PolyPixie / Blog: Recent posts

Shocker, I know. As I mentioned last time, I was writing my own database back end; exploring the genius wanderings of complex code. I was extremely proud of the code I had written. It was fast, compact, it sipped resources through a coffee stirrer, and was extremely versatile and easy to use; or so I thought. I was learning and writing things I had never attempted before. That was until I discovered the devastating news that, no matter how smart you pride yourself on being, there are people in this world that are so ungodly smart it's astounding. And I'm not talking about some triple PhD nuclear physicist or something; I mean average people that you sit next to on a bus or pass on the street without even a second thought that they exist. And yet, their intelligence, creativity, and gobstopping ingenuity sits, unassumingly, below the surface, waiting for the simple opportunity to do what they love.... read more

As you have probably already noticed, I didn't release the alpha in a week. :-) I had intended to just spit out a simple little thing to do a pretty basic task, but the more code I wrote, the more I wanted to add and the more potential I saw in this small, little thing. Consider it a character flaw if you wish, but I have a very hard time bringing myself to release a program that is incomplete, and like it or not, to me, programming is like a slot machine: "Just one more feature." "Oh, let's add this!" "Ooh! That would look really cool!" "Ooh that would be awesome, let's write it from scratch." And since it appears that no one is even watching this project anyway, I have decided to indulge myself: taking breaks whenever I feel like it and writing whatever cool chunk of code catches my fancy. For example, A week or 2 ago, I finished writing an entire Automatic Serialization System...(wait a minute. Yep, my mind just did that) Anyway, I finished writing that (all 3,000 lines of it; complete with built-in version recognition, fully automated testing, and documentation) and then took a break for a week or two. I'm now about to write the element organization, sorting, and retrieval, the indexing managers and indexes themselves, as well as the underlying File System interfaces, to turn it into a simple but fully functioning Object Oriented, Generic File-System/Database (no SQL support however). I'm actually rather proud of its performance and extremely small footprint given it's functionality.
...But anyway, you see my point.... read more

I got distracted last week, and didn't get much work done. I'm back to work today. Here's the status of everything:

UI [3% complete]
Login UI [100% complete]
Tumblr interface code [~100% complete (but untested)]
General system code [5% complete]

-Chris

Summary: Pages requiring authentication (Private Tumblr feeds and FetLife) will be in final release, but may not make it into the first few releases.

Security code put on hold. Current authentication code would be too inefficient for thousands of consecutive requests (currently it must re-authenticate [log in] for every request [i.e. for every image]). On hold, pending an efficient means of maintaining the session.... read more

Security Code [~40% complete] (for determining and handling authentication requirements)
UI Code [~2% complete]
Tumblr Code [~1% complete]

I decided to write this program because downloaders for these websites were either expensive, feature-scarce to the point of being unusable, or completely nonexistent.

I created this project on Jan. 15, 2013 @ ~11:00 AM and as of this moment I have only sketched out a basic design of the GUI and written about 65 lines of code (including curly brace lines, imports, and blank lines); so, basically nothing. However, I write code pretty fast, so check back over the next couple days or so (maybe a week) for updates. I hope to have the first alpha out by the end of the week. I'm still debating writing this in Java or writing it in C++ with a Java GUI.... read more