I got a new digital camera for my birthday (the 22nd), and I’ve been playing with it. Some of the photos that I like have been put up in my new gallery.
For those interested in what I do for fun projects, the project wiki is a good place to look. Being a wiki, anyone can edit it, although I’d appreciate it if people didn’t deface it.
I finally finished packaging up uber 2.0, so it’s now available for download on the get uber page. Go get it, it’s a lot better than uber 1.0.
I haven’t had time for anything lately. Eventually changes are coming, and I’m going to be forking uber and making another uber-like template except one that’s a bit more conventional. It’s going to use an actual image for the background, and won’t be doing weird things with parametrics and div tags. If you’re wondering why, it’s just because I need a change. Soooo yeah, when life permits, stuff will get done, uber 2.0 will be released, and an entirely new template will be created (similar layout though — I really love it).
Pretty simple color controls have been implemented (as I’m sure that you have noticed). The ugly black and white backgrounds are only temporary, until I can find some nice combinations. Anyway, one can toggle the random color generator. When it’s on the colors are random. When it’s off a random pair of colors is chosen from a user-defined array. Yeah, it is really hard to read black text on a black background. I’m probably going to adjust the shaders a bit to make it look better on darker backgrounds.
I implemented a simple check for culling divs that are entirely off-screen. That is, off screen to the left or top because it’s impossible (without using Javascript) to determine if they’re off-screen to the right or bottom. This should save some bandwidth, not a lot, but enough to cut down considerably. It should cull approximately 1/2 off the tangent graphs, and 3/4ths off some of the hypocycloids (which still need tweaking). This method doesn’t save much on the linear graphs. It would require a pretty complex algorithm, and the tradeoff of writing it against bandwidth savings isn’t worth it.
I added a new background, a hypocycloid, more commonly know as one of the sketches you can get from a Spirograph(tm) toy. Refreshing the page will eventually bring it about, or one could view a pretty example. That’s really it for today. I’m mulling over how the color controls should be implemented, but other than that, the template hasn’t changed much.
I went ahead and got rid of the parsing. Right now, anything under the headers will be added verbatim to the content div of the template. That’s it for now, more backgrounds are coming soon.
Only a few tweaks with CSS, and a handler for level two headers were added. I’m thinking about removing the handlers/parsing entirely and making it that the files need to be marked up by the author. This is in some ways a pain, but it provides much greater flexibility. I’m going to think about it some more, and continue with rolling-out improvements (on the site, the release comes when it is time, but the source is available by asking).
Today, uber has officially become XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant! This involved changing the handling for level one headers (no other headers are supported in uber at the moment), and also for blockquotes. Headers are to be placed on their own line or at the beginning of a line, and blockquotes must be placed on their own line. Also, blank lines are ignored, instead of producing empty paragraphs. These fixes aren’t in the source currently available. They will be available in the next release, which will come after some more cleanup and a few fixes. As an aside, if one really wants to play with jamming everything on one line (not a good idea), then they can insert a paragraph close tag before the block-level element, and then a paragraph open tag after. Again, this is not encouraged. At all.
Today saw the addition of a new background, the random spray background, to the uber template. Also, uber is released under the GNU General Public License because I like it that way. Contact me for other licensing options.
I was thinking today (after seeing a certain advertisement) how one could express words using notes. I was trying to come up with a list of all of the words you could spell, when it hit me that the notes are frequencies, and instead of spelling words, one should be able to create a musical piece that actually speaks words when played. Yeah, you know how cool that would be. Granted, it wouldn’t sound exactly like the words, but it would be possible to break it down so that when played it would resemble words enough to be understandable. One would also have to tweak it so that a human could play it, but that probably wouldn’t be too hard.
Sooo yeah, the level one headers look really nice now that I’ve jazzed them up. This markup isn’t in the archive that’s available on this site right now. It’ll be in the next version after/when I add more features (a.k.a. more parametric equations for the background, the ability to specify pairs of colors to generate from, and the moving of certain variables to the top of the script to better enable tweaking of the output). Other than the style change, no work has been done on the script so it’s otherwise the same. The pairs are going to be implemented to avoid ugly color combinations, and allow one to ensure that only certain colors will show up. Granted, this is a lot more work on the part of the site designer, but it’s rather worth it.
