I am stretched thin, of course, as always. I am still posting chapters of a novel about a missionary movement to spread the use of social technology in third world countries, at http://SocialTechMissionaryOrganization.SocialTechnology.ca/ and (less often) chapters of a sequel to Social Tech High called Connected College at http://ConnectedCollege.SocialTechnology.ca/ — and even chapters of a novel about world languages at http://Languages.SocialTechnology.ca/. That’s social technology too, though most people think a world-wide second language is unlikely — people who construct languages are often considered a few morphemes short of a sentence.
All this interferes with programming, though I am making some progress. I am not experienced with animations, and have not done much graphics, either, but I can and will. I have learned that PIL, the Python Imaging Library has some disadvantages, such as a reluctance to antialias lines. You can fake it by running the image through a smoothing filter, but that has side effects. Better is aggdraw, but there is a catch: it is only available under Linux. I use Windows, though I have some Linux experience. For those in my situation, having a Windows machine that I don’t want to screw around with, you might check out wubi. You can get it from http://wubi-installer.org/. It installs a complete Ubuntu Linux in a large Windows file, so you don’t have to repartition your hard drive and risk some catastrophe or other. It works fine under Windows 7 (and earlier versions) and is smart enough to install either the 32 or 64 bit version depending on your machine.
Anyway, I’ll use aggdraw with Python on this nice Linux system, and see what I can do. Unless, of course, some kind person accepts my offer to do illustrations and animations for me, in exchange for ad revenue. See http://socialtechnology.ca/wordpress/make-pretty-get-revenue/ — I’d much rather someone else do it, but I can do it myself if I have to.
By the way, using StumbleUpon in my spare time, such as when eating lunch, I notice that I tend to ignore websites without content that is immediately eye-catching and informative. This tells me a lot about what my own websites should look like. I highly recommend this to other website owners. Stumble for a while and see what catches your eye, then look over your own site and see if it would catch your own attention if it wasn’t yours. If you are not already a user, go to http://www.StumbleUpon.com/ and sign up, I recommend it. — dpw
