Yes, I’ve done some decorating around here, well, actually I got the interior designers in as I didn’t write this theme. I have retired my own custom theme as I felt it wasn’t making the most of the features that Wordpress has to offer such as widgets and plugins.

This Carrington Framework Overview gives you an idea of some of the details that can go into making the best theme possible and right now I just don’t have the time to dedicate to my own theme to do it right. Instead, I have found myself a new theme and done some customization on it, and no doubt it will be tweaked in the days and weeks to come.

I’ve recently changed hosting providers which so far has been a royal pain in the backside. My old provider EasyCGI were fine when I started a year ago. Last fall, they underwent some changes in their platform and since then, their service has been patchy. I’m not alone this opinion as plenty of their users are miffed over the lack of quality since their platform shift.

From experience, their customer service is also pretty bad. After their switch, I ended up with another of their customers databases in my account. I could actually go into phpAdmin in my control panel, change the content of their database, go to their web site and see the change live. Obviously, I didn’t do anything harmful, I was just testing their screw up and the site was old, and there hadn’t been a post on the forum for years.

More to the point, my database was missing and had somehow not found its way into my account. I messaged their tech support and they claimed that I hadn’t set my security password hint and I was probably hacked. Of course, obviously someone hacked into my account, removed my database and put their database in it’s place for me to fiddle with, all on the same weekend that my hosting moved everything around </sarcasm>. I had half a mind to call their bluff and ask them if I should email the feds about the matter but decided not to. I then wondered if someone less clued in than myself had found themselves in possession of my database and been told the same thing by EasyCgi and decided to take the issue up with the feds. I awaited the no-knock raid at any moment charged with forcing my nerdy ill-thought-out opinions onto the owner of KnittingCollectors.com.

Anyway, of the couple of times I had to deal with them, they were a bit pointless, and my site performance has been deteriorating since September last year and getting worse. So, since my contract was up next month, I decided to go shop around which is when my problems really started which I’ll discuss in part 2.

Wow, makes you feel old when the people that you grew up on start making headlines this way. He wrote, directed and produced a number of movies that define my generation by never forgetting his adolescent experiences that are common to all of us and putting them on celluloid. He set many of his movies where he grew up in Illinois which I think helps capture the spirit of his teen years where he experienced them.

FYI, I just updated my about page with my (mostly antique computing related) biography. You can find it here </shameless promotion>

Download Here

I have finally found the time to finally release my library for creating procedural textures called JTexGen under the LGPL license. It is a framework for rendering and viewing procedural textures which you can then use as images, backgrounds and textures for modelling. Because the textures are procedural, you can ramp up the resolution of the image to get increased detail without getting blocky artifacts.

The source code for the above images is included in the distribution and also discussed in the reference documentation. These images are reproduced untouched after being generated using a few lines of Java code.

The distribution contains the usuals (source, a jar, javadocs can be built in maven) and also a reference manual in pdf and html format. The reference manual describes what procedural textures are and how to use the framework to create them. The library itself is thread safe, and uses multiple threads to render the images.

The files can be downloaded from Project Kenai, and contains nearly 100 different textures and signals you can use.

In the fifth part of this four part series, I decided to give a non-conversational framework a try and implemented the same application with Wicket which is a semi-stateless framework.

(update : If you have already read the previous version only chapter 5 is new and has the Wicket example and final comparison.)

Enjoy,

HTML
Single Page HTML
PDF

Looks awesome,