Senior Project Week 10

Richard Banister
CSC 4790 Senior Projects
Work Log

Week 10: 3 November - 9 November, 2008

Monday

• More suffering over labels in subtitles. Restructured interactive object inheritence. Sizing of subtitle links. See development blog. Japanese text. 4h

• Started looking at linking to Jim Breen's Japanese dictionary. AJAX and XMLHttpRequest. 0.75h

Tuesday

• Brainstorming about linking to Japanese dictionaries online, displaying web pages in pop-up windows in SWF. Solid ideas for this, perhaps. 0.5h

Wednesday

• Subtitles in different languages; show/hide subtitles with javascript; ability to switch between languages through javascript. Subtitle code is real messy, and is begging to be fixed through some fundamental architectural change, but no time for that now. 4h

• Use XMLHttpRequest to load pages into content area, without reloading page. Really kind of awesome. However, this does not work for pages outside of the domain, as it is a client-side script and it's a security problem to be loading stuff up from different domains. BUT, it's okay to do it on the server - so I found a way to have PHP open a socket to another site and grab the data as a proxy. This info could then be fed into an XMLHttpRequest. Also kind of awesome. Got this working on a POST request to Jim Breen's JDIC, grabbing information for an individual kanji. Parsing and formatting this information will come next. 2.5h

• It strikes me that Jim Breen might want to know about me pulling information from his site. He has made some backdoor entry methods available, but I'm using one that he has not published.

Saturday

• Ability to specify colors in subtitles. Hierarchy for this (a white subtitle group, with some words highlighted with red, for example). Fixed a bug with the relative seek control. Subtitles w/o links behave as simple labels. Encoded new videos and created subtitles for same. Reencoded for better performance with video controls; it helps to specify more key frames in encoding (although this increases file size). Less frames means more inaccurate seeks. More frames means more download time. But I'm not that concerned with that at the moment. 3h

• Needs: specify font, font effects (eg. drop shadows, outlines, etc.) for subtitles. Something to make them pop out more. Ability to center subtitles. The inheritence scheme makes this a little difficult at this point. Will need to figure out a clever way. Most importantly, need an editor tool to do all the subtitle and region creation for me. Much too difficult and time-consuming to do it by hand (although it definitely makes obvious the flaws in the software).

Sunday

• Tried to upload software to my project site, but was thwarted. Site must have been down. Will retry on Monday. 0.25h

Total

Total work time: 15 hours


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