or maybe something uplifting…

I was wandering around the W3C site, as I am apt to do, and I finally took a little time to read up on XForms. There’s a good intro for people who approach XForms from an HTML background. It explains how to do with XForms what you do today with the form element.

Read the rest of “XForms Thoughts”…

Start your Christmas shopping now. Every year at Christmas I tell myself next year I’ll start in July. Well July’s almost done, so get to it and beat the rush!

At the end of last month, I mentioned that I’d be heading up to Wasaga Beach for some fireworks and a break from the grind. I decided that since I enjoy my vacations so much, it would be nice to write about that trip and some of my others. I’ve been writing that travel log lately, but I backdate the entries so they make sense. The idea of a travel journal has been floating around in my head for a while, so I have some other photos from earlier this year that I might get around to putting up later. I took a lot of pictures at beaches around Los Angeles, and I also have some from beaches in southern Ontario (Canada). So here’s a link to read about my trips and see my pictures so far.

Read the rest of “Yeah, I’ve Been There”…

In which we talk a little about scripting in the Gimp, a little about colours and as only as much as is necessary about Scheme.

If you’ve ever looked at a picture and decided that it would look great with a different palette then you’ll see where I’m coming from with this. Think about graphics resources you use in a game. Like a red brick wall. Now suppose you’d rather it was a yellow brick wall. Suppose furthur that you’re not really a great artist, but you’ve got a whole bunch of great graphics resources for free (as in speech, if you mean to republish it).

You can easily move from one part of the colour spectrum to another with a hue rotation. The term comes from the measurement of colour hue in the Hue-Saturation-Value (or HSV) colour model. The hue measurement can be thought of as how far across the rainbow you’re going. The colours of the rainbow are arranged in a circle, so the measurement is done in degrees. All a hue rotation does then is to change each replace each colour with the colour that’s a given number of degrees away on that circle.

It’s not hard to find the hue-stauration tool in the Gimp. It’s on the Colour Tools Submenu of the Tools Menu. You can use the tool to do a hue rotation and adjust some other parameters for the selected part of the image. That part is pretty easy. If it was just one red brick wall texture then that’s how I’d do it. Suppose that you have to do this operation a lot however. Suppose you have a bunch of red brick walls, maybe ten or twenty variations of the same wall - to keep the game interesting. Now that’s not a huge amount of work to do once, but it can be enough to slow a developer down or tempt them to skip it and just use the pictures as they are. That’s the point when I decide I need to do a little automation. For a little project like this I want to reduce the chance of making a mistake on one or two graphics and also I want to speed it up from 30 seconds each to 10 seconds each. Read the rest of “Hue Rotation Using the Gimp”…

Webmaster is one of the hats I wear, and I guess that if you’re interested in what I write about it may be one of your titles too. I have to keep up on the tools that make the job easier. I found a link on DrasticTactics to a good site statistics crunching application called Funnel Web. Apparently it’s been around for a while and the company - Quest - has released a freeware version (that’s the one I got). It does a great job - a lot better than the simple daily reports included with my web hosting account.

Read the rest of “Finally Found a Good Log Analyzer”…

I know Deer Park Alpha 2 is already out, but I said I’d put up the full table of my results from testing the alpha build against the SVG test suite if anyone was interested. Someone was interested, so here’s the big table. Remember these are just my subjective results and for the most part I only made one pass. I also realize that many failures are because of the use of the invalid MIME-type “text/ecmascript” in the tests. I still consider those a failure - even though I realize the test is flawed. The world is a tough place.

Big ugly table after the jump.

Read the rest of “Catching Up - Full Test Results from Deer Park Alpha 1″…