Categories
Haiku

Ottawa Haiku

Rideau Canal is
a spring thru fall bike highway
a winter skate path

Parliament building sit
On the hill ruling us all
In English and French

Gatineau hills are so
Lovely year round. Red leaves in
Fall are delicious

Ten below zero
You see puffs of breath, skating
under the blue sky

Categories
Haiku

Haiku Thanks

Turkeys are walking
In a field, not on a farm
Surveying their realm

Potatoes in dirt
Waiting to be dug up soon
Followed by mashing

Cornucopia
Stuffed with pumpkins and a squash
A horn of plenty

Categories
Haiku

Japan Haiku

When in Osaka
See the historic castle
And ponder history

Chuo sen subway
Many times took me back home
Maido go josha

Amazing Kyoto
Golden temple at sunset
Many festivals

On the bullet train
And Millenium Falcon
You go very fast

Golf is a big deal
Practice at the driving range
Or subway platform

Little known fun thing
Nagashi somen. Yummy
Lefties will struggle

Eating close to home
Restaurants and street vendors
Many yummy treats

Categories
Haiku

Trout Lake Haiku

Dogs running around
Chasing balls and ducks and sticks
They look so happy

Blown down willow trees
Trunks cut into large sections
Sawdust on the ground

The boy and I talk
as we walk around the lake
Perpetual bond

An owl stole my touque
One night while I was running
Then he dropped it

Yoga under trees
Sunny days and rainy ones too
Our mats in the grass

Categories
Haiku

Yoga Haiku

Lying on my back
Mostly still, arms by my sides
Shivasna begins

My eyes are closed
I am breathing through my mouth
My spine is tall-ish

Feet and hands planted
My butt very high in the air
Downward dog; woof woof.

Sun salutations
sometimes make me feel dizzy
Too much namaste

Categories
Haiku

TS Haiku

blood on my knuckles
cut and scraped, dull and aching
what was I punching?

stones tumbling in waves
retreating back toward the sea
fear of being dry

standing on a cliff
staring into the blackness.
forgot my question.

(written while listening to folklore)

Categories
Haiku

Haiku for November

Rain drops on bike rides
Somewhere between damp and wet
And then my chain breaks

November yard work
Consists of cutting back stuff
that’s done for the year

Categories
Haiku

Eagle Haiku

Proud eagle standing
On its razor sharp talons
Holding a seagull

Ginko leaves fall
And flutter in a wind storm
Look like little finches

Categories
Haiku

Haiku Reboot

Going to restart
My effort to write haiku
again. wish me luck.

I will publish them
As I write them. Generate
momentum I hope.

The above don’t count.
No references to nature
Same problem here. Tree.

Beautiful red birds
Their plumage looks like horse blood
Even in the shade

The leaves are falling
mostly in wet goopy piles
In the gutter. Ugh.

October was wet.
Many dark and rainy days
Occasional sun.

Categories
Software

qualityOfService

While working on my zentangles app, I added a spinner that appears when the app is fetching or saving data to CloudKit. This appeared to be working wonderfully. But then I tried using the app when I didn’t have access to the network. The spinner appeared and never disappeared.

Not Good!

I immediately thought of a couple of things that might fix the problem. Things like setting the time out for the network operation, using the Reachability frame work to detect when there was no network. But when I attempted to set the CKOperation’s time out, Xcode told me I was using a deprecated function, and I should really be using CKOperationConfiguration. Groan! I thought. This new things is likely just helping some obscure use case that doesn’t apply to me.

Sure enough CKOperationConfiguration has a timeout interval property, to let me do what I thought I needed to do. But then I noticed another property called qualityOfService that can have one of the following values: background, utility, default, userInitiated, userInteractive. Hmm, the header describes the behaviour for these different values…

Description of the different values for CKOperationConfiguration’s qualityOfService property

As an aside, I find myself a bit confused on the subject of timeout intervals. It appears the operation’s configuration has a default timeout of 60 seconds. When I run in a simulator and disable networking on my computer, it appears to time out after 10 seconds When I run on an iPad, not on any networks, it appears to never time out. <Shrug Emoji>

Regardless of timeout confusion QualityOfService is a much smarter way to describe a network operation. When I set QualityOfService to UserInteractive and then attempted a fetch on a device with no network, the operation immediately failed. (likely thanks to internally using Reachability?) Awesome!

I do still have a couple of questions about Quality of Service.

  1. Are there any behaviour differences between UserInteractive and UserInitiated? From the table above, they appear to be identical, but the devil may be in the details.
  2. Is there a way to create a hybrid approach? ie can I get a result right away that will make my spinner go away, but still do retries?
    Perhaps I don’t really need a spinner on a network operation that is just sending updates to the server….