| 11-22-03, 12:01pm: Find a Dragon map, Forums images now thumbnailed | PHP is so cool... I searched around on the web for some sample code and in about 20 mins I threw together a world map that plots the locations of all the dragons who've given their Lat/Lon coordinates! I've thought this would be so cool to have for so long, and here it only takes 20 mins with PHP and a well-written tutorial... You can view the map here.
If you haven't already found your Lat/Lon and put it in the system, do it! Surprisingly few people have bothered (only 112 out of thousands of profiles), even though the Lat/Lon fields have been in there for over 2 years. I'm hoping this map will give people more reason. If I see the interest, I'll definitely improve the functionality. Right now it's really just a quick test. As for all the points in the ocean, I think those are people writing in bad coordinates rather than plotting errors.
The Forums message posting system has also been converted to PHP, so be on the lookout for bugs.
While I converted it I also got into re-doing the file uploading system such that you can now choose to include posted images as thumbnails. Image types that are not viewable on all browsers (like BMP and ART) are no longer allowed to be included. Other, non-image file types, now show up as a hyperlink to the file instead of trying to use the embed tag on the file. This allows files other than music to be uploaded, and I think it makes more sense for music as well since trying to embed and play more than one song doesn't work too well. |  | | 11-01-03, 12:00am: Find a Dragon is up for beta testing! | The new Find a Dragon is up for beta testing! Check it out at the link above. The main parts that are not yet complete are the Open search and the preferences section which will include things like e-mailing you new matches and reminding you to keep your e-mail up to date. I have two midterms this monday and then a GRE test to study for on the following Saturday, so it could be a while before I can finish those final features. For now, please test, fill out all the new questions (you can't view matches till you answer the new questions), and enter your latitude and longitude in your profile so I can have more data to test with.
Summary of what's new: New look and feel - looks much more professional (I think). Matches are now based on a weighted affinity system. Each type of relationship has its own set of questions with appropriate weights. New types of relationships added. You may now choose different criteria for each type of relationship (I.e. you can choose to care about the religion of a spiritual mentor but not of casual friends). Results are now displayed in individually sortable columns. Results are calculated once and then cached so paging through them or re-sorting is fast. Much nicer look for profile view. Support for non-dragon profiles (but they won't be found when matching). You can view a set of latest matches since you last visited. Pictures are now thumbnailed, so feel free to upload larger ones. E-mail address can now be hidden with messages sent to you via a HTML form. Alternate contact info can be entered. Everything is now database driven such that new questions or responses are easy to add. "Other" textboxes will let me find common responses to questions that should be added, as well as letting you see what a user meant when they chose "Other". Built in suggestion box. Lots of other smaller things… | | | 10-02-03, 12:00am: Find a Dragon almost done | | Update on Find a Dragon: After a few solid weeks of work, it's very close to being ready, but with school back in session, progress is painfully slow. Still, I'm hoping to have it ready in 2-3 weeks with most of the important features. Less essential features can then be added more slowly such that I can have some free time again. =b | | | 9-21-03, 12:00am: Forum topics reorganized | The Discussion boards have been re-organized. They are now called "Forums" instead of "Discussions" (mostly because shorter names make for more screen real-estate). Learning to be Dragon has turned into the General Discussion board (since that's mostly what it ended up being used for). Draconic Stress Relievers has turned into Dragon Support Group, and takes on the intended purpose of the old Learning to be Dragon. Music has been moved from the visual art board to the stories and poetry board, because there's a lot of art but not as many stories, poems, or songs being posted. The remaining boards have been renamed, but maintain the same topics. Dragons in Literature, Council of Zxizar, and Language and Culture have each been retired. Their archives can still be accessed (recent posts can also be seen if you change ViewType from A to R in the URL when reading the board).
Also, I want to welcome Tresh as the new moderator for the Stories, Poetry, and Music forum. She won the vote by an impressive margin, and I'm sure she'll do a great job! | | | 9-13-03, 12:00am: Horizons MMORPG | | Horizons... The first MMORPG where you can play a dragon. But only a selfish, gold-hoarding, prideful, Istarian-style dragon. I used to be really excited about this game, but now I don't like how they portray dragons, and how most dragon role-players on the message boards behave in order to follow their portrayal. Still, I suppose it's not as bad as some people paint us. At any rate, I got into beta, so I've been playing from time to time (though not very often). I can't give you any insider info thanks to the NDA, but if any of you reading this are also in beta and want to join a little Draconic guild, look for KaniS or Royelle on the server that begins with T, or send me an e-mail to say when you'll be around. So far, I've found 2 others. Around when the game is released (supposedly Nov, though that seems rather early), depending how it turns out, I'm going to see if my roommate wants to run a Draconic guild, so if you're interested in joining a guild of true dragons, check back here for info. If the guild works out, one of the central focuses will be on showing the game community that dragons can be benevolent, helpful, kind, etc. So, don't plan to join if you consider yourself evil or cruel. | | | 9-08-03, 12:01pm: PHP installed | | In more draconic news, I've installed PHP support on the web server and gotten it working with the database and user logon. This means we can support all those nice, pre-built PHP packages out there (at least I hope so). It also means access to a lot of built-in PHP functionality that is a pain (or just costs too much) to find support for in ASP. For example, I can now check an image's size to prevent large signatures. Yay! =) I've been fixing lots of bugs in an open source asp2php utility I found and using it to convert Find a Dragon to php, as well as start implementing new functionality and features. It's a slow process, but it's good to be doing it, and PHP is much more fun than ASP. | | | 6-18-03, 12:00am: Summer vacation, OpenGL KaniS | College is over, though I still feel like everything is taking too long. I'm still working on cleaning out my e-mail and cleaning off my desk of old snail mail. No less than four environmental organizations guilted me into sending them money during this process, but that's alright because I think I'll be working part time this summer with one of my professors. BTW, an EarthJustice contributor is doubling any donation made to them until July 15th, so if you ever did feel like donating, now is a great time.
Once I get all this other stuff done, I plan to work on posting the discussion board rules and then on adding an environmental section (remember long ago when you voted to include that? If anyone has ideas for it, please e-mail me, or start a discussion board thread about it and e-mail me the name of the thread). After that will be the big project which is a revamp of Find a Dragon.
As a final project in my CS160 OpenGL class I wrote a standalone program with my dragon model (of myself) flying around over one of the campuses on our college. He bank turns to fly towards a target hovering over the campus and when he reaches it, a new target is randomly positioned. At any rate, everyone I've shown it to thinks it's very cool, so feel free to check it out here. It's been tested to run on any reasonably fast windows machine and requires no installation, just unzip it. | | | 3-26-03, 12:00am: Term paper compares 3D animation software | I did a term paper for my college writing class you all might be interested in. It was on the subject of what 3D software to use to animate a dragon. To be brief, based on price/performance, I picked Maya Complete. However, if you want to use the free educational version, Softimage|XSI may be even better. I didn't do a lot of research on XSI because it was out of the price range I set in the report, but I did keep reading about people who prefer it over Maya for character animation. You can read my whole report here.
Even if you don't read the whole report, you may want to check the references. There's pointers to a few interesting web sites, especially a couple dragon animation tutorials for Maya. After I wrote the report, Maya also released a whole scene file showing how to make an animation involving a dragon. The animation is rather cute and well done; it can be found here.
We also had to do a poster presentation after the term paper, and as part of the poster I ended up posing the 3D model of myself I've been working on for years. You can see the result here. The way I set it up was quite rushed, so he wouldn't move realistically in an animation, but from this angle, in this pose, he looks fairly good.
Finally, something which has nothing to do with dragons, but which is one of the funniest things I've ever seen can be found here. | | | 2-22-03, 12:00am: Dragon Wars movie | | I just happened to notice a new movie is being made called Dragon Wars. Yeah, the title makes it sound like yet another Reign of Fire, but the trailer makes it look a little different. There are dinos and other weird creatures with humans riding them, some of them shooting lasers (!?)... The dragons seem to be working with them (no riders on the dragons, yay!) as part of a huge army attacking a village. Then it switches to a huge city with dragons flying through, helicopters, and a giant serpentish creature coiling his way up a skyscraper and then growling at a tiny helicopter. Unfortunately the web site is in Korean (I think), so I can't read any of the text to figure out what it's about. If anyone finds out, feel free to e-mail me. | | | 2-11-03, 12:00am: College takes too much time | No news is good news, right? Actually, I'm still extremely busy with college, but I did get some stuff done last winter break. Mostly behind the scenes stuff. Some advice... Don't try to get all As in college if you want any free time. Unfortunately, now that I've been doing it for 3 quarters, it's hard to stop... It would just look so good on a resume... *sigh*
Anyway, check out this for a laugh. Not everyone's type of humor, but I like it. |
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