Mindless Drivel

I’ve made the frustrating decision that I will redo the site (again) using Drupal. I debated that back when I first went with Joomla!, but Drupal has a much steeper learning curve. Since then, I have done a site with Drupal, and decided it’s really not so bad.

The main reason for the upcoming switch is that I am growing more and more frustrated with Joomla! The new 1.5 branch seems to be a completely different system than the 1.0 branch, which isn’t so bad, but the 1.0 version seems to be regressing. Case in point: I recently tried moving the site to my local dev system. This is something I’ve done countless times in the past using the once powerful JoomlaPack component. Now, all I get are stupid AJAX errors about how myRet has no properties. I’ve tried following the posts in the JoomlaPack message boards to no avail. With Drupal, all you do is move the database using phpMyAdmin, ftp the files, maybe change a few values, and BOOM, you’re done. In theory, Joomla! is like this, but it just isn’t working for me. I finally got it to come up without errors, and now I have some funky issue with the images. There is NO point in spending that much time on this issue, when other systems work better.

A secondary reason for switching is that blogging in Joomla! is horrible. I hate that this wordpress component requires logging into the backend. I hate that it’s not native. I hate that it is currently out of date, but I don’t want to mess with updating it. I also hate that when I move it to my local computer, the sort order get reversed. Seriously, what’s up with that? A php issue, or maybe mySQL issue, huh?

Oh well. I could start from scratch with Drupal, and probably be finished before Joomla gets its act together.

So long Joomla. You probably won’t be missed.

Wow, it’s been over a year since my last post. I really need to find more to talk about.

AggOO is becoming a very good package. I still consider it to be alpha, since it hasn’t been tested too much. It has probably exceeded my goals for at least version 0.3, and maybe even 0.4, but since I haven’t implemented text rendering yet, I still have it at 0.1… It has the color matrix (quite good, based on the QColorMatrix, which is more capable that GDI+’s color matrix.) I have implemented polymorphic pixel formats (PPF)… not sure if that was necessary. Basically, PPF is cool, and makes some things easier (I have a factory method to create the pixel format, then that object will create anything else.) The downside is that I already had a renderer in place (which handled the run-time pixel format) and by using the PPF, more classes need to be rewritten. Templates run amok.

Anyway, I suspect I should be able to have a new release available soon. In the meantime, continue to check out the latest CVS from http://www.sourceforge.net/AggOO

The PocketPC version of Bubble Burst (for the ARM processor) is
available at
http://www.dratek.com/Downloads/B/BubbleBurst_setup_ppc.exe. You can
also get the updated desktop version at
http://www.dratek.com/Downloads/B/BubbleBurst_Setup.exe. Enjoy.

I have uploaded my Puyo-Puyo like game, Bubble
Burst. Its not perfect. Also, it was made using PocketFrog (I do have
a PocketPC version, but I haven’t created an installer yet) which means the
screen size is fixed. Sorry.

edit 2006-12-04:
I’ve made some changes which will basically limit the frame rate to 50fps, but will also prevent the game from using 100% of the CPU.

I have put up release 0.1.0 of the AggOO source code at
http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/aggoo. It is still an early
release, and may have any number of problems.

AggOO is available at http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/aggoo.
Currently it is only available through anonymous CVS, but I’ll put up an
actual release once some of the issues are worked out. Also, be sure to
check out the wiki for information on building Anti-Grain Geometry to
work with AggOO.

I am almost ready to release my first version of AggOO — my wrapper for
Anti-Grain Geometry which
essentially emulates GDI+. AGG by itself is rather low-level and not
very fun to use (the results are nice, though.) I have already done a
lot of work with GDI+, so this will be a natural replacement. The nice
thing is, it can switch between GDI+ and AggOO code by simply changing
the namespace.

I should point out that there have been other GDI+ wrappers for AGG,
namely Aggplus. Aggplus
has support for text rendering, which AggOO does not (not real high on
my priorities yet.) Other than that, I think AggOO can do everything
Aggplus can and then some (namely, it is designed to allow variable
pixel formats, although only 24- and 32-bpp formats are currently
implemented.)

Hopefully, I will have the release available soon.

I am in the process of setting the site up with Joomla! Once finished, this will help me reduce clutter, but in the meantime, some things might be broken for a while.