You must must MUST go listen to William Shatner’s cover of Pulp’s Common People…

Right now!

Seriously!

I mean it!

Today’s comic is a little late, and I was going to blame it on that damn* Daylight Saving Time [invented by Benjamin Franklin apparently] but really it’s because I had to redo the final panel, which was just too gory in the previous incarnation.

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* “Damn” because everytime we pass in or out of daylight saving time, I am assured of some weird software problem cropping up… this time my HTML Editor has decided that my entire web site needed rebuilding [because all the time stamps got out of sync] and hence I will now have to upload the whole damn thing instead of just the few changed entries… BTW yes this is my fault as a programmer and not a problem with DST per se.

Just posted a new demo, although online interest has sort of died down after an initial surge. Last time I checked there had been 80 downloads of the demo I posted, which is pretty good really, considering it’s only been up for two weeks and mine is not exactly the busiest of blogs.

Sorry to those still on dial-up by the way; JujuBlog is getting a little image heavy lately and is probably taking a fair while to load on a 56Kb line. It’s just that I find text without images kind of boring lately. Even when I read a novel I sometimes wish for the odd illustration here or there.

I was going to write today about a cool computational solution I finally worked out after like… oooo… more than a year… [see original post] but I think I’ll leave it for another day because a) I haven’t put it to any practical use yet and b) My brain is mooshy.

So if you’re looking actual information which is useful to programmers, I highly recommend you go read Raymond Chen’s Blog: The Old New Thing.

After much umm-ing and ah-ing I’ve decided to go for fixed width on this blog again, because it just looks so crap to me when you view it fullscreen and end up with 16 pt text stretching all the way across a 1280 pixel screen. I decided to do the naughty thing and revert to using tables for layout [a real no-no these days… it’s supposed to be CSS all the way] because it was the only way I could think of to specify a maximum width while still allowing content to be squishable [except when the content contains 600 px wide images, like the comics].

I left it late, but decided I didn’t want to break the very young tradition of posting it on a Saturday, so here it is. Also, the novelty of drawing with a mouse is rapidly wearing thin ;)

When you’re on your own
And it hurts when
They tear your dreams apart
…

As a programmer who spends way too much time blogging and generally faffing about, it’s incredible how utterly irrelevant that song is to my situation.

The demo I posted is actually getting more interest than I expected, which has me all spooked now, because I’m thinking maybe it’s far too early to be releasing stuff into the wild… but then I recall that the whole point of posting was to force myself to start working on it again by letting people start playing around with it… Already I have updated the demo with some basic fixes that should have been done months ago, so I guess the theory is working so far…

The question is: What next?

Something I have not yet mentioned is that [being the masochist that I am] all comics so far have been drawn without the aid of a graphics tablet, since mine’s buggered and I still haven’t got around to taking it back under warranty. Which leaves me only one* other option: the [optical] mouse. Although drawing with a mouse is very difficult it forces me to work very slowly and carefully, and when attempting a comic strip style that’s probably not such a bad thing.

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* Of course I could draw on paper and then scan it in… except that I hate hate hate drawing on paper, because I can’t copy/paste/zoom images on paper. Paper is broken. Boo paper.

I think it’s about time I retrieved poor old from the Phantom Zone of software projects, and try to remember what it was that I had planned for it… I remember that it was going to be something kind of cute and kind of different, but beyond that I guess I never really nailed it down.

So if you’ve got a reasonably fast PC [minimum 2 GHz I guess] you might want to check out the simple demo I’ve posted for download, which is linked to from the . If you like it, let me know, but if you think it’s an inefficient use of my time and resources, you can… I dunno… something rude.

Spastomania is another such banished project, a kind of free-form 2D platformer using realistic physics [inspired by the brilliant but now long-in-the-tooth Elastomania]. I might try to reconstruct it into a functional toy and post a demo too. Like so many things, it’s got potential…

Hmmm… It seems that my projects folder has become the virtual equivalent of the Great Australian Shed — which for the uninitiated is where us Aussie men apparently spend all our time avoiding things we’re supposed to be doing by starting projects we know full well we will never finish. Following this analogy, is merely the software equivalent of the half finished boat that is already too big to ever fit through the door.

At least there’s less danger of me losing a finger or electrocuting myself…

A friend forwarded me this image today… I’m not sure if it is real [as opposed to a Photoshop job], but it’s pretty funny… I will add an image credit if I ever find out who took it.

*sigh*

The Liberal/National coalition [not to be confused with small ‘l’ liberals — they are in fact the more conservative/right wing of the major parties here and have governed in Australia for the last nine years or so] actually managed to increase its majority in the federal election today. It’s all rather historic. Also, it looks like they may win effective control of the Senate, which means that they will be able to do pretty much whatever they want with minimal interference from those pesky opposition and minor parties.

[ in case you’re wondering, today’s comic has nothing to do with the election, I just wanted to get my mind off politics for a bit ]

Was checking out my new glasses in the mirror a few days ago, and noticed something weird which I had never noticed before: eyeballs have three degrees of freedom!

For the uninitiated, a Degree Of Freedom is essentially a way for a thing to move, and the unconstrained object can generally be considered to have six. In the parlance of Ye Olde Computer Graphics these are often called: X (left/right), Y (up/down), Z (forward/back), Yaw (turn left/right), Pitch (tilt forward/back) and Roll (tilt left/right)

My eyeballs I had always assumed to have two DOF, meaning that they have only the freedom to tilt back and forth (pitch) and turn side to side (yaw), but when I looked in the mirror and tilted my head side to side, I suddenly noticed that my eyeballs were attempting to stay upright, actually twisting in their sockets to counter my head movement!

They seem to do so for only about a second [and only as far as 15 degrees or so], then they tend to twitch and realign themselves with the tilt of the head, so I assume this automatic movement is associated with the eye’s ability to track and compensate for motion; ie in the same way that you can still comfortably read this text whilst turning or nodding your head, you can also continue to read it whilst tilting you head from left to right.

If like me you didn’t realize eyeballs could do this, I recommend that you go look in a mirror right this instant and check it out for yourself. Fun and creepy!