I have done away with the place holder page and the website is now publicly accessible again. The entire site has been reworked and the main focus shifted. If you visited this site earlier this year, you would have found a portfolio for prospective employers. I didn't like that website. The language used was all very formal. It was a chore to write and I believe it sounded somewhat unnatural. Reading the dialogue back would always make me cringe. Due to problems writing in that formal style and a reluctance to show incomplete work on the portfolio, the projects listed were bland and rarely showed the most exciting bits. So I've decided to do away with them completely for the time being.

I am reclaiming my website. Instead of trying to cater to potential employers explicitly I'm going to run this site as a personal website and share my daily experiences in programming my various on going projects. It should prove to motivate me to work on said projects more and to work on them to higher standard.

The project pages will be a big part of the new site. This might sound contrary to my decision to take the old project pages down. This is not the case. I don't want the project pages to just be a static block of text explaining the project in a few paragraphs. I want the new project pages to tell a story and document each project's development. I'd like each one to undergo regular updates throughout their life cycles. I would also like these project pages to be closely tied into my SVN repositories. I understand that something is better than nothing so I'll add a temporary project page with lots of screen shots shortly.

Other sections can be added as I deem fit, but that should be sufficient for the time-being.

I didn't post anything in October, here's a quick account of what happened. I finished the audio component I was working to an acceptable level, though technically it still isn't as feature rich as I'd like yet. Based on that work I started coding more of the framework around it. By the time I'm finished it should work on the three major computer platforms and apple and andriod mobile devices.

In version 7 of Firefox, Mozilla have delivered "An even faster Canvas element"*. In doing so, they also broke the banner of this site in a manner that proved very annoying to fix.

The problem pertained to how the banner drew its rounded corners. It would define a square region with rounded off edges and use the clip function to prevent any drawing in the corners. In Firefox 7 the transformations that made the background of the banner interactive also effected the mask, I couldn't find a way to keep the mask in the right place. The solution is to remove the mask completely and set the pixels in the corner of the image to transparent after all the processing has been done.

I'm currently working on a c++ sound component. The component will be multi-platform, simple to use, modular and robust. In order to achieve platform agnosticism the system will use different system apis depending on which platform is being used. On Windows, I intend to provide DirectSound functionality initially and eventually an xaudio component. On linux i can make Alsa and Pulseaudio modules. On OSX, Iphone, Android and other embedded systems I still need to examine what is available. However, the aim is to make a system where this functionality can be added when its needed.

A lot of effort has gone into this website since the last post. A notable addition to the front end is the twitter plugin which can be seen in action on this site's front page. The caching mechanism has seen revisions aswell. The plugin system is now initialised earlier, making a cache plugin possible. The caching functionality has now been moved to a plugin. In place of the hash values which were calculated in-line before, a key class has been introduced, the cache plugin can determine how to use the key.

With the new cache plugin mechanism, it will be possible to create various caches (filesystem, database and memory) and test their speeds. The data from these tests should prove interesting. I'd like to know if a database is a better caching option than the filesystem, as i've heard claimed.

Post number 1:

The blog plugin seems to be in working order, even if it's editor is a little messy.