Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

I think I want to rewrite one of my drawing routines. The way I did it first has the advantage of being fast and using very little memory, but has the down side of relying on implementation defined behavior which means it looks fine on my laptop and kind of trash on the machine at my roaster. Sketched out a replacement algorithm that doesn't rely on implementation defined behavior, is likely to be a little more flexible on most systems, but does require more memory. Still plenty fast.

I think everything else on my to do list is more involved than I want to get into tonight so it's time to pack up, go home, and hug a cat.

One line fix for a purely visual issue that's been bothering me. That change should be the default behavior, but it doesn't seem to be.

Added another feature after today's coffee roasting. It'll be a little while before I need to use that so I hope it works. It compiles, at least.

Did some data integrity related work today, disabling an operation in conditions where it can't do something meaningful where previously the program just crashed. There's one chunk of data that I'm not sure how I want to handle it yet. I need either another integrity check or preferably just rework some things such that all possible states become valid. Ideally I could extend the all states are valid approach to all the data, but I can't do that right now for back compat reasons.

Two other changes also got in today, but they're very minor QoL tweaks that I could do in 6 or 7 SLoC.

There are some other possibilities here as well which might require a bit more work, but my hope here is that it takes a feature that's already been proven to improve batch to batch production consistency and makes it even more powerful.

Use case #2: You're doing an experiment where you want to vary a part of the roast in the middle, while keeping the start and end the same. Having a later translation point makes it easier to match the end without having to design the whole modified plan up front. (which you should, but we all know coffee roasters aren't great at actually doing things like that in the real world for the most part)

Use case #1: You're far enough off the plan at the start of the roast, think you're running parallel, but want an early translation to make sure you're on the right track before the auto-translation at the start of taste-able chemistry kicks in, making it easier to match the significant parts of the plan.

Added a new feature to Typica that I've wanted for a long time now: Immediate Translation. This lets you shift live data or plan data across the time axis to make it look like the temperature of the coffee is ascending through its current value at the same time in both without needing to specify a fixed point in advance. You're just saying, "line it up now". This augments the previous behavior rather than replacing it.

Tonight the cat wants belly rubs.

Tonight's potato was better.

I'm eating a baked potato. It's not the best baked potato I've ever eaten, but it is at least edible. It's been a while since I had one.

I had 4 feature changes that I wanted to make before roasting the coffee today. All of them pretty minor, all implemented without difficulty. The one I expected to be the most difficult was something that I had already mostly implemented as part of earlier feature work and I just needed to hook it up the right way.

Current state of the cat

The cat has decided that scritches are no longer enough. She must sit on me.

The cat is in the mood for scritches tonight.

Took another look at a piece of code I wasn't happy with and proved that half of the conditionals were redundant. Took those out, which let me sensibly remove a temporary variable and did a couple other minor tweaks and now I have something that's shorter (both width and height), earlier to understand, runs faster (though that won't be noticed by anybody), and has exactly the same behavior.

Pyrotechnics are disturbing the cat. Maybe I'll have peanut butter on crackers while assuring her that everything is fine.

Removed Sulawesi Toraja from the the shop's web site. I still have a little of that available to sell locally, but I can't roast any more until I have more green coffee available. Online orders from now won't go anywhere until after the 4th, but I'll roast for any orders that come in on the 5th and try to get all of that shipped promptly.

https://wilsonscoffee.com/