See the Glider project page for more details and screenshots.

Note: You need a modern browser (Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, etc.) to run the game.

All I’m using is HTML, CSS, and Javascript (with jQuery). Feel free to poke around in the source (which you can use however you want). Oh, and it’s just a demo and I don’t really plan to develop it much further, so the code isn’t optimized or all that pretty.

Consensus: Canvas is pretty darn cool, and this is only barely scratching the surface. And the future of the web is exciting. Really exciting. :)

Chris at Wait till I come! mentions this about it:

The most amazing thing about this is happening under the hood: the developer wrote a library that abstracts browser rendering engines using Canvas, SVG and Flash (on a per-need basis) into a unified language – Objective J which is – as the name suggests – a mapping from Objective C to JavaScript.

Very interesting…

[tags]280 Slides, Objective J[/tags]

Incidentally, I wonder why comics like those are so enthralling. (Just witness how many of them have been made into movies in the last few years.) That deserves its own blog post, I think…

[tags]Peoples Archive, TED, Donald Knuth, Stan Lee[/tags]

Speaking of books, I’m now up to 753 in my personal collection, growing every few days. It’s almost like I have a subliminal goal to fill my apartment with books, to grow my own library as it were. And I dare say I’m getting closer to that goal. ;) (So far my roommates haven’t complained. If they do, I’ll unleash the tarantula on them.) (Just kidding. I’m scared to death of spiders.)

In other news, on Monday my boss came up with a few new deadlines, one of which was this afternoon (he’s presenting the database to an archive in Naples), and so the last couple of days have been hectic. But I got the stuff done. Now I’m on the last tight deadline for the week, writing some code to convert an Excel file to GEDCOM by Saturday or Monday. Which should be fairly straightforward and easy. And the deadline’s tight primarily because I was full of self-confidence at the time that it would only take seven or eight hours at most, so it’s my fault. But it’s an easy project and shouldn’t be too stressful. It’s just the culmination of everything. ~sigh~

Remember how I said I loathed holidays, back a few months ago? Right now I’m really looking forward to Thanksgiving break. All this stress has been building up, day after day, and not without ill effect either. Oh well. That’s life. R&R is on its way.

[tags]C.S. Lewis, Narnia, books[/tags]

And now, eleven hours later (with an hour taken out for lunch), I’ve got most of it done. This screenshot is real — it’s not a mockup. There are still a few things to add (like the rest of the title details), but you can search for localities and navigate around and such. It’s pretty nice. :) The one caveat is that it takes a while to load the page if there are a lot of microfilms in the list, because it has to ping the UVRFHC’s server for each one. I’m going to talk to the people who coded the Perl file and see if I can send them multiple IDs at once and get a list back. That’d make it faster. As for the rest of it, it’s decently fast, especially considering that it’s screen-scraping everything. Hurray for regular expressions and Ruby! :) (It’s coded in Ruby on Rails, by the way.)

I ordinarily would have posted this only on Outside the Box, or Beyond, but I’m dead tired and so I’m just going to post it here for now as a work-in-progress. Oh, the UVRFHC is the family history center here at BYU. And the whole reason I did this is that ordinarily you can’t tell what films are in the family history center unless you go to the FHC’s site and pull up a little pop-up and type the film number in. This automates it all for you.

[tags]Family History Library Catalog, BYU[/tags]

I also like programming. I’ve done it for years.

At the moment, though, I feel like I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. I’m talking about Beyond.

Coding is fun, and since I’ve been doing it for fifteen-plus years now I can hold my own. But the part I most enjoy, the area I want to spend most of my time, is design. Now, I don’t mean that I try to avoid doing the dirty work of actually building the things I design — to the contrary, I think it’s impossible to be a great designer unless you know how to use the tools and have a lot of experience doing so.

I guess it’s just that I want to be working on other projects, getting good at design, but I’ve got this huge obligation to turn Beyond into a reality. There’s something far more difficult about pulling off a project like this than about typesetting a text. So many different strands, so many possibilities for error, so much to be connected together. And that is cool and challenging and all that good stuff, don’t get me wrong. I don’t know.

Ordinarily I would suspect that this is a momentary, passing mood, but it’s been at the back of my thoughts for a while now. And yet I can’t just give up on Beyond. ~sigh~ Well, “you must do the thing you think you cannot do,” said Eleanor Roosevelt. My plan is to try to have Beyond up and running by the end of August, and then I can hopefully leave it in more capable hands. I don’t want to be attached to a project like that for the long-term when it’s going to require so much maintenance that I can’t work on much else. (And lest you think that I’m a starter who can’t finish things, let me hasten to add that design projects — like books, charts, etc. — usually have a definite completion point, whereas software tends to go on forever.) If my plan were to become a programmer, as a career, then I’d probably think differently, but I’m going to be a librarian, and most of what I see myself doing on the side in the future is design, not coding.

At the same time I don’t want to abandon a project just because it’s hard. Conquering difficult obstacles is how we grow. Hmm. But sometimes it is okay to stop work on a project — after all, there’s only so much time in a man’s life, and he has to spend it on things that really matter. And that’s why this is a dilemma: Beyond does matter, and it’ll help make genealogy easier. ~sigh~

Other than that, I’m working on Beyond a fair amount. It’s coming along very well. And my brain is empty right now, so I’ll leave it at that and go home to eat dinner. And read books. Mmm. :) (I picked up a copy of A Good Man’s Hard to Find, a book of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories.)

[tags]Ruby on Rails, InDesign, Lulu, Flannery O’Connor[/tags]

Next, I need to fix the recent comments plugin so it doesn’t include comments from me… (That’s why I haven’t been commenting lately — I don’t want the “Recent Comments” to show only my name. :))

[tags]WordPress, blogging[/tags]