Renegade Folk Hero

Fanime went well. Turning on subs for the major songs in ReDeath made the typically rowdy crowd experience even more fun (a “songs only” sub track may be a worthy additon). A show of hands before the screening revealed that about 2/3rds of them had never seen it before (really?), but I’d say it was one of the most energetic screenings I’ve witnessed. Having about 15 minutes to kill afterwards, as a lark I played selected scenes with ‘Engrish’ subs turned on (I fed the sub script line-by-line into Babelfish, going from English to Chinese and back). Kelvin told me that a girl sitting near him commented, “I didn’t think it could get any funnier!” Not a bad payoff for a couple hours of repetitive cutting and pasting. I’m not sure if I’ll do Engrish subs for FBBB and Nesca (ReDeath’s cultishness makes it a little more appropriate), but I am a little more inclined than I was previously. Nesca v1.6 screened to a good response, I like the little pacing trims I made, have one more I might try, and then the completion of the full climax should make 1.7 the final revision. We also screened the FBBB director’s cut at our panel and I’m quite happy with it. It flows much better now, IMHO. I’ve made one more trim since then, and only a little tweaking of the audio mix is all that’s left to be done.

Our panel. Photo from http://www.usagichan.com/

Some big news for Sokodei production in general is that I’ve purchased a new computer to replace to old Pentium III I’d been using since 1999. Editing and DVD authoring will be much faster and more convenient and hopefully will supply the inspiration I need to get off my ass and make something, dammit! However, since I can’t port over my old capture card without finding software that is long out-of-print, I’ll be using my old comp a little longer to finish the FBBB and Nesca DVDs. I’m aiming for the end of July to be totally moved over to the new system, and the end of August to have ReDeath, FBBB and Nesca finalized on disc.

So, apparently my HTTP Host is going through a major systems transition. Yesterday there was some major PHP wonkness leading to my non-functional site. My site was down longer than the time needed to fix it because I didn’t get around to it until now. Anyhow, crossed fingers, I hope things go more smoothly for the rest of the transition. Should be over in a week or so (I hope).

I just realized I have my DVI->VGA converter in my bag. And, since I got this cable coming out of the KVM going nowhere, I thought I might just plug in and expand my MBP’s screen real estate

So, I got this hair-brained idea yesterday on how to fix one of the bugs in Super Faviconic…
Basically the problem was this:
When Super Faviconic is running, Safari(WebKit) can be downloading new favicons. However, Safari(WebKit) does not immediately write the favicons to disk. Instead it caches the favicons in memory and by some retain count mojo (I’m not really sure how it works) it eventually syncs it’s in-memory DB with the on-disk File DB. So, when surfing in Safari and browsing the icon cache in SuperFaviconic, there was always a delay between when a new site favicon was downloaded and when it was synched into the File DB for Super Faviconic to read in.

Anyhow, my hair-brained idea to fix this bug turned out to be a totally egregious hack. And it goes something a little like this…
Part a) Build a WebKit Cocoa plugin that responds to new icons being downloaded.
Part b) said plugin will then notify Super Faviconic of the impending database change via Cocoa distributed notifications. (I know, genius/insanity at it’s best).
Part c) Super Faviconic readies its internal icon cache for an impending change.
Part d) said plugin then forces WebKit to synchronize it’s in memory DB to disk. (by some really unkosher private variable access, yuk).
Part e) Now that the new icons have been written to disk, Super Faviconic then pulls the new icon index into memory and re-displays the browsing tables based on the new notification.

…in five easy steps parts. Except, now of course, I have the small requirement of the user having to install the plugin if they want live Favicon DB browsing. Which, I guess I can explain easily enough (I think it’s a good feature). Also, I now have to write some code to get Super Faviconic to both recognize that Safari has been launched (easy) and recognize whether or not said plugin has been installed. Which, shouldn’t be all that bad.

But to the point of the matter: It’s now 6am. Furthermore, my (very lovely) girlfriend has been asleep in bed with no one to cuddle with. I know I’m very definitely going to get the shit end of the stick for this offense. Now, even though I’m in the dog house for now, I’ll still take the time to realize now that I truly enjoy this type of reckless code hacking. This is the first time in a long while that I’ve sit down and wrote some righteous Cocoa code. You may not understand what’s so great about what I’ve built. But I look upon it and it is good. Trust me on that.

With some recent activity on my forums I got an itch to dive back into the Super Faviconic source code. So today I ironed out some bugs and updated the code for intel. I’m not sure when I’ll release a beta but hope to eventually.