Well, I did it on time, but barely. It's now 11:24 PM on Friday and I just finished Scene 1, Page 6. If you've read the past few Making Of JF pages, you know that this is important to me. I plan to do Page 7 tomorrow and Page 8 Sunday and Monday. That means that if you're reading this now, you can probably hit the "Next |>" button and see Page 7 and 8. This is not JF Rough Draft anymore, this is JF Final Draft. That means that I officially take my hands off it. I may decide to change it, but I don't want to. The truth is that JF has gone on long enough. I want to go scene by scene, week by week from here on out. It may not work that way, but I'm going to try at least. Scene 6 will be before December 7th and Scene 7 will be before December 19th. That will be my Christmas present to you. I've decided to visit my parents over Christmas break, so I will be away from my heart of steel and soulmate: my computer. I will be surrounded by computers, but all with WinXP on them, *shudder*. If you have been reading the Making Of JF Pages, you know that I recently converted to Slackware GNU/Linux. I only go into Windows now for three things: MilkShape3D, AS3D Manga Director 3 (the program that makes these wonderful JF pages), and Corel Draw 6. I'm currently developing AS3D Manga Director 4 which is Linux based (I may port it to Windows over Christmas break). I'm looking into a few Linux based modellers and animators, but the truth is that MS3D is unbeatable. AS3DMD4 is reliant on MS3D's file format, so that's an obstacle to any other possible editor. I may have to use Wine or find a port.
This is proof that JF Scene 1, Page 6 will be done in the next few days. Pages 7 and 8 will be done by next Monday. I've gotten the first three boxes of nine for page 6, so it's looking good. I'm only stopping now for sleep. Today's lesson will be short and sweet. The lesson is simply that work done well will build a platform for work in the future. For example, a good program will allow people to build off it, customize it, and make it better. Whether that entails open source, shared libraries, or an SDK is up to the creator. People who are interested, usually yourself, will be able to use any of those to create something better. For example, there is this certain hack* tool (cURL) that was meant for just simple shell-based web downloading (as opposed to browsing where you can actually click links, it just downloaded the file you requested). But it added a few bonuses like being able to control the cookie jar, including editing of cookies, spoofing, and all kinds of tasty treats for hackers. It is often important to do these things because much of the web is quirky. But this certain hack tool was doubly smart in that they opened their source code and they made a static library. This allows hackers to use the source to achieve wonderfully good things. One good thing I thought of was to build a smart web crawler that crawls certain sites for critical sensitive material and grabs it for safe keeping. For example, DrudgeReport.com has a lot of news. It's hard to keep track since it changes so quickly. So a smart crawler could benignly grab each story as Drudge finds it. It would keep the info for another crawler that searches for matches. For example, if one story quotes George W. Bush saying that Iraq is seeking nukes and then another story the next day gives proof that Iraq is not seeking nukes, it would match those and send it to the user or send it to another crawler for further analysis. It would be helpful for anarchists like me. Since these types of things are common (proof nearly always contradicts any politician, especially those with power), it is left up to the anarchist to find useful ones. This is an important part of being an anarchist: educating people about the truth and the contradictions presented by government helps my case greatly. When I can say, "George Bush Sr. supplied Saddam Huessein with the weapons that he used on the Kurds in 1989," then I have shot down a major common defense of an unjust war.
I've been neglecting JF for a long time. That's about to stop. Or maybe it won't. Today in church*, I had a random thought about the importance of Scene 7. You'll see why I had the vision in church when you see Scene 7. It's only a few months of dev away; if I just start dev now, I'll finish it in a few months, right? It makes sense. I can finish Scene 1 in a week. Then I start moving into Scene 6. I can work really hard on models and such and give _you_ a beautiful Scene 6 John Woo-esque as if Scene 5 wasn't Hong Kong enough for you. Scene 6 will feature an SUV, a mountain bike, and amazing firepower. Beyond that, I can't tell you. But Scene 7 will be very emotional rather than action-packed. Err, actually I just looked at the script... After page 4 or so maybe, it'll tone down.
Oh my goodness, I just found Kate. It has everything that EditPlus does and it runs under Linux. Kate isn't a person,
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