Alright. So this morning I slept in, and then started writing a movielog entry for Any Given Sunday. It's still barely half finished. lol.

Slept. (You may as well just insert that word between most of the activities I mention.)

Ate the rest of the leftover pizza from last night. I veered a bit from my usual topping selection. Instead of pepperoni, Bitscape used a coupon to order a pizza with anchovis, jalepenos, and extra cheeeeze. Papa John's rocks. Strong, salty, and spicy. Mmm.

Spent some time working on getting Jaeger's satellite image code into the collective code. I spent way more time than I had thought I would trying to track down documentation on how to make the ImageMagick libraries create transparent pixels (a seemingly simple operation, but apparently not). The documentation for the Magick perl wrappers is rather sparse, and documented functionality varies slightly depending on which web page you visit. I soon gave up on the idea of doing anything so sophisticated as an alpha channel (my original plan), and was ready to settle for a simple transparency bit. When I did eventually find the method that's supposed to do it, the damn transparency property didn't even work at all. Broken. I even looked a little bit at the c wrapper routines, and didn't find much of help there either. Maybe I just wasn't patient enough.

After beating my head against that for a while, I did a net search to see what possible alternative libraries might be available. As long as one is using perl, there doesn't appear to be a whole lot else for writing png graphics though. A pm wrapper for libpng would probably do the trick nicely. (Hmmmm... Could it be that I have found yet another calling?)

Maybe I'm going to too much trouble on this. Maybe I ought to just leave it as a plain background, finish integrating / adapting the rest of the code, and get on with life. But... I'm just such a perfectionist. I'm sure at least a few readers will understand.

In examining alternatives, I also did a little performance testing on other alternatives. The more I struggle with them, the less I like the ImageMagick libraries, although it does appear to be the only real alternative for perl, I guess. While experimenting, I discovered that the overhead of setting each pixel on a 640x400 image on Argo was maxing out the CPU for 10 solid seconds. Just because of running the function call that many times. I don't know what, but something in there is taking WAY longer than I think it should. It seems like there ought to be a way to just throw all the pixel values for the entire image into an array, and pass them all at once. There might be, but if there is, I haven't found it yet. (Again, a seemingly simple operation, but if it does exist, it's buried under piles of stuff talking about other image manipulation operations I currently have no interest in.)

Even if it's just run as an hourly cron job, I don't like the potential server load as the map grows.

All this combined has me tempted to just go back to the drawing board and write the satellite image generation stuff in C, where everything can be exactly the way I want it. Of course, the big tradeoff: Doing that would be a huge timesink. Unless I were to really crunch on it, I highly doubt that I would be able to finish it this weekend, given my current knowledge and experience. Is it really worth it?

(I suppose only a person as neurotic and nitpicky as me would even be asking the question. Most people, I think, would have sensibly said "good enough" and moved on long ago. Oh well.)

So anyway, this evening I to just leave it alone for a bit, and watched Contact. Most of the time listening to Jody Foster's commentary, but at times reverting to the full movie sound when I felt like just getting into it, and then back to commentary when the mood to hear thoughtful analysis struck again.

After that, it was the Torture Ares hour. Is it just me, or is he starting to morph into a Joxer-like presence on the show? Well, I guess with Joxer dead for 25 years now (aren't we all thankful for that!), somebody had to fill the void eventually. I was laughing throughout.

I seem to have developed a ritual for the show when there "fun" episodes like this, and I am watching alone. I like to sit and add my own sound effects to the action, make exceedingly dumb comments, and "talk" to the characters as the situation warrants. And I have an absolute ball at it! Try it sometime. It's fun. The more stupid and inane, the better. Like saying, "Bummer Xena" when the nasty, always-overacting warlord (the more the part is overacted, the better) figures out her plan. Or, "The chakram, Xena, use the chakram! There ya go. Now go help her Gabby. Ha ha!"

Okay, now that we have established once and for all that Bitscape is a lunatic nutball, let us continue in civilized fashion.

Um... yeah. Basicly, the plot was a thinly veiled excuse for the two heroines to spend the better portion of an hour running around a farm house mercilessly torturing the once great God of War. I do mean mercilessly. lol.

When this show does a comedy, there is no restraint whatsoever on the part of anyone involved with the production. Silliness abounds. Nothing is off limits. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it falls flat. Tonight, at least in the case of this viewer, it worked. It was also apparent that the actors may have had a little too much fun when they were making this one too.

Ares: "We're all adults, here, right?" (When presented with the conveniently awkward situation of one farm house, one bed, and three potential occupants.)

Xena: "Yeah, we're... adults."

lol.

[Bitscape yawns.]

Loved the staged "fight" at the end too. (NOT a fake catfight. A fake lovers' quarral. Get it straight!) Hehe. I think we can all agree that the producers made the right decision in taking the subtext out of the closet. ("We" being defined as those belonging to the group known as "subtexters".)

Alrighty then. My brain is dead, and this day has been a total botch. At least it's been a fun botch. I'm goin to bed.