Late Night PC

Candace graciously loaned me her Digital Rebel for the day so I could get an idea what it's like to shoot with a digital SLR. She suggested I should at least try it before I plunk down all that lettuce for the Rebel XT. I'm glad I did - her Rebel was really a pleasure to use. It really makes my point & shoot look like a toy. I know I don't have any real ability with it after just one day, but there were a few things that really impressed me (as a novice) with this piece of equipment. I played around with it at home for a little while early this morning. I figured that I should leave it on the automatic setting for a while. I've learned to appreciate automatic settings on a camera. See, I had a bad experience a few years back at E3 when I got my first digital camera. I didn't realize how much different the picture on the LCD could look from the same image blown up on a 19 inch monitor. And I knew that indoors with low light, like most of the convention centre, I'd need a higher ISO setting. So I fiddled with the manual settings a bit... What a whole lot of awful pictures. Some were salvageable. Many were so blurry I actually used the word 'blurry' in the filename. I'm going to try not to think about that anymore right now.

From the what-worked-for-me file... two tips today. One on getting sound by turning up the volume and another on getting rid of applications that keep coming back after a reboot.

Why is it that I can pay my bills over the web, I can go shopping online, I can run a business, pay my taxes, check my stocks and plan my vacation all over the web, but for some reason tonight I had to drive around the city, go into a gradeschool gymnasium and scratch some graphite on a scrap of paper to vote? Seems like a problem we should be able to solve... Anyway, you can see the outcome here. If you're into that sort of thing. P.S. I have to admit some of my bitterness was definitely taken away when I saw the smooth AJAX refresh of the results on the page.

This one's for the casual game developers and the SVG folks I've been working off and on (okay, mostly off) on a simple puzzle game done in SVG and Javascript. I started on it almost a year ago and the idea was to just put up something simple as a guide to building SVG games. I got something that sort of worked pretty easily, but each time I added a feature it seemed like I had to rewrite the whole game. I guess that's just part of developing in a green field. One of the issues that bothered me most throughout the work I did was that I was transforming level files from a generic XML to SVG in the browser. I knew that every browser that downloads the level would perform the exact same transformations and every user would have to wait a few seconds while it happened. I also had to deal with the rather hairy Javascript code that handled those transformations and debug it every time it broke on one of the platforms I'm trying to support. Not every browser has a debugger as accessible as Venkman (and at the time I don't think there was a Venkman version for Deer Park). I'd rewrite the code, get a little more capability in it and tweak it for a day or two, then shelf it again until Jeff or Candace bugged me again to stop talking about it and get something done. Okay, so I finally did another rewrite on it a month or so ago that fixes the issue that I'd avoided for so long. See, I'd wanted to keep it in just Javascript and SVG since I thought that made things simpler. There's no build step that way and the design of the game is more obvious. Scripting languages don't generally need the kind of development pipeline that compiled languages do. In C or C++ the source code has to be built before results can be seen. In Javascript or HTML, the source is the executable. When XML is used to store information though, there's always some kind of interpretation that happens to display it. That can happen right when it's accessed (like viewing an SVG or XHTML document) or there can be interpretation first that creates another document that's actually viewed. The latter transformation can be done with XSLT.