Thursday Grind

Plate Spinning 

You will hear the term plate spinning, which is the activity of keeping as many plates continually rotating on a long thin pole for as long as possible before one of them crashes to the floor due to lack of momentum.

When I start forgetting tasks that I had planned to keep spinning, that is when I know I have too many plates on the go, and the next sound you will hear is the crash of pottery!  Not to name names, but I have totally forgotten two tasks in as many days and it's not something I like to do as a rule.

I have since corrected the omission and all is well with the world but I do feel I am at the threshold of what I can comfortably spin. This means any new projects or jobs coming along will have very little resource placed on it for the time being.

DarkGDK Now Open Source

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.  Although many of you will know that DarkGDK has been open source and free for years, we still get the occasional email coming through support mail asking for, er, support. It is tasks like these that find themselves with precious little resource with other more demanding projects on the go.

To head off any disappointment in the DarkGDK camp, I have decided to announce today that it is now officially open source, and that no further intervention from TGC will be made on the currently open source code. It will remain free to use, and the source code from Google Code will allow you to amend, fix and upgrade as you see fit. The forum is still a lively place so it should continue rolling for many years to come, all be it without a steering wheel.

Fortunately this allows me to bring the source code back in-house so I can start ripping it apart from the impending FPSC Reloaded work. Part of the project will involve improving some aspects of DBP (of which DarkGDK is the underlying engine) and having it closed source will help me focus on it without having to consider how it might break other coders projects.

FPSC Fun

It became apparent to me today that my first month of Reloaded work is not been too spectacular on the progress front. In blasting the other projects to get them out the way it has been sacrificed and I am about a week behind my internal schedule.

To combat this, irrespective of the demands of the hour, when I return in the evening I am going to switch to FPSC work for the rest of Thursday. That way I can put another stake in the ground along the way to completion. I am going to leave the 'what' for later, but switching on the new machine and working for a few hours on Reloaded will give me a nice warm feeling.

Signing Off

The work will continue into the night, but I will sign off now so you can look forward to Friday's blog and find out what and how much I did on Reloaded. I must also note that internet drop-outs are a royal pain. I have been uploading the same test flight binary for over 24 hours now and it's driving me nuts!  Even my blog is showing 'an error occurred' every now and again, and last night the whole power grid went off at 3AM.  Sometimes living in a small town in Wales has it's downsides!