These two images are not the same, at least if you are using the default Firefox configuration on Linux/X11 with gfx.color_management.mode set to 2 (only tagged) instead of 0 (all disabled). It turns out I disabled that setting entirely at some point—for some reason—and later forgot about it.

To be more specific, the image to the right is the intended rendering. This is what the side-by-side comparison above should look like with the defaults.

It also seems I have been leaving behind a trail of PNG files in the web that contain bogus ICC information that causes Firefox—again, with the default configuration—to render them differently than I actually intended when exporting them in the GIMP. In the case of my avatar, it’s not a big deal since it’s just Xykon from the Order of the Stick serving as my terrifying spokesman spokeslich. However, if my memory serves me right I have seen this being an actual issue with my whole website layout in my default-configured virtual machines — and I always dismissed that color disparity as being caused by VirtualBox instead of Firefox.

Thankfully, the website CSS currently makes more use of browser gradients to prevent the faulty (?) graphics being used in practice. The spritesheet that contains the post category icon (used in the front page) is evidently affected, though.

But to what degree is it Firefox’s fault? Unfortunately, I understand jack shit about color profiles and I don’t seem to have a tool handy to tell me what the technical differences between both images are. I suspect I did something wrong in the GIMP at some point, or perhaps the problem was created by my application of a certain PNG optimization script. Does the wrongly rendered version of my avatar actually have color profile information in it?

What I do understand is that color profile information in PNG files has bitten my ass several times over the years, and not just with Firefox, but also with Wesnoth (via SDL_image).

If anyone there thinks they have a definitive answer to this conundrum, please share.

EDIT: Yes, I reuploaded my avatar to the Wesnoth.org forums and my Twitter profile during the last couple of days in order to fix this issue. It was just matter of opening importing the current versions in the GIMP and then saving exporting the unaltered contents to new files. I will probably try the optimization procedure on the fixed versions later.

EDIT 2: Also, yes, I am aware that the two sample images look identical in non-Gecko browsers.

The website’s appearance has changed again! Dorset6 (codenamed “Air”) has come to replace Dorset4 and to reduce the site’s data weight by a significant amount, by abandoning the use of bitmap graphics for layout and replacing them with some well-supported rules from the CSS 3 suite.

As a consequence, older browsers will not work with the website very well and might not display some neat details like rounded corners and shadows. Despite this, it’s still readable and mostly functional with Internet Explorer 6 and later. Both Chrome 11 and Firefox 4.0 provide all the required features to make this work properly, but there’s also some degree of compatibility with previous Chrome versions, some other versions of webkit-based browsers, and Firefox 3.5 (found in Debian 6.0) and later.

There were also a few structural changes around the Project section with this revision, making it hopefully more readable and concise.

As for the version number skip, Dorset5 was ultimately scrapped and recycled into Dorset6. Here’s what it looked like before the slaughter.

I don’t know what’s the worst (or best) part: that HTML 5 is being used for this kind of gimmicks, or the fact that there’s people who are entertained by a gray cat who shits rainbows while flying- er, running across the universe with a pop tart glued to its back. Does that make sense? No. Does it need to make sense? No — this is the Internet, after all.

Feel free to click the links, but don’t blame me if your score in future IQ tests drops by a significant amount as a consequence.

Protip: nyan.cat works best with Google Chrome. Firefox 4 and Opera 11.10 miss the rainbow animation for some reason, on Linux at least. Not that I care, really.

Apparently the people at Mozilla finally decided to give their last Firefox release a try on a Linux/Gtk+ configuration other than Ubuntu 10.10’s default, or some diligent user reported to them how awful the new interface looks to the rest of the world who’s not using Windows. In any case, I seem to be receiving new builds through their beta channel, and a few hours ago I got my hands on Firefox 4.0.1 “beta” build 1, whatever that means.

The following picture should speak by itself: (Hint: look between the Firefox button and the toolbar.)

Before switching to Mozilla Firefox 4’s builds from the Nightly (Minefield) channel some time around mid-2010, I used to follow closely the blog of one of the Debian Iceweasel maintainers, from which I got goodness such as updates on the status of Iceweasel 3.6 for Debian Sid/Squeeze in Experimental, that I used for a while.

There’s a little piece of customization advice for Iceweasel/Firefox 4.0 users posted around January that I overlooked until now.

Turns out that this night after Firefox 4.0.1’s update, I decided that the “Firefox button” should match the Oxygen window decoration in style — because I’m that crazy. I took the ~/.mozilla/firefox/<session>/chrome/userChrome.css modifications from the blog post and played around with various combinations until I produced something marginally uniquer.

#appmenu-toolbar-button > .toolbarbutton-text {
  /* oxygen "carved" effect */
  text-shadow: 0px 1px 0px white;
  /* bold */
  font-weight: bold;
}

I am actually afraid of messing around with the many possibilities of XUL/CSS styling further, lest I spend the rest of the month producing my own full-fledged Firefox theme. The fact that I can handle CSS makes this all the more worrisome.

Don’t throw your shoes at me! I didn’t come to continue the overly long “display resolution” gag!

I have been thinking about some stuff to do during this year for a while, actually. It’s really hard to decide because I’m a person who runs into all sort of trouble while trying to get projects accomplished (including procrastination).

One thing I’m already doing is learning some Japanese, for no particular reason at all — although you’ve got to admit that having multiple languages in your curriculum is worth a bunch of coolness points. Espreon is helping me along the way with his own recently gained knowledge. It seems quite fun to learn a language in a non-Latin alphabet, if not a tad overwhelming at times, especially with kanji.

It’d be a good idea to lose some weight this year, too. My addiction to sugary stuff isn’t quite compatible with my heart condition! (Nor is coffee, but… meh.)

Then there’s Wesnoth. I intend to finish the Second Act™ of After the Storm Episode I as soon as I may, even through the means of placeholders — I’m willing to do anything to rescue AtS out of Development Hell before the end of 2011.

Wesnoth RCX’s development is halted right now due to lack of interest on my part to invest energy on writing the rest of the new functionality (i.e. definition of custom ranges and palettes), but I know that once I touch Qt Creator’s awesome interface I can’t stop working for a while — so I may eventually get some inspiration to redesign the main window, which should inevitably lead me to tinker around with the rest of the code.

C# was the first “major” programming language I learned, not counting Visual Basic. I have some fond memories of my first experiments with C#, but after I embarked upon learning and using C++ I kind of forgot about it. I have been considering the possibility of writing an IRC client of sorts using C# just for kicks, and to not forget this language in case I ever need it again. Why IRC? Because clients for this protocol are simple and challenging to implement, both at the same time!

I’ve already started to learn a bit of Lua for my work on the aforementioned Wesnoth campaign — in fact, there’s already some released code within it written in this language, particularly in scenario 5! I have plans to rewrite parts of Invasion from the Unknown in Lua to clean it up a little, thus paving the road for future maintenance work by me or other people (don’t forget that IftU is still abandoned!).

Another software project I intend to tackle in the short term is Rei 2. Sure, she’s doing well and her main command handlers are many and useful enough for channels such as ##shadowm and #wesnoth-umc-dev, but her dependence on Irssi’s core might well be a curse for one of our use cases: Shikadibot (the Second), which runs on a resource-limited VPS where every drop of RAM has got gold value. I’m already brainstorming a possible abstraction layer (codenamed “API 3”) which could allow the Irssi core to be swappable with a custom, native IRC client core (codenamed “Anya”). There’s really not much in the current Irssi-based implementation of the internal interfaces (“API 2”) that make a dependency switch unfeasible.

Finally, I’m not going to stop producing useless updates for my website! Dorset5 0001 is already a reality, although there’s still much I want to do before replacing the current layout. This time I have placed an emphasis on readability and elegance that I don’t think the previous revisions have lived up to so far.

• • •

All in all, I always have so many ideas floating in my mind that I rarely carry to realization, so this can’t be considered a definitive list. There are other possibilities I’m contemplating for the long term regarding my personal life, but that’s a much more volatile subject to discuss so I’m avoiding it for now.

After so much work, codename “Hakone”, the new website layout and software powering the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev website is finished, bringing with it a series of changes to begin to renew the project for the upcoming new year.

Ancient, old, and new

The Wesnoth-UMC-Dev website has gone through three revisions counting “Hakone” — “Soradoc” and “Kalari” being its predecessors.

My emphasis during the construction of codename “Hakone” was placed on functionality, standards compliance at the web interface level, and a soft, elegant and modern look, all of which I think have been accomplished. Through the integration of technologies such as XML feeds using SimplePie, and the minimalistic yet extensible blog engine provided by Blosxom along with our homegrown Poison Ivy PHP engine, we have achieved our ultimate objective of establishing our own network identity as an independent, parallel project to Battle for Wesnoth.

We have also added an embedded IRC client using freenode’s neat webchat gateway, available from within the Contact section. This should pave the way for further coordination between developers and repository administrators using our official discussion and support channel.

In this opportunity I’ve also opted for standardizing the spelling of our short project name to “Wesnoth-UMC-Dev”, as opposed to the earlier “wesnoth-umc-dev” and “Wesnoth UMC Dev[elopment]”.

There are bugs that remain to be fixed though, which are related to the feeds handling within the various site components — but nothing that is going to matter for the moment due to our rather restricted audience.

So there goes another bit to add to my web design stories, an experience from which I’ve learned a lot of valuable information for my work on “Dorset5”.

The Wesnoth-UMC-Dev Project website is now running with the Hakone layout system, but the blog section is currently not operational due to administrative issues I hope to have solved within the next 24 hours.

Although I had originally set the completion deadline for codename “Hakone” to March 2011, after one week and two days of development it’s close enough to final for an early deployment, hopefully before the end of the year.

    

This is the fifth website layout I’ve designed, now joining the list along with “Dorset0”, Dorset, Soradoc and Kalari — but Hakone is somewhat unusual in that its CSS was written from scratch rather than being based on a previous template, while less than 40% of the basic HTML structure was inherited from Kalari.

Hakone is also the first site layout in which I reset margins and padding attributes for all HTML elements and specify them manually instead of allowing the web browser to use its internal defaults. This technique appears to work much better across browsers than my previous selective overrides. Consequently, Hakone looks very good and usable on IE 6 and 7, despite the usage of CSS 2/2.1 and 3 features in some places.

To get an idea of how much Hakone has changed since its first incarnation, take a look at this ’shot:

Besides the renewed appearance for 2011, Hakone is also intended to bring some functionality improvements and administrative changes around the place. For starters, the front page will pull feeds from a local blog which will be deployed using Blosxom for simplicity, in which we’ll dump any important updates we deem appropriate to share. Interestingly, we used to have a blog at the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev website at the beginning, but the lack of interest from the other admins doomed it to death.

I also intend to add XML feeds support to the Registry Service frontend in order to announce newly added users and projects. I don’t know yet how that’ll be achieved, though — but bet on an update here as soon as I have a plan for it.

By adding more documentation to the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev 2011 website we should also be able to drop most of the contents of the official forum thread, which is currently unmaintained and redundant.

Finally, with all these changes we hope to attract more add-on authors and maintainers to our project. Despite a few administrative issues, we have already hosted large and popular add-ons such as Ageless Era, and campaigns which are currently part of Wesnoth’s mainline, including Legend of Wesmere and Delfador’s Memoirs. We don’t know yet where the community will take us next year, but I expect some amazing work to come out of the repository soon.

It’s almost over. Time flies even faster as we get closer to the end of 2010, and apparently there’s a lot to summarize despite we’re not in the finish line yet!

This has been a particularly difficult year for me in a more personal sense, and I’ve faced some trials I won’t speak about and then some, but I’ve also learned new things in the road — things that may be of greater use to me in the future. There’s really a lot that could be said about this year but I’ll restrict it to computer stuff to avoid boring the audience too much bore the audience as much as possible.

Long ago, I wrote a (scarcely linked) Wesnoth fortune viewer that runs on this website, using an old copy of the fortunes file which can be found in Wesnoth’s SVN trunk under /misc/fortunes/wesnoth. I wanted to build an interface with more features from that ground, but never got to it, until now.

The fortunes database for Poison Ivy, codename “Asuka”, is in development since exactly 3 hours ago, and a test tree is already online at http://shadowm.rewound.net/asuka/. It is not very functional at the moment, and the visual design sucks, but I expect to improve that soon. For now it’s possible to get safe permalinks, select the previous/next quote in the database when viewing a single entry, or let the website pick a random quote for you.

Other planned features include:

• Short excerpts in the index page.
• Author/source detection.
• Full quote index.
• Published source code, under a BSD-style license.
• Anything else I come up with in the way to 1.0.

On a more personal note, it’s amazing how much time can be saved by coming up with completely modular code design. Implementing individual features becomes then as simple as adding a few lines of code here and there. With this, I’m slowly regaining my faith on my own ability to code.

Today I was talking to Gambit on IRC about web design, sharing some of the things I’ve learned as an amateur/wannabe web designer over the time, which reminded me of the multiple changes that this site has gone through since its conception circa 2006 thanks to rewound.net’s hosting, kindly provided by Grafix of the Public Commander Keen Forum through NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

With the intention of showcasing my progress on the web design area, I have prepared a small picture gallery with Konqueror’s help, collecting some screenshots I have lying around in my home dir.

• Dorset evolution gallery

A detailed historical explanation follows.

After some hesitation, I have deployed Prosilver Special Edition on the Wesnoth.org forums, with multiple changes meant to make it more similar to mainline Prosilver in terms of layout. Wesnoth’s custom Prosilver changes have also been applied on our copy of Prosilver SE.

In fact, Prosilver SE as used in Wesnoth.org depends completely on the main Prosilver template rather than its own partial template set, and it also replaces the default Prosilver theme/stylesheets and imagesets, since otherwise very few people would choose to use it. Besides, OAB.

Of course, further changes are not unlikely to occur, depending both on the users’ feedback and my own testing experiences.