(Apr 1, 2001) (the toon)
Hey, stop me if the breakneck speed of this posting is an any way uncomfortable.
But I figured I'd strike while the iron was hot instead of sitting on a
perfectly good episode for a day just so I could say I had a buffer, just for
a few hours. But when the next one takes nine days again, I don't want
to hear any complaints. You should have waited.
All hail Lord Emsworth, who's a keen hand with a spot of Wodehousian prose in
a tight corner, and who handles wolverines better than anyone else I know.
(Apr 2, 2001)
Call me crazy, but this Pickle Crisp episode just cracks me up. I get burned out on most episodes after a couple
of readings, but this one just really pleases me.
In other news, turns out that Toonbots comes up in ninth place on an AltaVista search for the phrase "tire history". That's just too weird not to share with you.
(Apr 6, 2001)
In case you were wondering whether or not I'm cool, I'm not. I'm a complete imbecile. I've been using XML and ImageMagick together
in the Toon-o-Matic for more than five months, and just today I realized that one of the formats that IM groks is
SVG. Dumb, dumb, dumb! One of the things I hate most about the Toon-o-Matic
is the braindead way I do the actual drawing. Yeah, OK, I know -- the point of the Toon-o-Matic, at first, was to be as baroque and ad-hoc
as possible. But now it's just too darned irritating, and besides, I'm looking at real-life applications. So I want things to actually work
now. So remember my posting back in February about restructuring the Toon-o-Matic? Looks like it starts today. The Toon-o-Matic proper will
henceforth be a translator from the high-level cartoon description language I'm inventing, bit by episodic bit, into SVG. The neato part of that is
that if you have (or get) an SVG-enabled browser, you'll be able to look at Toonbots really fast.
Have to redo stuff anyway, due to the loss of my dear departed CPU. I got all the data off my drives OK (onto the new P933 with 60GB/128MB with
the completely gratuitous 19" monitor that was on sale!) but I didn't bother to get antedeluvian copies of Ghostscript, etc., and so the wacky
way I was doing text (with Postscript) won't work any more. No loss at all, it was an inelegant hack. Baroque enough at the time but the excitement
was beginning to pall, if you know what I mean. The problem with being a professional is that it makes it darn hard to be an amateur sometimes.
All this is by way of preparation: I'll probably do a new episode this weekend, but as it'll require coding, I expect you all to appreciate it.
(Apr 8, 2001)
Yeah, OK, so, I could do an episode, or I could get deathly ill and sleep the entire weekend. But wow -- I got a lot of
science fiction reading done! Two novels in two days!
(Apr 17, 2001) (the toon)
Almost there. As you know if you're following the forum (and if not, well, why not?!?) I'm recoding the Toon-o-Matic.
Turns out it was the motherboard on my old box. The new box is (snif) wonderful. One nice thing about doing computer stuff for a
living is that you can justify buying new equipment occasionally -- I even get to take it off my taxes!
So anyway, the Toon-o-Matic is tooning again, kind of. I just got it drawing panels and heads again. It can't do
ellipses yet, but lines work. And it can't do text yet, even captions.
Oh, heck, I guess I'll just have to do an episode anyway. OK, just did one. I must say, between this damn spank new box, and
the increased performance of ImageMagick 5.3.1, and the speed increase due to using one conversion (from SVG to GIF) instead of
lots and lots of calls, my drawing time is far less than it used to be. Literally a fraction of a second as opposed to the old
way, which was maybe thirty seconds.
If you have a good idea for the captions to this episode, tell me.
(Apr 21, 2001)
You want cool? You want comics and XML? Look at ComicsML, a markup
language for toon content. Not the same thing as what I'm doing, but there's enough cross-section that I'm going to be
incorporating features from it.
(Apr 23, 2001) (the toon)
There is actually a new feature in this toon -- the panel borders are now constrained to lie on pixel boundaries. With the
new monitor I'm now able to see that many lines in the old Toonbots were blurry; this is simply because width-1 lines on
fractional pixels don't render well with ImageMagick (and probably with anything at all). So I fixed it. Now all the
panel borders will be nice and sharp, and I suppose I'll have to do the same with captions when I finally get my
text-metric program done and can re-implement captions.
For your extra-credit homework, you can see the output of a close
cousin of the Toon-o-Matic. Nothing like getting paid for having fun, I always say.
(Apr 28, 2001) (the toon)
Well. Things are moving along at breakneck speed now, I can tell you! I have gotten my font-file-reading tool to the
point that it can summarize the Verdana TrueType font so that I can calculate the widths of text strings. Now that I can
do that, I can tell SVG where to put each text string. The result? A much nicer and far saner way to do
captions.
(Apr 29, 2001) (the toon)
The first person to identify the new Toon-o-Matic capability demonstrated in this episode will get a handy-dandy Toonbots
"cool enough" award. And now we'll see whether anyone reads these little commentary items.
(May 2, 2001) (the toon)
Well, if I'd been thinking about Toonbots earlier, I could have done a May Day thing, since the First of May is the international
socialist Labor Day. (Must be why America has its Labor Day as far away as possible. It's surprising we don't celebrate Labor Day
on November 1...) Instead, a little Dubya time.
(May 7, 2001) (the toon)
The font is "Nahkt", a freely-available TrueType from from Michel Bujardet. Now, there aren't a whole lot of hieroglyphics in this
font -- there is a different set of four fonts which together encode more than 800 glyphs -- but as they're arranged all in
one font, and they're all in alphabetic positions, this font is ideal for the casual Egyptian-atmosphere text as I'm using it here.
Hieroglyphics are cool. The Nahkt glyphs are apparently the "regular" hieroglyphs that you see in mummy's tombs and things. There
are related syllabary-type scripts which were based on the original Nahkt hieroglyphic system, too.
(May 10, 2001) (the toon)
See? I told myself that in May, I'd post an episode whenever I had any idea, however inane, and it's true!
(May 16, 2001)
BoxJam says I'm the Orange Guy! (And if you haven't
already, read Somebody Strange's Vicious Lies. It's brilliant.)
Sorry for the delays -- I'm trying to draw some of the Jihad for the upcoming Big Day, but the Toon-o-Matic just isn't getting the
picture. Soon.
(May 22, 2001)
OK, the Big Day is tomorrow and I'm going to have to wing it. I had wanted to lead up to it, but instead I'm going to start a storyline
tomorrow on the Big Day. The reason is that my wife has a talk coming up and guess who does her transparencies? Yeah. Me.
But look at some of the slides. They're beautiful. These represent roughly 98,000,000 man-hours of
labor. Treat them with respect.
(May 23, 2001) (the toon)
Well, this isn't really what I had in mind, but the strip seems to be leading me somewhere. I'm interested to see where we all end up.
(What's that, girl? Tommy's fallen down the well?!?)
(May 24, 2001) (the toon)
Mwu-hahaha! I've always been able to keep you in suspense as to when the next episode would hit the Web, but I'm betting you're
not expecting suspense as to what will happen next! ... I wish I knew what will happen next.
(May 26, 2001) (the toon)
Well, I finished the article I was working on yesterday, so today I figured I'd do up a bigger episode. I think it came out pretty
good, actually. I hope (completely seriously) that it's as fun for you to read as it was for me to write.
(May 30, 2001) (the toon)
Sorry, I've been sick. But as you can see, not too sick to watch videos.
| 
