'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

Let's see... today I spent the morning trying to work out why one of the jobs on the build server was consistently failing, yet running the build by hand at a command prompt worked fine. The weird part is that after doing that it started working again.

Then I made the foolish mistake of updating the Android toolchain at lunchtime, to discover that there's a new appcompat library which horribly confused Android Studio (as in it claimed that I was missing some libraries, yet my code compiled fine and loaded successfully... and then a function call which was working before started returning null for no good reason). I eventually solved that by blowing away all the dependencies and starting again from scratch, only to discover that in the shiny new Material Design world that is Android 5 they've removed a user interface widget that I was using with the official recommendation being "add a progress bar manually (see StackOverflow for help)". That's not a useful answer!

And finally I returned back home to discover that my Roomba had for once not beached itself on the Ikea chairs, but instead had gotten lost searching for its docking station and eventually ran out of charge right behind my front door...



That's where it ended up after I pushed the door open - you can see the scuff marks from it being pushed sideways across the carpet!

I have a new toy! Unfortuantly iRobot don't actually make models with a jet engine, though at least its power level is OVER NINE THOUSAND. Now all I need to do is charge it overnight, feed it a suitable offering in the form of a dust bunny, and then let it loose on my flat. I'm not sure what I'll do with the old Roomba - the battery puts out a pitiful amount of current, one of the rubber strips on the vacumn entrance is peeling away from the case, and iRobot don't stock replacement filters for it anymore (any of those on its own wouldn't be an issue, but given that it's end-of-life it makes sense to replace rather than try and scrounge replacement parts).

On a less silly note, it's interesting to see how they've changed the design. The new Roomba (third generation) has the battery buried inside rather than clipped in, much smaller gaps around the bumper, a rubber strip above the brush deck, and the cliff sensors are now on the main body rather than the bumper. It loks like they've made an effort to stop up all the gaps where dust would get in on the previous model, which can only be a good thing given the number of times I've had to open up the last one to clean the bumper touch sensors. They also appear to have tweaked the programming - at first glance it's a lot more competent at docking with the charging base than the old Roomba was.

Also, contrary to what iRobot tech support said, at least the infra-red remote from my previous Roomba is compatible with the new one.