Week #763
This is the last week in Q3. That means we turn over a lot of calendar pages/columns to Q4 and start to prep for 02026! Part of the process is to get our A0 Annual Wall Calendar ready. You can download the PDF or SVG file here and salt to taste. But we also print a four-column A4 sheet to help us plan vacation days, holidays, publishing schedule and more.
You can download these calendar files. We like this A4 format because when folded, it keeps us focused on a shorter period of time, acts like a bookmark and is too small to do daily planning, but large enough to scribble something in a square.
This week we continued working on our Timetracking software. It is now connected to two accounting app’s APIs to generate invoices. The unique selling point of the system is now under-construction and next week we’ll sync-up with some early testers to get feedback.
More WebRTC work this week. We’ve proven it works, but it is still bugging when making the initial connections. Smoothing that process has been the main focus.
Week #764
On Monday we met with some architect friends to demo some of the VR work we’ve done. For more and more projects they are being asked for VR demos. We walked them through all the different versions of a “VR view”. From taking their architectural models to: equirectangular 360 renders (easy, annotatable, light-weight, static, generic player), stereoscopic 360 renders(easy, lighter, some sense of parallax, generic player), partial 3d models and skybox (heavy-ish, lighter than full model, has some parallax, stationary, more effort and custom player), full 3D models (heavy, needs to deal with lighting, full motion, but custom player). They now have a better sense of what’s possible and what their skillsets/budgets can handle.
We also picked-up a Backbone controller this week. We have a new secret project that needs to support this hardware, so we could expense it! Hopefully in 6-12 months we can explain what this is all about.
This week also rolled-over between September and October. That means time to pay bills! It also means we’re starting all our October surveys. We continue with the compulsory school student survey (October and April are the biggest months) then we start one for high-school students and another for 1st-5th graders. These are not as big as the student surveys in the number of participants, but we still need to go through all the steps of collecting lists, sampling and coördinating communications during the month. After October, it is much quieter until the spring when we kick-off parents and staff surveys.
We worked a bunch on the WebRTC project this week. Two major pieces we needed to sort out and we managed one of them. The first was dealing with coördinating playback. If someone play/pauses or joins late, we needed to sync-up any media. This was working except for the instance when someone joins late. They caused everyone to rewind their media back to the start. Now we let the server “remember” the last play/pause message and anyone new joining knows at what position to start the playback.
On Wednesday (October 1st) an old client alerted us that their customers cannot login via island.is anymore. Going back through our emails, we first told them this was going to be an issue in April 02024 (~1.5 years ago). Other customers migrated away from using the Single Sign-On service which it was going private and going to cost a lot of money. On other projects we switched to TOTP (temporary one-time passwords). Over the course of a few months, we met with their dev team and explained the situation and everyone agreed they would take care of the migration and we would wait for how to integrate with the new system. We continued to reach out, no news and now things are broken. They are understandably a bit panicked and we are helping where we can, but it really goes back to their dev team getting us the connections we need to move forward. Ultimately, when we talked to their dev team, we decided that they should just take over this whole project. To update the system, we need to update the Heroku stack, which doesn’t support the current version of python, which means a lot of software library updates which have NOT been maintained in the last 2+ years. TL:DR; if you want to change a link, it’s going to be DAYS of work at this point.
On Thursday, we sent out our Quarternotes Q4 newsletter. You can read it online, but be sure to subscribe to never miss an issue. The rest of the day was spent fixing small survey issues, updating the testing suite and updating some cable management.
It’s been such a busy week, we kept Friday to just a few meetings and required reports. The extra time was spent getting organized, testing and starting the weekend a little early.