Here’s some disturbing output.
“
Exception in thread “Thread-0” java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 2147483
646
at Figure.nextTurn(Figure.java:799)
at Realm.cycle(Realm.java:83)
at CyclerThread.run(CyclerThread.java:41)
“
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:54 — 16.7MB) | Embed
Today we cover the Jurassic period, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, growing large and being in charge. One group began, during this period, to evolve toward becoming birds, and we talk a little bit about some early mammals.
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My robo-eye is sitting in my desk at the moment. It’s a pair of smart glasses, with a camera built in. I put these things on and run the vOICe, an app that changes what the camera sees into sound. With practice, blind folk like me can use such a setup to help navigate the world. As it turned out, I found they could help me do that within a couple of days.
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In posts on this topic, I keep saying I’m about to get to the interesting part…
posts, with optimistic titles like “Trembling on the verge.” Followed immediately thereafter by posts like, “How long has that been wrong?”
Bugs and issues keep dancing out from between my lines of code, and they all demand their share of time and attention. It’s reached the point where I’ve become superstitious about it, so I didn’t say any sort of fate tempting phrase like, “Almost there,” or “nearly done,” in the last post.
BWAHAHAHAHA HA HAHA!
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There I sat, after longer than usual. I was waiting for the small population to stabilize. I’d just fixed a problem that had been there for weeks and months, a subtle bug I just hadn’t noticed. Fixing it meant that my little digital creatures, called “Figures,” would behave differently. Maybe the fix would break the system. Maybe they wouldn’t be able to stabilize anymore. Maybe the entire concept has been fundamentally flawed from the beginning. Maybe it’s all been a waste of time.
And then…
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I fear them. Not obvious bugs, but the sneaky ones—the ones where your code will compile and run just fine, where the program can pass all the tests you thought of; but there it sits—the bug you didn’t think of testing for.
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 21:43 — 12.4MB) | Embed
We blame the sickness. Both of your hosts managed to catch, and were suffering from, a rather nasty little chest cold. In episode 179, on the Triassic period, we mispronounced, misspoke and mistook. Since we were recording on a holiday and didn’t want to do that much research for this week anyway, we corrected our mistakes from the last episode. While we were at it, we got to expand on a couple of things, and add a couple more.
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Once I had the vOICe installed on my smart glasses, I put them on and played with it. The vOICe is an app that takes images from a camera, and turns them into sound. If one is blind, which I am, it can provide a way to send visual information through the sense of hearing. It takes time and practice to learn. For more information, or to download a copy to play with, you can check out the seeing with sound website.
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 18:20 — 11.2MB) | Embed
Today, despite your hosts suffering from a nasty cold, we talk about the Triassic period. During this time, the first flying reptiles appear, along with several reptiles that returned to the water. We also get the very first dinosaurs, though they were still rather small, and the very first mammals, which were even smaller rodent-sized animals.
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:45 — 11.4MB) | Embed
For the summer, “The Lab” has a co-host. My brother Phil hops onboard. We’ll be putting out a ten to twenty minute episode each Thursday night. In this episode, we attempt to cover the last 177 episodes in just one.
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