Here’s an update on a few side projects I have going. First, you may remember QuickReplace. As I used it myself, I realized that there were some limitations, which I set out to address. So now we have QuickReplace 2.0. One thing I found myself doing with QuickReplace was opening it in several tabs, pasting text in the first tab, copying the output and pasting it in the next tab, because each tab could only run one filter at a time. But now, instead of having a fixed number of filters, which are executed in a fixed order, you can add as many filters as you want. The filters can be dragged and dropped in whatever order you want. And, if you want to save a filter and run it later, there is now a permalink option to do so. As before, the tool was written for me by me, with the assumption that the user (me) knows what they want to do. If you’re a programmer and you understand regular expressions, you should be able to figure it out. I’ve been using the new version for about a month and I think I’ve ironed out all the bugs, but if you find one let me know and I’ll take a look. Unless your “bug” is that it doesn’t work in a browser other than Firefox or Chrome. In which case the bug is that you’re using the wrong browser. (That being said, it seems to work just fine in IE, Safari, and Opera, but I haven’t tested extensively.) Also, the HTML file is self-contained, so you can save it locally if you’d like. (But you can’t run it offline because of a dependency on Google-hosted jQuery.)

The other side project I’ve made some updates to is my gradient generator. The previous version would generate horizontal or vertical gradients. But then I started thinking, wouldn’t it be better if it generated diagonal gradients too? So I worked out the math and made it happen. Now, instead of an “orientation” parameter that takes either “h” or “v”, we have an “angle” parameter, which takes a number in degrees (from 0 to 360, inclusive). It still takes “h” or “v”, for backwards compatibility—”h” is converted to 0, and “v” is converted to 90.

I added an extra parameter, “extend”. If it is false, the image is only as large as it needs to be to hold the gradient. This is OK if the image is being used as the background of a fixed-size element, but otherwise you won’t see the whole gradient. This is where the extend parameter comes in. If it’s set to true, you will see the whole gradient.

So here’s what it looks like without the extend parameter:

You might also notice that the y axis is inverted. That’s just how images are oriented, and I didn’t correct for it since I figure the most common case is a gradient oriented in the top-left corner. Now, if the gradient is extended, it will look like this:

You can view the gradient generator source code here.

Of course in a few years, when CSS 3 gradients are fully supported, my gradient generator will be obsolete. Oh well.

If anyone is using ImageSizer, my unimaginatively-named multi-monitor image resizing and cropping tool, I’ve made some minor-but-long-overdue updates. Namely, it can operate on a list of input files, instead of just one. And the list of input files can be anywhere in the parameter list. So you can do something convenient like this:

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java -jar ImageSizer.jar -monitorWidth 1024 -height 768 *.jpg

Download it here!

The source is also included in the jar file, if you are interested. And if you don’t know what ImageSizer is, I wrote a pretty extensive description with the initial release, which should answer all your questions.

Longtime readers of this website probably remember1 that, when I created the current layout (nearly four years ago), I commented that the Homer icon beside the title of my posts was just a placeholder.  Well, I finally decided to do something about it.  I opted to just use my gravatar, as I started doing in the comments last year.  In case you’re curious, my current gravatar is from a doodle of one of The NiNjAS.  But if you were one of my true fans you would know that already.

Just a quick note for those of you who don’t follow me on Twitter or Facebook: I have accepted a new job at Verian, a small company based in Charlotte (near where I used to work) that has remained profitable even in the economic downturn.  I’ll be a “Programmer Analyst,” which is their way of saying I’ll be programming.  My manager will be a guy I worked with at Dassault (and, in fact, I don’t think I’d have found the job if it weren’t for his recommendation).  This is great news for us! :)

I’ll be starting on May 5, so Stephanie, Emma, and I are headed to Myrtle Beach Monday morning for a quick vacation while I have this last week off.  Assuming our resort isn’t on fire, of course...

If anyone decided to make use of the gradient generator code I posted yesterday, be advised that I just added alpha channel (i.e. transparency) support.  I’ve updated the source code to include these new changes.

Something strange I found out is that PHP only supports a 7-bit alpha channel, even though PNG (and really any image format supporting transparency) uses the same number of bits for the alpha channel as for the red, green, and blue1.  I’m assuming this is because PHP uses 32-bit signed integers, and if they let the alpha channel use all 8 remaining bits they would use the sign bit.  And heaven forbid people need to know a little bit about twos-complement.  Oh well.

And of course, if you use transparent PNGs, you should know they are not supported by IE6.  But I’m guessing any IE6 users out there are becoming increasingly aware of the fact that a lot of sites look strange for them.

This post is to let you know about several small tweaks to this site that I’ve been working on lately, even though you probably don’t care at all. :)

One of the cooler things is that I’ve written some PHP code to programmatically generate gradient images.  If you’ve looked around the web you know that gradients are essential to modern web design, and I figure there’s no need to fire up Photoshop everytime I need one.  (Now if I can just write a glossy floor generator I’ll be totally web 2.0 compliant.)  You can view the gradient generator source code, if you’d like.  Of course, this kind of thing is so easy to do with PHP and a bit of 7th grade math that it’s almost not worth posting.  But I figured I’d share anyway.

Thus far I have put these gradients into action in two places on this site: as sexy new comment headers (as seen here, for example); and in the background of any picture in our photo album.

I can’t remember if I ever posted about this, but I wrote some Javascript a while back which is currently in use on the photos page, which scales the photo to fill your browser.  jQuery is awesome.  (And every modern browser1 can scale images without making them look grainy.)

I’ve also fixed the bug with the stored name/e-mail from adding a comment.  I have to apologize for the accidental breach of privacy, which would have exposed your e-mail address to other visitors to the site for up to an hour after your visit.  Now the name/e-mail fields are filled in by Javascript, so they are not cached server-side.

Another small change is that timestamps on posts and comments are now converted to your local timezone.  You can still hover over the timestamp to see an ISO-8601 timestamp, part of the datetime microformat I adopted when I added hAtom support.  Speaking of which, I finally found a way to validate hAtom: there is a site, transformr.co.uk, which will take a URL to a page supporting hAtom, and it will generate a true atom feed for it.  Here is mine.  I’m still not sure who would benefit from that though.  If you know enough to use the hAtom feed, then you probably know enough to click the little feed icon in the address bar too.  Oh well, it’s there if you want it.

So I mentioned in a post over two years ago that I was going to start reading The Chronicles Of Narnia.  Well I just finished them over Thanksgiving break, and I thought I’d share my thoughts.

First of all, it didn’t take me two years to read them, I just read a lot of other stuff in between.  Especially after I finished The Silver Chair, I think it was over a year before I went back to the series.  I can easily say that it was my least favorite book in the series.

As Jonah mentioned in a comment on that post, the books were not written in the order in which the story takes place.  The Horse And His Boy and The Magician’s Nephew were written after The Silver Chair, but before The Last Battle, although the stories take place much earlier in the Narnia timeline.  I think The Magician’s Nephew needs to be read next-to-last to be properly appreciated.  There’s just too much in the story that you wouldn’t understand or appreciate if it was the first Narnia book you read.  Of people I’ve talked to who have read the series, they either didn’t like The Magician’s Nephew at all, or they liked it but only when they read the series for a second time.  I thought it was great, which is probably because I read it next-to-last.  Reading The Horse And His Boy where it is presented chronologically, however, is probably not going to detract from the story.

I will avoid spoilers even for this fifty-year-old book series (although, really, isn’t there a statute of limitations on spoilers?), but I have to say I was disappointed with the treatment of one character in particular.  Seriously, I think this character must have been named for a person who C.S. Lewis really liked when he started writing the books, but while he was writing the last book this person must have run over his dog, repeatedly.  The ultimate treatment of this character was just unnecessary.  In a way it reminded me of the gratuitous demise of Chef on South Park.  If you’ve read the books I’m sure you know who I’m referring to.

(Actually, I’m avoiding spoilers because Stephanie is reading the books now, so don’t leave any spoilers in the comments please!)

I experimented with using Feedburner to manage the feeds for this site, but I haven’t been pleased with the statistics they provide.  They seem to be inaccurate, and I think the problem is that Feedburner is geared towards sites much larger than mine.  So I’ve decided to revert to hosting my own feeds.

So.  If you subscribed to a feed from this site in the last three months, you may need to resubscribe sometime next week in order to keep getting updates.  If you’re not sure which feed you’re subscribed to, you should start getting notifications sometime next week that the feed is dead (if you’re subscribed to the Feedburner feed).  If you don’t get any notifications, and you keep getting my blog posts, then you don’t need to do anything.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about then none of this applies to you.

Lots has been going on in our lives lately, but I’ll start this post by discussing one that many of you already have heard about.  My company is closing down their Charlotte office in six months.  A few people have been offered relocation to other offices in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and France, but not many.  A lot of people will be let go in two or three months.  And a few of us are fortunate enough to be offered jobs through the entire “transition period.”  I am in that last group, which means that if I stay through the end of March I will get a pretty substantial severance package (if I leave before then, the severance payment is much smaller).  I’m not sure what we will be doing from here, but I’ll try to keep everyone updated.

In more pleasant news, I thought I’d give some updates on Emma’s development.  She has turned into quite a giggler.  There are a few things that consistently trigger this giggling.  First and foremost, holding her in front of a mirror (especially while moving her forward and backward in front of it) will always make her stop crying and start smiling and laughing.  Another way of making her laugh it so simply let her see Punky.  It doesn’t matter what Punky is doing, she can even be sleeping.  When Emma sees her, she starts laughing.

A few days ago I spent most of the morning working from home, and I got to see Emma watch her Baby Galileo DVD.  This was very interesting.  Basically, random stuff comes by while classical music plays, and occasionally they show babies playing, or they’ll have a young kid say a word like “sun” or “moon”.  It reminded me a lot of A Clockwork Orange, when they brainwashed the guy by forcing him to vidie the ultraviolence while they played Ludwig Von.  I’m not sure if Baby Galileo is trying to brainwash viewers or not, but I had a strong urge to assassinate public officials after viewing it.

In other news, Emma learned to make the “d” sound about a week and a half ago.  This means that occasionally she sits there and says “da da da da da da da da!”  I’m trying to teach her that “da da” references me, by responding to her whenever she says the phrase.  I’m not sure how well its working, because she also says “da da da da da da” when she’s looking at Punky.  We’ll see.

As far as locomotive skills, Emma’s still not able to crawl and certainly not walk yet, but she has mastered rolling over.  She’s close to being able to sit up on her own, although she’ll tilt over to one side or the other after a minute or so.  She is also very aware, in that she’ll follow people around the room, and she can figure out where people’s voices are coming from.

I guess that’s enough updates for one post.  Until next time, keep on... doing whatever it is that you do... !

Last night I marked another item off my mental list of things to do with this website, by supporting Gravatars for the comments.  Since I haven’t been requesting e-mail addresses in the past, none of the old comments will show Gravatars.  If you’re a frequent commenter on this site and you want me to retroactively apply your e-mail address to any comments you have left on this page send me an e-mail telling me what e-mail address you use, or just leave a comment for this post with the e-mail field filled in and I’ll use that address.