June 30, 2016

I would like to get the site landing page roughed out and in place this weekend. Currently http://ninecrows.com just drops you on a plain HTML page with text on a background and some links. I know mod-rewrite rules can re-point that reference to a sub-folder. I have installed a target to catch those requests and expect to configure this to serve static wordpress pages. If all goes well, I’ll have something in place there by Tuesday.

I’ve fleshed out and enhanced the book shelf area. Still not particularly structured but it now has thumbnails for all of the books and I’ve added comments on more of them. I still need to add comments to much of the newer material and perhaps rearrange the lists to be more usable. It have been an interesting dive into my books list as I ran across a few items that I had bought out of curiosity and never found the time to give real attention to. I’ll have to remedy that soon.

I want to tackle the ‘things I’ve worked with’ list on this blog next. It is currently just an expanded version of the key word list from my resume. It needs expanding (and I guess my resume list needs expanding as well then) and it needs organizing. I think I may go to a category based setup with ‘languages’, ‘operating systems’, process and such.

Sandbox projects keep getting postponed due to work and life time crunches. Not looking much better in the near term future, but I’m going to hold out hope.

Ju51pnT4sXw2L._SX379_BO1,204,203,200_st grabbed a copy of ‘Building web apps with WordPress’ for my kindle app. I’m really looking seriously at building shared information applications with my site in the middle. I need to substantially improve my command of the UI side of web apps and this looks like it may hit that and some of the back end issues that would help me get leverage from WordPress rather than writing code from scratch.

Site backup and sundry…

I spent last weekend getting backup set up for the site after a scare that had me thinking I’d lost the blog side of the site. Backups now are looking good and appear to be running well. I still need to load XAMPP on my linux box and verify that I can restore the sites, but I’m pretty comfortable that will work.

I’m not sure what is on my agenda next in terms of technical projects but here’s a loosely form list in no particular order:

Continue reading Site backup and sundry…

Continuing to pull together the blog area here

I’ve been putting off fixing the ninecrows.com landing page because things have been busy. At this point I’m trying to put content up here and keep the site interesting and thus I’m looking at fixing the landing page and pulling the whole site together.

It looks as if I can use mod-rewrite to point http://ninecrows.com/ to a static page wordpress instance that then provides hand-offs to the blog areas. At the moment I have two, one for career/technical information (here) and another for all other personal items

Continue reading Continuing to pull together the blog area here

WordPress and PHP

Back in WordPress and PHP land a bit. OpenGL is fun, but I want to make this hosting/blog cleaner and something I can point people at without running then through messiness at the landing page.

I think the Jetpack plugin has resolved my immediate image display issues over on my personal blog. I still want to build more comfort level with PHP for a number or reasons and with WordPress to keep things going in the right direction here.

I’ve bought a few PHP and WordPress kindle books to cover these areas (and update my several years old volumes on my current physical bookshelf). I’ll likely drop XAMPP on my linux machine sometime soon to create a test environment for a number of things.

Continue reading WordPress and PHP

3D Rendering…

I find myself back again reading the documentation to OpenGL. There are so many cool things that can be done with this stuff. At this point it is a bit like a whole new API though as the programmable pipeline is new since last time I took a serious look. Much more capability, but in many ways a completely different way of making things happen.

The issues around gimbal lock with Euler angles and transformation matrices (which is the approach I’ve used in the past) are making me seriously look at quaternions again. They’re a bit of a strange hybrid, but it seems as if they offer a means to manage rotations that may have fewer sharp edges than what I’ve used in the past.

I think I may wind up buying the paper copy of the the OpenGL Superbible as it is likely to be more pleasant to flip around in than the kindle version I’ve been reading. Also suspecting that HLSL is important enough that the OpenGL Shading Language reference may be something I want on my bookshelf. Add in the OpenCL Programming Guide that I picked up when I was job searching (thought there might be some CT related opportunities and for projective reconstruction, OpenCL seems very interesting) and all sorts of stuff should be possible.