Today I upgraded the MySQL on my development machine from 4.0.20 to 4.1.7. Everything went well except that I had to change the password hash type to log in with phpmyadmin.

I wish I could start using subselects on my site, but my host is still using 4.0.

I had been thinking about using a revision control system ever since I started writing my own programs to release on the Internet. Today I finally downloaded Subversion and starting figuring out how to use it. I also installed TortoiseSVN, which adds an easy to use Windows shell extension to Subversion. So far all I've done is create a repository and add my web directory to it. Importing my web root took about an hour. Next I guess I'll figure out how to check out stuff, and check in updates.

I am working on some new stuff for the forums. Most of it has to do with using JavaScript to display the posting form, rather than reloading the message viewing page with a post form on it. It should be more intuitive to work with threaded messages, and also faster. I fixed some layout issues with displaying message threads. I am learning about all the niftyness of JavaScript, which I have mostly avoided learning for years.

Every so often I would think about writing a web based painting program in Java. I would never act upon it, probably I haven't been into programming Java for quite some time, and I am in PHP mode. I go through phases of only programming one sort of thing at a time. For the last year I've been doing mostly PHP, hardly any C++, no Java. Recently I started writing some JavaScripts and came up with some good ideas for future stuff, and some working things to put online.

I haven't really been into Java programming in over 6 years, besides one school project I did 1.5 years ago. I decided to try to write a painting applet today. First I went to Sun's website to see if they had any free development tools. The last time I used Java they offered a free Sun One Studio, but it is no longer free. Instead, they had a link to the free, open source, netbeans IDE (netbeans.org). I downloaded NetBeans 4.0b2 after reading a little about it.

A few minutes later I had installed NetBeans along with JDK 5. I read a few web pages on how to create an applet, and I tried to get something working a few times. I kept getting a file not found error when I tried to run my applet. Eventually I found out that it didn't like path names with spaces in them, so I created a new directory in my system root directory, with no spaces in its name.

This time my test applet worked. It was a blank window that didn't do anything, but it was progress. I spent the next few hours learning how to write a mouse event handler and drawing into a graphics buffer. I've done this stuff plenty of times but not in an applet, and I've never used any Swing components before.

So I found myself buried in Java documentation, with lots of FireFox windows open and I was constantly having to look up things.

Right now my program can draw pixels that roughly follow the mouse. I am done with it for today. Hopefully I'll have a nice looking applet in a few days that at least draws with different brush strokes and stuff.

These are some stuff I want to fix on my site. I'd try to do some stuff, but I should really go to bed.

calendar:

I should fill in the visitors and messages fields when drawing the main page. I should also remove the underlines from the links in the calendar and make the whole cell clickable.

forums/blog:

I have been wanting to make a simple search engine that picks up keywords in the messages, and links messages together based on keywords. I also need to make a message categorization system.

I need a preview option with a spell checker. I need to look into using aspell again.

I just posted a reply to something on LiveJournal, and noticed a cool little thing they had set up there. When you click reply, it shows a hidden reply field. I would like to add that to my site so the whole page doesn't have to be reloaded to reply. Also, Google seems to like to link to my pages with post=true in the query string, which I don't want, so if I got rid of the links with that, Google would stop using that.

The last few hours I've been working on a gallery system for the foundphotos
site. What it does is download the gallery page from their site, and then make thumbnails of each gallery. The thumbnails are saved on my site, and link to their site. This would save dial up users a lot of time when browsing through the pictures.

For now, the link to this gallery is in the new stuff section. Check it out :)

The other day I continued my XMLHTTPRequest experiments. This time I decided to add a 'peek' option to my message board. This lets you view a message without having to click it to view the whole thread. It has a cool fade-in effect on Mozilla browsers. It doesn't work on Opera, which doesn't support XMLHTTPRequest, I will look into using iframes at a later time.

Next, I would like to try some simple streaming animations using XMLHTTPRequest. I have some ideas in mind, it will use a combination of images created with PHP.

Today I discovered a wonderful program called Ming, that lets you use a programming language to create a Flash movie. So far I have managed to build a sprite made of a collection of bitmaps and apply a simple animation to it.

I guess this PHP script is my beginning of a possible future as an animator. I am considering designing a simple skeletal animation system, so I can design characters and move them around easily.

Recently I discovered the Flash animation of David Firth
Fat-Pie.com. His 'Salad Fingers' cartoon series has become quite popular, and I started thinking about how to animate stuff like that without having to manually set up the keyframes. Basically you would create a set of chatacters using a skeletal animation system, import the various body parts and define pilot points. Then you can add various facial expressions, clothing, whatever, and then have the program do the work of moving the chatacter about the screen.

Also, making a wireframe 3D graphics system would be pretty easy using keyframe animation. I'm sure I can find an interesting way to combine 2D and 3D graphics.

I have written a PHP script that creates gradients. Currently it uses two lists of colors, and makes them each symmetrical. It then calculates the range of colors between each color in each list. The final image produced is a blend of the two gradients, one horizontally and one vertically. These images can be used for seamless textures and color palette. Another use for this script is creating a palette similar to PhotoShops color palette.

For now, I am just using it to generate random background for the logo section, but it's use will be extended to the following areas:

-Replacing the color palette in the edit section with an easier to use one.

-Generating backgrounds for boxes used throughout the site, tailored to the dimensions of the box.

-Making endless amounts of random plaid patterns :)

I will make a gradient sampler script shortly.