You probably guessed by my last post what I was working on. Well, here is a screenshot of what it’s starting to look like (this is an old tinderbox log, and options obviously isn’t yet synced with the UI just yet.

Click for a larger image

There is already an extension that does something similar, hidden within the tinderbox page. But I’m still happier with this result, since anything that saves a trip to the tinderbox page is a nice thing to have!

I have also been debating between the license I want to give this program. I am basically limited to around three choices, MIT/GPLv2/{Beer|Donation|Charity}ware. Each with its own unique traits. I can’t really see anyone commercializing this or putting into some sort of binary extension, so I don’t think the GPL would really benefit me. Nothing is set in stone. There is still time to make that decision.

I’ve been writing an extension that uses part of Tinderbox’s (56K warning) json.js file. It’s an interesting experience, since I haven’t done much work with JSON before.

At over a meg, this json file takes quite a while to load. While parsing it and playing around with it for my own purposes, I noticed a few things that I would like to see :

• A JSON formatter refuses to touch json.js because it is too big. So I had to do one of my own (need to upload it once I pretty it up).
• JavaScript reportedly can load compressed javascript files. It would be mighty dandy for it to load compressed json (shrinking it down to a much smaller 84KB). Maybe it can! I have not been very successful
• Tinderboxe’s JSON output isn’t real JSON, but that has been noted and filed in bugzilla. Hmm, I wondered why an error message was being written to my console
• I haven’t yet found a (simple) way to associate a check-in with a time/person, so I can’t “blame” a burning build on anyone. It’s got to the point where I was just about to comment asking them to reopen the bug, but loading in a new json.js file I noted some things that were not in the previous file. Mainly, the last json.js file I downloaded all had ‘undef’ in one section, and this one has a few names and id so I can sorta match when they checked in.
• There are files littered in tinderbox to a bunch of this data that json.js is supposed to replace (See Tinderbox’s README file, Other Files section). When I just started using JSON, the almost CSV file was both direct to the point and pretty much what I wanted out of the JSON file anyways. But it was still missing some things, like who checked in, the log file, the stats. And another file sorta had that information. So it was spread out. I am really hoping that json.js consolidates and really fixes this problem. But at the same time, it is also fairly complex.

Anyways, it will be all fun and worth it when this is done. At least, I’ll be using it

While someone else has javascript and canvas covered, I wanted to learn some new things about SVG. While perhaps best known for the tiger and other graphic goodness, I am not a graphics artist. So these didn’t apply to me so much. However, you can do some neat things with images in SVG that are harder/impossible to do in CSS, such as rotating images and skewing them.

So I started doing some things with SVG. One of those being something to catalog all the albums I have started amassing (I only have 460MB left of my 2GB iPod). Yes, I still do pay for music. I’m old skool like that.

Not much. But it took me so long to get rotation working, mainly because of lack of good sample documentation. Though I came across some good docs, it just wasn’t enough. For example, here is the code to rorate:

rotate(angle, cx, cy)

Where angle is how much you want to rotate it by, in degrees.
cx and cy are the “offset of the current view box. If cx and cy are not present then the points are rotated around the origin” (Bystedt). Both cx and cy are optional.

Maybe an example of rotation would clarify cx and cy. Here is the first image being rotated 45° without skewing at point 0,0.

To rotate an image at the centre, cx and cy should be the distance to the centre of the image. Both on the x-axis and y-axis respectively. Imagine to my horror when the image was 50% from the left, and a 45° rotate threw it down half way across the screen. I won’t bore you with the details of how changing cx and cy confused me even more, but some samples would have helped!

So I have been on vacation for less than a week and I’m already disappointed with myself.

Firstly, I haven’t been keeping up with my AMO responsibilities. I really need to do this, but I find myself being distracted every few hours.

Secondly, I haven’t gotten anywhere near as much work done with Prism as I wanted. I want to fix three bugs, two of which I already assigned to me :

1. Adding Preferences as an extension
2. Installing a webapp should automatically fill in the name with the title of the website if not already present
3. Lastly, I want the extension to search for .js files in the .webapp file and load a security warning, as webapp.js files have chrome level privileges

And there is more stuff obviously. This website. Shopping for summer clothes. Getting paperwork out of the way. Hanging out with friends.

Damn you Playstation and Wintendo!