Today peter pointed me at SugarTracker

• I can’t figure out how to do progressive (e.g. line-by-line) rendering to give the user feedback.

I figured this would be pretty easy with the help of setTimeout() and some more global state, so I hacked it together here. Instead of the line by line rendering I implemented a progressive jpg style interlaced rendering, with multiple passes of smaller and smaller pixels. As you can see in the demo, you can mouse over and click while it’s in the middle of rendering, and it’ll start the new render. No more waiting.

One thing he’s doing (that he notes is quite heavyweight) is using rectangles. To lessen the hit, he uses 1 rectangle for many contiguous pixels of the same color on the same line. I’d imagine using an InkPresenter and adding stylus points might be a less heavyweight approach (at least I think it will be in the case of moonlight.)

update: realized how to make mouse events faster - specify IsHitTestVisible=”false” on all the rectangles.  That way the event system doesn’t have to worry about generating enter/leave events for each scan line (and for many individual pixels on those scanlines).  And speaking of scan lines, add an translucent red indicator line that shows the next line to be drawn.  Add more precision (down to pixel_size == 1), and when we’re finished rendering, display how many rectangle children of the main canvas there are (for the first render there are over 13000.  that’s a lot of children.  moonlight seems to handle it ok too

I took benadryl last night and again this morning, and today the rash is gone.  By “gone”, I mean my skin no longer has flesh colored and red splotches.  Instead it’s uniformly red, although a lighter shade than last night.  It blanches when pressed, which is good (the redness isn’t caused by blood leaking into the skin), but it’s still hot to the touch and raises very quickly and angrily when scratched.

It’s way too long after the treatment for it to have something to do with a reaction to the animal proteins from the infusions (the cause of the previous two skin reactions), so at this point I’m guessing - and the doctors also seem to guess this, since they’ve told me to stop taking them - that it’s a side effect of the two prophylactic meds they have me on, both of which have this sort of thing listed as a possible side effect.  Strange to develop it now, though, as I’ve been on them since I left the hospital back in December.

So, back to the doc I go later today.

Ate a little under 200g CHO over the course of the ride, with no insulin injected. My ratio today is pretty stupid: around 1U/47g CHO.

Anyway, I don’t think I need any further tests. Time to start riding outdoors again.

About an hour and a half later I was feeling kinda funky so I checked again.  58.

So, I ate a glucose tab and a couple more bowls of cereal.  And now, 20 minutes later as my blood sugar climbs out of the toilet (it’s at 71 now) I feel like utter crap.  Palms are sweaty and fingers are shaking bad enough that it’s hard to type.  Heart is racing, balance is shot, and I can’t focus on anything.

It’s weird.  at 70 (or even 80) are start feeling shaky and get sweaty palms.  At 58 I feel fine.  I feel kinda spacey, sure, but I can push through it if I’m focusing on something (like cleaning the house).  If I hadn’t had a momentary pause to think of what to clean next, I wouldn’t have noticed how weird I felt.

I bet at 40 I’d feel fantastic.  I wonder if it’s an asymptotic approach to peace, getting closer and closer until you finally kick off.  Scary.

On to the goods.

Silverlight 1.0 has no built-in text input support, so the conventional wisdom says “use windowless mode, and use an overlayed html form element to allow input.” Many sites use this, such as the weatherwidget:

The vista simulator (which is a pretty crazy body of code. *Tons* of javascript, and an architecture that leads me to believe it wasn’t originally intended for silverlight) uses windowless mode for another reason. It doesn’t hook up events handlers to any of the xaml elements. Instead, it adds JS event handlers to the <object> tag that surrounds the plugin. Since there are no event handlers in the plugin, we return FALSE to signal we didn’t handle the event, which bubbles up the dom hierarchy to the object.

You need svn HEAD of the moonlight code for this to work, and you also need to run it against a build of firefox3.  Unfortunately, given our use of unfrozen apis for dealing with the dom element reflection into managed code, you’ll more than likely run up against undefined C++ symbols for pages that do that sort of thing.  But there are a number of sites which don’t.  So give it a try

Also, it’s insanely insanely strong. The sort of caffeinated feeling that makes you think that if you *just* knew kung fu, you could kick everyone’s ass in a 2 block radius.

Or, the sort of caffeinated feeling that produces hacks like this:

The youtube size probably isn’t the best for viewing this — try this link for a larger version where you can actually see what’s going on. One thing that still needs fixing is the “popping” of the opacity up to 1 when then surface comes into focus. That and the code doesn’t use an f-stop-like metric now. I want another demo where the focus is on the center surface and the f-stop changes, bringing surfaces in front and behind the focused one closer to focus.

Hopefully I can figure out a way to stick this in moonlight. Maybe a canvas subclass.

Having “focused” mean “in focus” would be a pretty cool UI, and not just in moonlight.

Next week is the second Novell Hack Week, so I’m skipping out on all Moonlight/Mono related responsibilities, and will be scratching an itch I’ve had for a while now.  Care to guess what it is?

So many fun things to work on.  So little time.

So I’m officially normal now (at least in one small way).

This whole thing is exciting and frustrating at the same time.  It’s like I’m relearning everything.