Biweekly update 2020-01-19; Productive, but unsatisfactory two weeks
I've done a lot of stuff, but although it wasn't procrastination, I have somehow bitter feeling about it. I didn't get much sleep, so I felt tired all the time. This led me to using caffeine more than usual, so I had explosions of productivity alternated with moments of total tiredness.
tinySelf progress
When I wrote this update at Sunday noon, I've written an apology that I haven't been able to do anything on 📂tinySelf. Then I've got pissed at myself, opened the project in the IDE (PyCharm) and after several hours of debugging and thinking and tinkering, I've finally fixed the bug found by float's unittest which you maybe remember from Biweekly update 2019-10-27; Slacking hard.
You can read about it here: The "traits float" bug 2020/1.
Object wiki update
Basically, all my active free time, when I still have enough mental capacity and energy at the end of the day, I work on the object wiki. I've done a lot of PyQt coding and now I am working on the internal data representation.
OpenSource / other coding
I've had an explosion of productivity and creativity one day (just the right mix of nicotine and caffeine) and I've quickly put together script, that can be used to identify programming languages based on their hidden Markov models:
It seems to be working fine.
Blog updates
Generator for this blog was significantly improved:
- Added twitter button that allows quick retweets to the bottom of each blogpost page.
- Text on the mobile devices is now bigger for better readability.
- I've implemented image popup overlays with full size version of the image.
- Added syntax highligter using pygments and prog_lang_detector.
- I've reordered main index page and replaced links to feeds with buttons.
Writing
I've published Active widget in PyQT5 / QTextEdit (you can see the syntax highlighting here, language is guessed by prog_lang_detector), as promised. I am still waiting for grammar corrections on other blogpost.
Oh, and also The "traits float" bug 2020/1, as I've already mentioned.
Book report
I've finished Flatland, and I loved it. Be aware that this book is public domain and there are people selling hard copy with really horrible formatting and without images.
I felt cheated that my copy didn't contain images like this:
I've also finished Organized mind. Excellent book, that took me longer than expected. I am now in the process of extracting highlighted information from the book to some kind of mindmap.
Other than that, I've read half of the The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement. Initially, I've bought this book by mistake, when I thought that it is something else. No matter, it is very entertaining and interesting. Basically it is a story about plant manager, who has to improve his factory and solve all kinds of problems with all kinds of constraints. I really like it. It reminds me of The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win. Is there a category for this kind of books? Managerial fiction?
Edit: hah, there actually is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_fable
3D Modeling
I've bought 3Dconnexion spacemouse pro from some random guy on the internet. It cost me something like 140€ (new costs something like 400€).
It works with blender on Linux just fine, only thing I had to install is spacenavd. At first, I felt kinda overwhelmed with it, but after an hour of trying it out, it now feels just natural.
It works as 3D joystick, which means that you can also pull it up or push down and camera reacts accordingly. Mental model is like if you held tiny camera that controls your views with your left hand and if you pull it up, your view goes up. But it really reacts to 3D movements, unlike a joystick, so you can do all kind of wild camera movements and rotation with just a little twist and yaw of your fingers.
Which reminds me, that I am working on my Microtron model every time I feel too tired to actually do anything useful.
So far I taught myself a lot about binary and array modifiers. Array modifiers are kind of black magic and you have to understand origin points and rotations and local and global positions and sometimes it doesn't work at all, and then you have to apply transformations to your objects and it is imho weird and too much lowlevel, but over all usable.
Self improvements
I am kinda sad to report, that I didn't do much in terms of self improvements. I have a lot in queue, but I felt too tired most of the time.
Only one thing that I've improved is my aim when shooting from hand guns. I went to the small shooting-range near our workplace with my colleague Pavol, and he corrected me when he saw how I hold the gun. I've just picked it up and held it like this:
He showed me, that this is really bad:
And that I should hold it more to the top, so there would be no space. Immediately, my aim drastically improved. I've been able to group shots into ~5cm circle on ~7 meters distance with no effort. Even with the small Ruger LC9 handgun, from which I was unable to hit target reliably before.
Then we tried some kind of tactical shooting games. You shoot two shots (double tap) quickly in succession, monitor the (purely virtual) body on the ground, then check your weapon, and then look to your left, right and behind you. My friend who stand behind me made this more fun, when he sometimes asked questions like "how many fingers did I showed you?" or "what did I had in my hand?" (it was pocket knife).
It sounds easy, but it brings together your reflexes, situational awareness, all of that while maintaining control of the gun and following safe precautions (always point to the safe space, your finger out of the trigger and so on). I liked it a lot.
Then we tried quickly changing the targets, so you shoot one to the bottom left and second to the top right and that was also fun, although if you do that quickly enough, precision deteriorates:
Random stuff
Wanderer:
