Feeling a little blue

Saw off Kerri last night. She isn't comfortable with taking books overseas and releasing them, afraid that she'll be arrested for littering or something, so I miss out on a few exotic releases. Fair enough. Released a book at the airport departure lounge and kept my eyes on it all the way. Picked up by one of the staff members who, according to my daughter, looked very carefully at the Bookcrossing stuff and apparently got onto the site.

Uppsala is going to be pretty shitty for the next few days, according to the CNN weather site. The first day of her conference has a top of 8 degrees. And rain.

Cripes, but Uppsala in summer seems a lot like Canberra in winter. Except we could really really really use the rain.

The Qantas person gave her a window seat on the flight over, which had my daughter sighing at the thought of flying into London at dawn. I suspect the reality will be somewhat less romantic, but Mary's a bit of a dreamer. When we went over to New Zealand, Mary and I had our heads out of the window on opposite sides of the plane a lot of the time. Mary was looking out for whale spouts, probably a bit hard to see from several thousand metres, but then again I was doing exactly the same thing while we were low enough to see any marine activity.

Most of the flight will be in darkness anyway. I hope she doesn't get too jetlagged.

We'll have a pork roast while she's away. Usually don't have pork because Kerri doesn't like it, but I love it, Mary will tolerate it, and John will eat just about anything that is held close to his mouth. And the cats and dog line up looking anxious for titbits.

Having a blast getting back into VB.NET and ADO.NET. Been a while. Wrote a little program to seperate those pilot names into surname and initials, which worked well once I worked out the index base. Is the first character in a string the first or the zeroth? Anyway, it worked a treat. Able to pull data out of a table OK, just can't seem to write back the changes. There's more to this data adapter stuff than meets the eye, obviously.

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Hah! Blood Oath! There's been some deleted expletives recently, but I finally puzzled out the problem with my update code. As usual, it was something bloody trivial that held me up while I tried more complexicated solutions, none of which worked.

I've also been distracted by the rosellas and parrots feeding outside, just in my line of vision. Wonderful to see them in their showy colours on this grey day.

Been worrying about Kerri, probably somewhere over the Middle East at the moment. Of course air travel is safer than just about anything else, but still...

Getting back into the swing

Setting up a bit of a framework. I need a way to persist values, such as the current date, weather etc, and I don't want to have a table with only one row, but lots of fields, one for weather, one for date, etc. So I've set up an "Environment" table to store all this stuff, one value per row. And naturally I need functions to read a given value and set it. Took a bit of fiddling to get the read function to work, but the write function worked first off. Heh! It's rare that a non-trivial piece of code runs without bugs.

First game related task will be to set the weather for each day. I'll then have a skeleton I can hang everything else off. Pilot fatigue, injury recovery, reinforcements, replacements etc. And eventually German raid planning. Need to enter some data for that, and I'm still to work out the map structure to locate airfields and targets. I'd just have a simple grid, but I've got to account for radar stations and if I use a grid I'll have to calculate detection values for each station.

Dragged out two more boardgames to use as references. RAF is the solitaire day-by-day game of the battle, and "London's Burning" is a more pilot oriented game, which should be helpful for stuff like aircraft damage, pilot bale-out chances etc.

Battle Over Britain is the primary source for raid planning and resolution - the other two games are abstracted out to a huge degree because they are solitaire, but BoB gives a detailed mechanism for planning raids, assembling them, routing etc.

All good fun. I suppose the hard part will be making a website with all this stuff.