When I started programming it was on the Commodore 64 (uh oh, you know this is going to be a long story – go take a piss first). I started with Basic and then eventually moved to assembly language to try and write a Bard’s Tale clone with a friend. We got pretty far. I just came across the notebooks where I had scribbled all those assembly routines too – great times! But by the time we got close to having something we could call a game, Commodore had lost the battle and the IBM PC clone market was taking off. Different instruction set, different hardware and capabilities. Doh! Read the rest of this entry …
SVG is a pretty flexible format. Vector graphic editors often inject a lot of extraneous data to make their job easier. Unfortunately this excess data is just ignored by browsers and from that perspective just looks like bloat. In my opinion, output from editors such as Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator are not quite ready for the web, especially for purposes like clip-art. It’s not at all rare to find files up on Open ClipArt with large chunks of the file that are not even used (extraneous gradients, filters, etc). I had an itching to learn a little Python so I used this as an excuse to create a script that would tidy up SVG files: Scour. Read the rest of this entry …
Happy AdaLoveLace Day to Shelley Powers. I happened to be browsing through some blogger’s archives marveling at how many posts are just no longer intelligible (this and this are good examples). It’s a shame that many of her older writings are no longer around (or are they?). Shelley’s had an interesting life so far. I look forward to continuing to learn from her.
To help kick off the new SVG community site, I thought I’d write up a tutorial and post it there. It’s a quickie and it’s maybe a couple years out of style, but it’s got some pretty pictures: Gelcap Buttons in SVG. (Some people call these ‘aqua buttons’).
Disclaimer: The PlanetSVG website is still largely under construction, so please be gentle. Rob is working on a Drupal theme and we still have to plan out the overall flow of the site.
I received a copy of Shelley Powers‘ new book, Painting the Web
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