Apparently I don’t post any more often when I’m on break than when I have lots of work to do. Oh well. I watched The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers today, and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets the other day. Both good movies. The former deviated from the book too much, though, and the latter was full of convenient coincidences that kept the plot going.

I wish I could make computer animation half as good as the stuff they did in LOTR. Amazing stuff. I wonder, if I spent money on better software, if I would be able to do so. But that probably wouldn’t be a wise thing to do. I’d love to make something that proves how powerful POV-Ray is, but I wonder if using such simple technology is holding me back more than it’s helping me learn.

Posted at 1 AM on December 31, 2002

The archives are here! Along with permalinks (hover over the post titles or the little slimes at the ends of posts), and the destruction of the other sections that used to be on this page. I wasn’t using them, and didn’t need them. Along with them went the DHTML, and this front page now has almost no JavaScript executing on it. I’ll see what I can do about that in the future. In the meantime, if you’re hungry for DHTML, check the links on the sidebar. Nothing new there, not yet, but I also hope to change that in the near future...

I eliminated the Perl XML::DOM script that I used to be using, and now I’m using XSLT on my own machine, and uploading the pages manually. No more unnecessary errors to deal with. This will be easier, and cleaner.

Here’s a question for you: are the width and height attributes of the HTML img tag deprecated in favor of CSS? Or do they remain so that browsers can display a non-downloaded image at the right size without first downloading the CSS?

Posted at midnight on December 27, 2002

I got a CD burner for Christmas. It’s 48x24x48x. I’m not sure which number applies to what aspect of it, but obviously it can’t be slower than 24x for writing CDs. Oh, unless I only have USB 1.1, in which case it’s 4x. Oops.

Regardless, I’m backing everything up, since I haven’t done so since I upgraded to XP in the late Spring. I’m on CD #5 right now, and there’ll be at least a couple more. I wish I trusted the CD’s enough to delete unused files (you’d be amazed at how many half-black .bmp files a folder can accumulate when you use POV-Ray for a few years). Some of them are pretty cool. I gotta work on Space Fight again sometime.

Those updates to this page that I mentioned are coming; it’s just a matter of getting around to finishing up some XSLT files, really. But I got sidetracked by some Warcraft III map editing (see Valley of Tears if you play the game), an old JavaScript project (slowly nearing “completion”), and a little POV-Ray. I’ll get around to it.

Content is coming. Really. Encourage me to finish something with an email if you like. I’ll mark it as “unread” and let it sit in my inbox a while. =)

Posted at 9 PM on December 25, 2002

I’m not posting much because I’m working on restructuring this site. I’m going to ditch the Perl and PHP and use XSLT instead (much easier and cleaner that way). No more dealing with the server’s crappy XML::DOM installation. In addition, I’ll be dropping the “current work” and “resources” sections, since they’re redundant and I hardly use them anyway. That means the fancy, but useless DHTML is going with it. Fear not: I’ll come up with something else. But I gotta get the markup right before I write the scripts. I’ll be making the markup much closer to the structure suggested by the upcoming XHTML 2.0 specification. (Replacing, for instance, <section> with <div class="section">. By the way, wasn’t the original purpose of <div> supposed to be what <section> is going to be for?)

I’m also working on an interesting Computer Music final project (generating a wave file with C++), and a couple other things all at once. And I’m enjoying it, too. That’s what weeks of class work will do to you. I don’t know what I’ll do when I have to work a steady job five days a week for the whole year... =)

Posted at midnight on December 11, 2002

Finally finished the semester, aside from one final exam which should be pretty easy, and a final project which I have a week to do. Oh, and one paper that I have to finish up for tomorrow, but that shouldn’t take long. I should finally have some time to do fun things!

I’m considering removing the “Current Work” and “Resources” section of this page, since I really don’t use them much. They don’t serve much more purpose than to allow for some cool DHTML. We’ll see what happens with that.

This is why I like computer science. This is why I hate history.

Posted at 8 PM on December 5, 2002