Freesteel

Come on you lurkers, write to us. You know who you are. We do keep an eye out on the Apache logs, so we know something is going on, even if we don’t know what it is.

Is it the chatty front page with its rarely documented historical facts that makes you nervous? It doesn’t look professional and corporate enough, does it? Do you prefer it when all companies in this industry drape themselves in a venier of business perfection which is wholly devoid of life-forces? What’s that all about?

For another project, I’ve recently been scanning through old issues of “Time” magazine, and “The New Yorker” on the open shelves of the Liverpool Central Library where they go back to 1947. I am disappointed to report that nothing whatsoever appears to have changed to the sound of the business news, which is almost all the news. They still took interviews from CEOs and top management only, and they still spoke in the same boring content-free way with no hint of what was happening then, or going to happen in the future, a future which thirty years after the articles were printed I could remember. It’s like there’s some kind of mask you have to put on when you work in a company which makes you measure your words or, better yet, not speak aloud.

Hmm. Maybe that’s is why the internet hasn’t made the political difference everyone expected it would, which is why all the attempts by governments to clamp down on it early on have largely gone away. Its great weakness and strength is that everything that goes through it winds up on the record, in the way that spoken conversations do not, so people subject themselves to extreme self-censorship. And except for management people, politicians, and official spokesmen, most human beings don’t have the confidence to know that they can talk in the absolute platitudes which can’t possibly get them into trouble. So they stay silent.

Meanwhile, I think I’ve halved the time it takes for the Adaptive Machining algorithm to complete in certain examples. Depending on the blood pressure of the salesman, this is considered either a 50% or a 100% improvement. But it doesn’t sound like anyone is particularly interested. Let’s get back to real things like gas prices.

(Rant continued at The Myron Ebell Climate.)

We moved the freesteel website to a new server. The old server was in fact a so called ‘virtual server’, where a physical computer is running several installments of Linux, each behaving as if they are real computers. The new one is a real computer, standing somewhere on a rack in London.

I’m still at the preliminary stages of writing a const stepover/scallop routine. I’m making the classical version first, before the fancy freesteel version which will be smooth, spirally and have no corners.

First function needed is a really fast measure of the distance between point and contour. I’m on my second attempt now as I work out more about this subdividing weave structure. It looks like it is not wise to be inserting new points into the weave that you are measuring your distance from. It may be better to always build up the offset in a second weave. This looks wasteful, but is probably the only thing you can do if you don’t want all your pointers moving around.

A new complete waste of time: Playing on eBay. Just trying to restock some diving equipment since our garage got burgled last month. Someone at the pub explained to me how to play the system properly, and I’ve been following his advice. (The trick is, you put a big bid in 15 seconds before the end so no one else has time to bid against you and drive up your price. It’s the person in second place who sets the value.)

What’s happened today? I’ve finished the flat area detection and stepdown stuff, implementing the similar sort of thing that was in Machining Strategist. Don’t know if it is more sophisticated or less, since I can’t remember exactly what I’d done there. Probably it’s exactly the same, since the same programmer writes the same thing in the same situation, usually.

Still making plans for the trip to Glasgow and Worldcon. I’ve bought a bivibag and booked my bike on the train so I can cycle to a campsite, as there’s going to be room there.

Tomorrow’s job is to pick potatoes and blackcurrents if it’s not raining. I’m also going to put in a serious session of publicwhip, if there’s no crying from Cimco about how horrible my program is becoming.

Today was the first day of The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, and people got arrested. I’m sending a letter to the police asking for permission when I go there.

Feeling bit crap, with that sore eyeball feeling. And my knee is starting to give gyp, possibly with the arthritis I was promised.

Wasted most of the day searching for a digital camera to buy. Ah, consumerism. Not so good at doing that. Ordered some compact fujifilm thing, so it will be small.

The inflatable diveyak supplier I was trying to order from has really pissed me off. For 14 kgs they want to charge 50 quid carriage. Turns out they have to ship it from Germany. So what’s the point in having a dealer in England?

Weekend to yorkshire is cancelled. Excuse not to go Penyghent. May go diving at last.

Finally thought about some work. The latest cockup with the toolpaths is the roll-on function, which hits the wrong place when there is a cusp and makes a deep gouging toolpath. I’m beginning the implementation of a stripped down voronoi calculation to find all the smoothings that could be there. What a craze.

We’ll see if I can get into the freesteel blogging at some point. I must confess I’m not so enthusiastic at writing it. Doing the myron ebell climate seems more fun.

This blog is targetted at all you all victims who program CAM software out there, and work for some shitty company with bosses, hours, and no control over your work, and the satisfaction that you are directly helping some layabout toss-head CEO and board of directors to make a good living from bullshitting and ripping off anyone they have power over. Look. There is another way of doing it, if you have half a mind about how to develop software, come up with ideas, and work out for yourself what are useful things to do.

So we will show. The more who are free, the better it will be.

Things to do: link from start page to this blog

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!