem.

She was quite likely correct. The machine was choked with dust in many places, including the case fans, the fans on the video card, and in the CPU heatsink. I cleaned essentially all of the dust out using damp paper towels for non-sensitive areas, while a tweezer and a needle got some of the trickier dust and hair out. And, of course, there was the occasional puff of breath into the case, sending dust flying everywhere.

My sinuses may forgive me someday.

The computer is still a bit louder than I might like (although not that loud for a gaming machine). If we don't like how it's behaving, I can replace the heatsink (which is probably the most useful thing) and also consider replacing the case fans, as those are cheap. In the meantime, I noticed that it is running Windows 10 and is eligible for the free upgrade to Windows 11, so that is now in process. Julie does not care much for change, so this will be temporarily disturbing, but I should be able to neutralize most of the major Windows 11 annoyances without too much trouble.

Tomorrow, I will get back to the taxes. This will be aided by having to have someone up early and awake at all possible hours so that FedEx will have no excuse for not delivering my delayed package this time. Remembering, of course, that they had no excuse for not delivering it on Friday -- they just decided to lie and say that no one was home...

I was explaining to K the other day how there is something to be said for my basic approach of postponing decisions until it's obvious what the right answer is. Now, given that Microsoft is going to be supporting Windows 10 with no extra pain or expense until October of next year, this means that I could put off putting together a new computer until then.

Of course, I didn't. I was tempted by the sales as Black Friday approached and I jumped in, bought a new set of parts, and put the new computer on Wednesday. And it's coming together nicely so far.

This morning, I woke up to a headline in my Google feed that indicated that Microsoft had decided to officially relax the CPU requirements for running Windows 11. Aargh! *Three* days after I assemble the new computer and I could have sidestepped the whole thing without having to dance the hokey pokey.

This afternoon, I went online to check things out. It turns out that the article was an AI written piece of crap with no actual relationship with fact. Oh.

I will still need to figure out exactly how to deal with the two machines in the household that don't support Windows 11 -- one of which is thirteen years old, the other nine years old and only disqualified by the CPU requirement now that I've installed a TPU 2.0 module on the motherboard. The latter should be easier to deal with. The former is going to need a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM to keep going.

Ah, well. It keeps life entertaining.

I got the last couple of wires connected on the new computer and brought it upstairs today. Unfortunately, I only have two connections on the KVM switch, so I've temporarily disconnected the work computer so that I can get busy with the new one for a bit.

After a bit of entertainment, Windows 11 is now installed on the new box and I am in the process of neutering what Microsoft thinks is "good for me". OneDrive has been uninstalled and now I can go back to copying data from the old machine again with things arriving on the local disk where I want them and not in Microsoft's cloud storage.

And drivers! Oh, my, there are driver updates.

I will have to set this aside, having demonstrated that things are working, because I have a lot of things that I need to get done this weekend that don't involve setting up the new computer. But maybe I can make some progress.

On lots of things. :)