Tien Chiu

You are here: Home / Archives for All blog posts / computer stuff

by Leave a Comment

29 skeins of silk

I finally finished dyeing the skeins of silk today.  I had originally intended only 24 skeins, but on taking them out of the dyebath, it was apparent that I needed to “fill in” a few transition colors.  So I dyed five additional skeins; hopefully they’ll be enough.

I forgot yesterday that Peg asked about the temperature controller.  As far as I know it doesn’t do temperature gradients over time, but I do something similar by increasing the temperature by a step (say, 10 degrees) every ten minutes or so.  Once it gets to temperature, it’s completely automatic.

It’s actually more useful (to me) for fiber-reactive dyeing.  On the recommendation of a few professional dyers, I switched from Procion MX to Cibacron (Sabracron) F dyes.  They require slightly hotter water (around 120-140 degrees) but the colors shift around less, are much more WYSIWYG (color as mixed is very close to color of final dyed product), and rinse out MUCH easier than Procion MX.  But holding a bath of small jars at a consistent 120 degrees for 1.5 hours is much much easier with a temperature controller.

Now the apartment is festooned with drying skeins of yarn.  And I am NOT looking forward to the next part, which involves me winding 29 skeins x 60g/skein = 1740g = 4 lbs of yarn at 7500 ypp = 30,000 yards of yarn (!) into balls with a hand-cranked ballwinder!  That alone will take a couple of days.

I have started designing the draft for the warp.  Or rather, started experimenting with drafts for the warp; I wouldn’t go so far as to say designing just yet, really just playing around.  Once I have a basic structure set, then i can think about how I’m going to use color.  Which will of course send me back to edit the structure…there will be multiple iterations of this, I’m certain.  But that’s the fun part!

By the way, I have not forgotten about Weavolution.  Quite the contrary!  We have had our first dev meeting and agreed on feature content for the first iteration (we’re going to develop this in cycles and get feedback on each cycle before starting the next).  The developers are mostly getting up to speed on Drupal and our system right now, and the requirements are still being defined, but I am hopeful of being able to translate requirements into a functional spec and start work by end of next week.  I am infinitely grateful to all of our volunteers for stepping forward – especially the developers, without whom this would be a much poorer site.

by Leave a Comment

Fretting

Things at work are slow right now, so I’ve been sharpening up my project management skills.  I’ve bought The Microsoft Project 2007 Bible and read through the first 299 pages today (okay, I skipped a few sections and skimmed some others).  Mostly what I’ve discovered is that I knew a lot more about project scheduling than I thought I did; there hasn’t been anything really earthshaking in the book so far.  But there are another 530-odd pages to go, and I have hopes of learning some more interesting stuff once they get into what can be done with the new Project Server.

Whee.

In Weavolution news, the two developers are installing and getting to know Drupal on their home machines.  Our user interface designer, Marian, has promised us something to get started on by the end of next week.  So there’s not much for me to do in the interim, given that the prototype is already built and that most of the remaining tasks require customization beyond what I can comfortably manage.  I do need a graphic designer and have been working on getting one.  Beyond that…it’s a matter of waiting.

Have I mentioned that I am very BAD at waiting?

So I have been fretting and champing at the bit, wanting to move ahead but not being able to.  This is very frustrating, especially considering that it’s happening at work at the same time.

So…I am going back to working on weaving.

Sectional beaming continues to be a challenge. I have, thank goodness, managed to get two warp sections on with even tension, nice and flat.  I have also cut at least four sections off the beam.  I think I am going to use my remaining cheap warp yarn for practice, and then start over with commercially dyed mercerized cotton yarn in four colors that I bought just for the occasion.  There is clearly a learning curve here and if I don’t want to be miserable with an unevenly tensioned warp later, I had better get it down now.  Which means practicing, of course.

I am now considering what project to do next. I had planned to weave doubleweave samples, but have realized that since doubleweave requires very even tension to weave up well, it is not the best choice for learning how to beam sectionally.  So I am thinking that I will make my next project another network drafted project – this time on 24 shafts (eyes glaze briefly with greed at the prospect of so many shafts!), and use it to explore the color play that was so interesting in Liquid Fire.  I have wanted to do a shawl that goes from turquoise to fuchsia (Liquid Fire went from red to gold), and this would be a good opportunity. I would love to do a painted warp, but that isn’t consistent with wanting to practice sectional beaming from the AVL warping wheel.

I haven’t really thought about the structure, though.  Network drafting is fun, but I’ve done a few projects in that structure and would like to explore other possibilities.  I might just thread up straight draw and play around…so many options, so little yarn and so little time!

by Leave a Comment

The Weavolution blog!

Eight or nine solid hours of work have culminated here: http://www.weavolution.com/blog/.  Enjoy!

(I will continue blogging about Weavolution here, so you don’t have to keep checking there if you don’t want to – but do take a look at it, I’m very proud of the setup and the theming.  The “logo” isn’t the final logo, but one that I created on the fly after realizing, horrified, that I was going to go to a networking event in three hours without business cards! So I made my own from one of the photos on my website.  It’s not a bad job, if I do say so myself.)

More tomorrow morning, it’s late and I need to get to bed.

by Leave a Comment

More volunteers; more progress

Things are really churning along in Weavolution-land: in addition to me and Claudia, we now have four volunteers actively working on the project:

  • Marian, a user experience designer who is writing up the requirements and sketching out the wireframes;
  • Holly, a marketing and advertising expert who is helping us put together a marketing plan;
  • Alison, a business/accounting guru who is helping us with our business plan;
  • Kathie, a systems engineer who will be helping us with requirements definition and also with testing later

Also excitingly, I think I may have found a “real” developer to work on the site.  I’m not going to say any more right now, because it’s all tentative, but we’ll see.

Between him, those four VERY talented volunteers, Claudia, and me, we now have all the bases covered except legal.  For that we will probably still need to pay for services, but I think we might be able to afford that.

This is all coming together with great speed – more than I ever dreamed of when I first thought about creating a social networking site for handweavers.  There are SO many people helping out – with connections, with volunteering, with donations, with notes of support – that it’s almost overwhelming.  I did not expect this kind of community support, and it’s positively heartwarming.

At the risk of resurrecting a much-cliched quotation, it reminds me of the passage from W.H. Murray (often mistakenly attributed to Goethe):

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too.

A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets:

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!

– W. H. Murray, from The Scottish Himalayan Expedition (1951)

If there is one thing I have learned in a lifetime full of adventures (jumping off cliffs, eating rats and scorpions and dog, winding up on the front cover of a Thai travel magazine dressed in nothing but body paint, and other sundry items) it is precisely this: when you commit yourself to a course of action, then the world moves with you.  Once you are committed, and turn all your resources to the task at hand, you will pay closer attention, seize opportunities that you never saw before, find people you didn’t think you’d be able to locate, and make your way across all obstacles.  It’s not that you are guaranteed success – I haven’t succeeded at everything – but it’s a lot more likely, than if you’re halfheartedly weaseling around an idea.  As the quote says, boldness has magic in it!

Getting back to nuts and bolts: I have partially built the prototype for the site, and had a longish conversation with Ron, the developer who created our “platform” for us.  Nothing too inspirational to report, but we had a good conversation about technical details and he helped me solve some problems I couldn’t quite work out on my own.  I now have a prototype project notebook page, project page, and a loom summary page with different looms listed by manufacturer.  I’m working on shaping that up and putting a short summary of the project notebook in the user profiles.

I am also going to start a separate blog for Weavolution, for those who want to follow the progress of Weavolution but don’t want to hear all about my cycling and chocolate lives 🙂 .  Look for it in the next few days.  (I will continue to post about Weavolution here, of course.)

by Leave a Comment

One step closer to prototyping

Just shelled out a stack of greenbucks for the core of the site: a social networking platform + 1 year of hosting from the developer who put it together.

“Platform” is probably a little generous.  It’s Drupal plus a collection of 79 modules, many of which look hastily slapped in there, that together can potentially form the core of a social networking platform.  I didn’t buy it as a turnkey social network; I bought it primarily as a timesaving measure, and (more importantly) to get access to the expertise of the developer who created it.  He’s going to be helping us translate the requirements into a development strategy.  This is exactly the expertise I needed.

So Ron (the developer) is putting together the modules on the server, and will finish it by end of day tomorrow, at which point I will start configuring the content types.  My goal is to have some sort of demo available in two months – even if it isn’t pretty – so we can show it to potential donors.  And I know more or less what content types and fields are going to be required, so I can set those up in advance of the UI design.

It’s hard to believe that this project is only 16 days old – I just looked back and Claudia got in touch with me on the 19th of August.  We’ve made tremendous progress in a very short period of time.  This is encouraging, especially since there is so much more still left to do.