Rounding out the weekend, an Extrusion bug. While at first glance it seems OpenVRML just isn’t normalizing a vector where it should, the larger problem is that the algorithm for identifying linear spines is broken. Sigh.

I spent most of the weekend laying tile in my basement. It amounts to Real Work. One 50 lb bag of thinset mix seems to stretch for about 16 of these 18″ tiles (give or take depending on how much I have to use to get a tile set level with respect to adjacent tiles). I went through two bags this weekend. I am perhaps 25% done with the job.

I am impressed with just how hard this tile is. At one point I lost control of a tile and it hit the floor right on the corner of the tile. It made a “bong” sound as the tile flexed in response to the impact where it took a chip out of the concrete slab floor. The tile? Nary a mark.

We’ve been remodeling our basement for a while now. When we moved into the house over two years ago, doing this was Part Of The Plan. The basement looked like it hadn’t been changed since the house was built in 1980. Sculpted brownish green carpet. Dark gray vinyl tile. Darkly stained wood paneling. And the best part? A large conglomeration of nailed-together lumber that seemed intended to be a bar. A disco dungeon of sorts.

But past the unfortunate decor, the basement is spacious and has a fireplace. It could become very comfortable living space. But salvaging it has not been an easy task. The bar was evicted. The wood paneling was replaced with drywall. A closet and built-in shelving were torn out. The sliding glass door to walk out to the back yard has been replaced. The carpet and vinyl tile were dispensed with. The walls and ceiling have been repainted. Even the fireplace doors have been upgraded.

And, of course, there were the unanticipated problems. A leak in the basement was sealed. (“So that’s why it smells like wet dog down here when we get a hard rain.”) The lopsided stairs were righted and their failing supports replaced.

So, at long last, I feel like we’ve reached the last leg of this project. But at this rate, I’ve got at least three more weekends of laying tile left to go. And I hurt.

Since going a season without posting here, I feel like I ought to provide some resolution to some of the things I mentioned here earlier in 2006.

Fall was pretty good for OpenVRML. The 0.16 series (which saw its first release back in August) yielded 0.16.3 by the end of the year—which seems to be a pretty usable release. Even the Mozilla plug-in seems to be basically usable, caveat a really annoying bug in the JPEG decoder. Also, I’ve started packaging OpenVRML for Fedora Extras.

Lately I’ve been spending most of my OpenVRML development time working on a stand-alone player. Like the Mozilla plug-in, it is simply a host to the openvrml-gtkplug out-of-process component. But it exercises openvrml-gtkplug in different ways—which accounts for most of my interest in writing the stand-alone player.

After discovering svnsync I’ve migrated uri_grammar to Google’s Subversion hosting. I’ll soon do the same for my Autoconf macros for OpenGL.

So it’s 2007 already.

I have finally repaired the style sheets for this journal such that the stuff that’s supposed to be on the right column actually shows up there. Good grief; I’ve probably forgotten more about CSS than many competent professional Web designers know. I wish I were exaggerating. But the fact is that there was a time in the late nineties that I had a level of expertise with the technical details of CSS shared by a relative few on the planet. But that was back when CSS was a nascent technology. Now it’s bigger, more complicated, and commonplace. And the CSS minutia that was in my brain has been evicted by other minutia. Probably mostly C++.

The style sheets for endoframe.com were written back when I could sling CSS with the best of them. They’re somewhat elaborate. They’re all based on a suite of style sheets that are designed to normalize rendering of HTML 4.0. The problem is, I’ve forgotten a lot about how they work and what they do. But in the persistent absence of any pressing desire to sling a lot more CSS, I guess I’ll just be relearning this from time to time as stuff breaks. So let me not touch this again for a while.

But now that the appearance of this page is less embarassing, I’ll hopefully be more inclined to update it.