This post is a mashup of a few things I have been tinkering with over the last week that I think is fun to share. So if it seems I have been unfocused or whatever, this is pretty much why.
The first project I started doing for fun was working on canvas. This was different then some canvas stuff I have done in the past, The interesting people at nihilogic did a sepia filter using canvas. I wondered if it was possible to do filter so you can see an image with a red-green colour blindness. After some substandard research, I finally managed to do it. Though the quality is poor because it tends to be inaccurate. YMMV.
I wondered if you can do something like this for an entire webpage. So I moved the Javascript to an extension so I can use canvas’ drawWindow() method and take a picture of the entire website. Though I noticed that doing this on large image was computationally expensive and locking up the UI for an unreasonable amount of time.
I then tried to move all the calculations out of the main thread into a DOM worker thread. It was an interesting experience. I noticed though that while the main thread (and therefore, the UI) did not lock up, it was still sluggish and impractical to use. So I decided not to develop the extension further.
You can see the full demo here.
I then thought about what this would look like on other browsers. I didn’t expect anything requiring DOM worker threads to work on Safari/Opera. And sure enough, it didn’t. But I found out that DOM worker threads was based off of Google gears! So I looked into that and made a separate webpage that uses gears. Unfortunately, I found out that my efforts were largely wasted, as it only increased support to Firefox 2 and Mac Safari (Gears isn’t compatible with Windows Safari or Opera, and IE doesn’t have canvas support).
Either way, I made the Gears version available here.
Going away from canvas, I spent most of another day working on Google Maps API. The problem I was trying to solve was to see if I can highlight a 1 square kilometre radius from a pinpoint. This was difficult, as points on a map had a latitude, longitude co-ordinate, and I had to blindly figure out how much to reposition for a half-kilometre. Finding the distance between two points was also helpful, but hard getting a good formula for.
Of course, I am highlighting all the accomplishments and not mentioning the frustrating obstacles. There were several lessons learn on the way. Including a lot about incompatibility and how much I still don’t know how to do the kind of algorithmic research that you sometimes need. I’m starting to wonder if the BSD course taught me more than just to be a code monkey with a business touch, and made me wonder whether the theoretical/mathematical part will ever stop me doing something because “I just won’t get it”. Though, at the same time, I wasn’t willing to put the time and effort of research into pet projects. So this will probably be a problem for almost everyone, and not just me (honestly, mapping out longitude and latitude to distance is not something you learn anywhere).