« June 2004 | Main | August 2004 »
July 31, 2004
Major KoalaRainbow speedup for next release
The fancy blurry cross-bar category display (when modified to use older data so I have stuff to look at), used to take just under 12 seconds. It now takes 2.5 seconds. This is thanks to abandoning using the MT builder to drive the rendering. Instead, the MT builder is used once to populate a primitive in-memory representation. (That shaved 0.5 seconds.) All queries are pre-parsed, rather than parsed every time (that shaves the rest of the time.) The dominant routine (thanks to dprof) is now ImageMagick::Draw, followed by the various AST clone methods. That's probably it for easy efficiency gains.
I'll make a release sometime on Sunday. It will probably include some new example visualizations and whatever infrastructure is required to implement them.
Posted by sombrero at 07:52 PM | Comments (0)
July 25, 2004
KoalaRainbow 0.9 released
Here you will find the first public release of KoalaRainbow, version 0.9. It is released under the LGPL. Please see the readme for installation instructions.
The only difference between 0.9 and the version submitted to the contest (0.8) is support for auto-sizing images and maintaining image aspect ratios. The VU-display is now fully autosized on this page.
Posted by sombrero at 07:26 PM | Comments (0)
July 23, 2004
Hello, World
It appears that I have come in as one of the second place entries in the MovableType plugin contest. This is actually what I was shooting for, so I'm quite pleased. From what I saw of people's plugins linked from the dev mailing list and what not, there were a lot of excellent plugins, so my only disappointment is the (somewhat cliched (I have no idea how to get the accent, sorry)) one that there weren't more prizes to go around. On the upside, I know that possibly the best thing about the contest for me was getting off my ass and actually implementing something I'd wanted to implement for a while. Of course, I never thought it would be in perl...
Anywho, for those of you who followed the SixApart link to this page, I've been somewhat lazy in updating my blog to keep the visualizations pretty, so you might just want to look at the documentation's example page. Keep in mind that the client-side image maps only show up on the actual generated visualizations (like on the VU-style display on the main page.)
I'll be making some form of public release this weekend, although there is still more to be done in the near future. It will be released under the LGPL.
Again, congrats to all who entered.
Posted by sombrero at 09:08 AM | Comments (0)
July 11, 2004
Playing video games is a lot of work
Let it not be said that it was never said.
Posted by sombrero at 02:04 PM | Comments (0)
July 09, 2004
Xenosaga
Just began playing xenosaga last night, and I was shocked by how it played right into my stereotyped view of spaceship anime, even though I'm not sure if the people are on a spaceship right now. The cut-scene interspersed people in what my stereotype-recognizer might think could be a bridge (but also a research lab somehow?) with shots of spaceships driving around. I suppose I shall see.
Posted by sombrero at 12:37 AM | Comments (1)
KDX-125
The gem of Relentless, of Very/Relentless fame, for those who didn't know what I was talking about from the title of the post. Actually, the rest might be good, but I haven't really listened to them save for "Forever In Love" which doesn't count because I already had the version with vocals from the "Very" Extra Listening disc.
Posted by sombrero at 12:33 AM | Comments (1)
July 02, 2004
Gonna add imagemaps
I shall add image map support, the better with which to make visualizations useful as opposed to, uh, bitter eye candy?
Posted by sombrero at 04:33 PM | Comments (1)
July 01, 2004
Doctor Who!
Old Doctor Who, specifically. Pertwee. Rather heavy on the foolish British power-wielders is this era.
Posted by sombrero at 09:51 PM | Comments (1)