A few weeks ago, we had a team dinner to celebrate the two-year anniversary of our current project (even though it just seems like 7 years). Being the sole member of the social events committee on our team of 12 people, I had some added responsibilities that day - helping setup the restaurant space and taking our "decorations" over in advance.
As we re-applied to the Mothers Day Out program at my wife's church, we were asked to write a short biography about each of our daughters. This was the same assignment we had two years ago, so it's interesting to compare the one from back than with the updated one.
Donna wrote the following and submitted it to the school.
Elena
Elena is cheerful and easygoing. She usually wears a smile and seems to be quite empathetic. She likes to dance and loves to do multimedia art projects. For example, she recently designed a convincing 3D "superman" with shapes she cut and glued from scrap paper. Her superhero even has a cape made from toilet paper. Elena has a long attention span and will give anything a try.
Amanda
Amanda responds well to routine and often prefers her own company to that of other children. She slowly warns up to new activities and new people, but then can be very affectionate and loyal. Amanda has a great memory and likes to learn new poems and songs. She would like to read and write independently. A quick hug or tickle can really lift her mood.
My alarm clock didn't go off this morning, even though I set it correctly as far as I can tell. It's a new clock radio I got for Donna for her birthday, but she had very specific requiremtns for a clock radio that this one did not meet. So, I replaced my own aging clock (with lighted blue digits) with this one. I felt a little guilty about keeping it for myself, since it was a present I bought for Donna, but I justified this by saying that Donna didn't like my clock radio anyway, and the digits on this one are big enough that she can see them without her glasses from her side of the bed.
So perhaps it was karma that prevented the alarm from going off at 5:00 AM this morning. As it was, I had just enough time to shower, get dressed, and leave to make my 7:00 AM meeting. I didn't even have breakfast. I never skip breakfast. At least I have a free lunch out today, so I can fill up then.
I may be the only one that thinks this is cool, but I just have created a flash-based pie chart with Ming via PHP. Here it is in action:
I did this to integrate with an intranet application I built at work, but mostly it was excuse to try to actually create a Flash animation with the tools I have at hand, which are pretty rudimentary. In fact, as a pie chart outside of this application, it's kind of strange. There's no way to tell what the slices represent without moving the mouse over them, and there's no title to the chart (the example above is the number of pictures on my website from each year). For my purposes, this is fine, since the intranet application supplies all this.
But doing that was surprising difficult, mostly because I found little-to-no documentation about how to use Ming in PHP. There are some examples, but nothing very comprehensive. Not knowing how the Flash model works, I had a very hard time understanding the difference between a shape, display item, sprite, button, and so on, and when you can (or should) do what to which one. Even now, I haven't been able to figure out how to ensure each new slice's label appears on top instantly (if you look closely, in some cases it fades from the previous label).
I'm always excited when some new technological technique or toy catches my attention. I've had a few in recent weeks (Lilypond and Blender), but the last few days, it's been creating flash objects on my website via the PHP Ming functions.
If that sounds like a lot of techno-babble, well, it is. In simple terms, it's a way I can create drawings on my website that can be animated (or not), but are also vector-based, so they're resolution-independent. This originally caught my attention because someone at my wife's church wanted to know if I could help making a neat animated splash screen for their website. I said I couldn't because I didn't know how, nor have the tools, to create that type of graphics. But I realized I did have some ability to do that through PHP.
That lead to some experimentation, but that didn't last long. I then worked on getting my little bar graph-creation program converted to Flash. That was fun. Then I thought that I could use this same technique to finally fix my the counter on my Macintosh page that I never got to work beyond 99 days.
The trouble is that I want to overlay a perspective view of the counter on the image of the iMac's screen. Since the screen is tilted to the camera, it is not a perfect rectangle, so the text I put on it needs to be distorted to look right (perfect). I tried doing this with image slices, but these have to be rectangular, and it was laborious to pre-construct all possible digits to be placed on the screen. Perhaps if I could use the Ming flash tools, I could programatically distort some text and overlay it on top on the image.
My first attempts were promising, but I quickly was stymied by the lack of detailed information on how these PHP Ming functions work. I experimented some, but came to the realization that there is no facility arbitrarily distort objects with PHP Ming. I can rotate them and skew them, but I can't distort them.
So I'll have to try a different approach rather than the most robust one. I could create some digits that have the appropriate perspective already applied and then just place them on the image with PHP Ming, or maybe even the GD functions of PHP. I could ignore the perspective part of it, just skew the text, and hope it looks good enough. I'll think about it some before I start on my solution.
Well, it didn't nearly take me as long as I thought. My design of my pictures page is complete. I'm really pleased with the layout, and it definitely encourages me to keep it updated more frequently. This week, I have uploaded 109 pictures, including two picture collections: Florida Trip 2006 and Roden Reunion 2006.
The pictures page now has three sections: a display of the latest 20 pictures added to the site, the most recent collection added along with an ability to select any other collection, and a calendar-like grid showing the number of pictures from each month and year available. These changes meant I had to update several other components, most notably the search page. I still have a few tweaks to make, but everything is functioning well.
I am really bad about uploading pictures to my website anymore. In the past, it has been because I have not been able to keep up with titling and putting comments on my photos in iPhoto, but at present I am essentially caught up with that. And yet I have not yet uploaded any to my website.
I have recently determined that this is because of how my online pictures are organized. It's all based on "collections", which are basically sets of pictures that are uploaded together. This made sense when my pictures were not managed by a database, since the pictures would have to be presented in a static HTML index page. But I would rather be able to upload pictures one at a time and have them available quickly on my website.
So I'm in the progress of changing my online picture presentation scheme to move away from collections. I'm thinking of transforming the collection idea into "keywords" and presenting the pictures primarily by date taken. This way, I can create a set of pictures with the same keyword (like "Glen Rose 2006") to be able to present them as a set, but also simply upload pictures with no keywords.
Look for those changes, and some new pictures, within a month or so.
We had an eventful Sunday. After the normal Sunday morning activities (church and yardwork), we caught a 1:10 PM showing of the new Pixar movie Cars. It had gotten mixed reviews (stunning visuals, but hackneyed plot), but with a G rating and the past Pixar films among my favorites, it was a good opportunity to take my daughters to the movies.
They liked it, I think, although they were a little squirmy towards the end. I thought it was much better than some of the reviews it has received. It was visually breathtaking (the race scenes are spectacular), and the story was entertaining. We'll own the DVD shortly after it is released (just in time for the 2006 holiday season, I should think).
After the movie, we stopped at Old Navy to get some light sweaters for the girls, and then to Toys R Us to buy a bicycle for Amanda. We had gotten a really nice girls bicycle from a friend, so we got helmets and training wheels on Saturday. The bicycle fit Elena better, so that became hers, and she loved zooming up and down the sidewalk on her bike. We got a slightly smaller one (already assembled) for Amanda. She picked out a My Little Pony bicycle.
We then went to Sweet Tomatoes for a early dinner. It was just before 5:00 PM when we left the restaurant. The girls fell asleep on the short car ride home. I carried them in and let them continue their nap on the couch. But at 7:00 PM, an hour before their normal bed time, they were both still asleep! I gave them the carry test: if when I carry them to their beds and they continue to sleep, I consider them down for the night. That's just what happened to Elena - she got 13.5 hours of sleep last night. Amanda woke up twice (at 9:00 and 10:00) but both times not for very long. She got nearly 13 hours of sleep.
Today, it appears that the pre-assembled bike was not assembled correctly, as the training wheels are too low, causing the back wheel to not touch the ground (we haven't yet decided if we'll ask for our $10 assembly fee back). I'll fix it when I get home from work, but I hope Donna was able to survive their enthusiasm for a bike ride (they were asking about it even before I left for work this morning). I suspect fixing Amanda's bike will be the first thing I do when I walk in the door.
We were at Glen Rose this past weekend for the biennial Roden family reunion.
As we were leaving Big Rocks Park after having played and waded in the shallow water, a man with a camera asked if he could take Elena and my picture. We were scrambling on the rocks, and I was lifting her up onto a large one. I repeated the feat at his request. He took another picture of Elena climbing on the rocks as well.
My "parental radar" never went off during this. Perhaps it was because the photographer asked me directly about taking pictures. Perhaps it was because he did look like he was taking pictures of the site rather than trolling for little kids. Whatever the reason, I felt fine letting him take a few Big Rocks shots of Elena.
He then gave me a copy of his card, and he asked about setting up a blog, once I told him I'd link to his site from mine. I looked at the site, Texas Outside, and it looks pretty nice. I'm not sure what he'd use a blog for on that site, but I'll email him to see if I can help.
SketchUp is the neatest 3D-drawing application I've seen yet. It was so neat, in fact, that I looked into it about a year ago, but it was far too expensive for me to justify even putting it on my gift list. I instead turned to Blender, which is free and extremely powerful, but has a steep learning curve up which I have just begun to climb.
But recently I found out that Google, who bought SketchUp last year, is releasing a free version. It is available to the PC now and promises a Mac version soon.
I'm so psyched that I downloaded the time-restricted demo version of the full software so I can start playing with it now, instead of waiting for the Mac version. I want to design a 3D layout of my home, just for fun.