Oh man this took a long time. I wrote back when I started this endeavour that I thought it'd take just a month of my spare time to complete. As usual, my estimate was way too optimistic, and 2-and-a-half months later (a month-and-a-half over-time (and arguably over-budget)), here we are.

There wasn't any single piece of work that caused me to take so long. I simply wanted to do a lot of things, too many things, all at once. Given that it's been 3 years since my last major site update, I initially started with just wanting to stay up-to-date - updating a lot of my server software (most of it is a major release behind), getting off JSPs and use a real template framework for creating pages, and taking advantage of HTML5 and CSS3. However, in implementing each of those goals, they led to even more things to do.
eg: while updating software, I also went and updated many of the libraries and frameworks my site is built on. A few of them have had major changes done to them (requiring a bit of work on my part to integrate it with my site again), others had simply ceased to exist (leaving me to choose whether to stick with an old version, or find a replacement that was still active).

It was a similar story with moving to use HTML5 and CSS3. HTML5 was mostly an educational thing - learning about the new tags and how to properly use them - whereas my CSS troubles were mostly about trying to get a CSS framework, LessCSS, to run on the server (it's normally run as JavaScript on the user's browser, but the way I was using it, it felt 'right' that I get it to go on the server). I think I'll write another blog post about this in future, since much of what I learned with this latest redesign was from the experiences of other web designers/developers on their personal blogs. It's about time I started posting some of the programming stuff I learned anyway.

A responsive website

Apart from the change in layout, colour, and typography (thank you Google Web Fonts), the only other thing really worth mentioning is that my website is now a responsive website. What this means is that the layout will change/reformat/adjust itself to the size of your screen, which is especially useful for those of you reading this on a mobile device.

I think this was the main driving force behind my redesign. I've already written about how I thought the old layout didn't look ideal on the iPad, then about how I cringed when I viewed my site on my brother's iPhone, to the point that it really made me understand how terrible the mobile web browsing experience really is. So much so that it made me go and do something about it.

If you're viewing this site on a large screen, then one way you can see how this site adapts to different screen sizes is to change the width of your browser window. If you can't be bothered doing that, here are some screenshots of my site at varying widths:

The only thing I haven't really figured out to further enhance the mobile browsing experience, is how to serve smaller images for smaller screen devices (and lower bandwidth connections). The thing is, nobody has really figured this out, and it's still being actively worked-on and debated. The 'responsive images' community have even enlisted the aid of a few browser developers to help things along and, while the solutions they have on offer so far are really impressive, there still isn't any universally accepted or cross-browser solution. In the meantime, I'm still serving the 'normal-sized' images, having them scale down to smaller screen widths, and sucking-up your bandwidth in the process.

As someone who is also on a rather limited 3G data plan where every KB is precious, this really sucks.

Although I've allowed the site to 'respond' to various screen sizes, I haven't had the luxury of testing across as many devices as I'd like. I was able to test across the usual selection of desktop browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer 7/8/9) on a large desktop screen, but for mobile devices I didn't have that many to choose from. There was my iPad and my brother's iPhone (Safari @ 1024px, 768px, 480px and 360px (and the iPhone may have that Retina display thing going for it, but it uses 4 'real' pixels for every 'virtual' pixel)), and two Android 2.x phones my parents have (stock Android browser @ 480px, 320px, and 240px).

Even with 4 mobile devices, I didn't have the opportunity to test other mobile browsers on Android (although from what I've heard, mobile Opera and Firefox are pretty much on-par with their desktop counterparts), nor did I have a chance to try Mobile Internet Explorer on a Windows phone.

Regardless, it felt pretty cool going home to my family's place one weekend, gathering all our mobile devices, and then testing everything on real devices - it really made me appreciate the challenge of creating a site that still delivered a good mobile experience when you have to squeeze everything down into a display the size of your fist.

Updated wallpapers

Last year I updated a handful of my space wallpapers for widescreen resolutions (Now in 16:10 - Part 1, Part 2). Last month I updated those same ones for 1280x1024, then updated the rest of the wallpapers for both widescreen and 1280x1024:

New/Old stories

As well as the First Dance short story I shared with you over February/March, I've also added another 2 stories (1 old, 1 new-ish) to the Writing section. These are from some long comments I made on friends' Facebook photos, initially as a bit of fun, which became a tad popular with other people (though not always with the recipient):

• Unimpressed face (Frances' photo, January 2012)
• A world of their own (John's and Alexey's photo, April 2010)

More to come

I think that's pretty much it. The only other things that are left to do aren't visible, or only really affect me: some CSS quirks I'm still trying to figure out, and maybe another responsive layout change to better take advantage of widescreen monitors. That, and the usual bug fixes I expect to do after a big piece of work such as this.

Either way, it feels good to finally get this thing out of the way. The large fraction of my year's spare time spent towards this project has made me feel like a recluse, shutting myself up in my apartment, toiling away endlessly working on this website... it'll be good to move on to other hobbies, get out of the building, and see some sunlight for a change.

Further to part 1, I've updated another wallpaper for my screen and other 16:10 resolutions:

Looking back at the other pictures, this may be the last one I update - I'm a bit out of ideas of what to do for the others, and it feels like my creative flair (for digital images) has been exhausted just by working on this and the other 3 images.

It's just a bit like that with me though - I go through phases where I end-up concentrating on one of my hobbies at the detriment to all the others. At the beginning of the year, I was spending all of my spare time working on a novel-length story. I got maybe half-way with that before I switched to something else.

Right now the main-focus hobby is the piano playing, and I would've had another piano video up on YouTube by now, but I lent my camera to my brother to help him with some actual paid work (which I think trumps doing a YouTube video anyway, so I'm cool with that). So I hope to get some videos (2, maybe 3) out in the next few weeks.

Update: As requested, I've added 1440x900 versions. I really shouldn't have forgotten about that resolution - it's what my work laptop runs at.

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I got a new 16:10 widescreen monitor over the weekend, and wow at all the extra pixels! :D

I used to have a 17" LCD monitor that dates back to early 2005 and stuck with through all these years and other computer upgrades, until just a few days ago. The thing came with 1 stuck pixel which was easy enough to ignore since it was on the side, and in the last year it had been showing signs of aging. I mean, LCD technology isn't supposed to suffer from burn-in right? Well, this monitor started to, and thankfully a temporary version of it. To see it in action I just had to leave a maximized Firefox window open for too long, and bam! My bookmarks toolbar is now a part of the screen when I close Firefox. (The burn-in would go away after a few minutes of displaying something, anything, else.)

So at 1680x1050, the extra screen real estate is great when working with pretty much any software, particularly the creative stuff: Adobe Audition for sound editing, Adobe Premiere for video editing, Corel PaintShop Photo Pro for image editing, etc. Hell, even using my programming IDE, Eclipse, is better now that I can put those extra views/panels to the side of the code instead of obscuring it.

The only annoyance is that all those wallpapers I'd collected over the years, made for the 1280x1024 resolution, suck at 1680x1050. So once I was done admiring how games and other programs looked on the new monitor, I went through my wallpaper collection and did a massive cull - either going back to the original artist hoping for a widescreen version, or just deleting them.

My own space wallpapers (from 2005-2008... I really need to get back into those), looked pretty bad too, so I took some time to update them for my new screen. Here's what I've managed to do so far:

Apart from including extra elements from the original images to make use of the extra width, I've also done away with prominent titles or other obtrusive screen elements (eg: the HUD-like parts that were present in older versions of the last one). The title has now been relegated to the lower-right corner along with my name and website (it used to show my e-mail address, which has changed since these wallpapers first came out).

I'll have to update the actual pages in the Artwork section, and may have to update the originals as well. Hmm... I think I'll just work on getting more up-to-date 16:10 versions of these wallpapers first. Just the ones I like the best anyway - some of them have since fallen out of favour with me.

And on the back of the last post, I have extended the RSS capabilities to the artwork page as well. Not only that, but I've incorporated Media RSS into so that it can be used with flashy apps like the Firefox plugin CoolIris.

With CoolIris, you can now browse my gallery in sweet 3D:

Pretty eh?

And now, for the writing section.

Just when I thought I was getting too old for presents, I bought a new scanner and suddenly it feels like Christmas has come early! :D OK, so technically it's not a present as I bought and chose it myself, for myself, but the result is the same: I have a new scanner!

If you must know the exact model, it's a Canon CanoScan LiDE 600F. It's a huge step up from the old one, which was also a Canon, but was a relic from the pre-Internet era: a parallel port scanner. Actually, I'd probably still be using that old scanner if it wasn't for the fact that I no longer have access to a computer with a parallel port, and that it doesn't play well with a USB-to-parallel adapter.

So what made me buy it? Well, I've been drawing again in an effort to re-train myself for a big drawing project I'm aiming to do, and I had just finished a sketch that I was relatively proud of. My first thoughts were along the lines of "Ooo, gotta scan and store this one", which after some more thinking soon became "Crap, I can't use the scanner anymore".

Always amazing what necessity makes us do :)

So I went on a bit of a scanning spree and scanned several drawings new and old.

Not my best work, but... new scanner!

Almost 7 months since I did anything artsy worth putting up on this site.

• Wallpapers - Six Feet Under The Stars

There; an end to that hiatus, and the beginning of another one.

A new piece of space art in the wallpapers section, and my entry to another competition on deviantArt:

• Wallpapers - Phaethon's Legacy

In researching some of the background behind that image, I came across the Live Journal site of the author of the books from which I drew a bit of inspiration. I expected a couple of things while the page was loading, but what I didn't expect was for his posts to make me laugh. Particularly, this reply to a comment on his 'classification' of what makes sci-fi a sci-fi:

Normally, it would count, except that you only used one exclamation point, and did not use all caps for any word; looking carefully, I do not see anywhere that you say you "pwned" me for my n00b3i ski1z -- which would have meant, by the rules of the Internet, that you made your point and won your argument.

Instead you use evidence to fit a definition, submit what amounts to a reasoned proof to prove your point, and attempt to appeal to reason. This is not the way of the Internet. Get with the Information Age! The Age of Reason is over!

Give it a read. Like me, you might actually learn something, like the magic link between Jennifer Connelly and space travel :)

Recently created a new picture, on which I've been experimenting with a couple of new techniques. I also used it as an excuse to change the original splash image for my Red Horizon project.

• Coloured - Red Horizon

OK, I only used a small corner of the entire image. That's where all the interesting stuff is anyway.

After a long nothing-to-report period, I've finally got a new space wallpaper to show for it. It's not trying to be a complicated one like previous wallpapers, and it's more of another shot at using Terragen than anything else. So it's simplicity just means that there's less of a chance of me to screw it up :)

• Wallpapers - A Tear In The Night Sky

Aside from that, development on Red Horizon has been pretty slow these passed months. Just recently, I've been helping one of the JOAL (Java bindings for OpenAL) developers try to figure-out an issue in the framework, which was preventing Java programmers from using OpenAL's EFX extensions (think advanced mixing and effects for OpenAL). The results of which have been positive, and I hope my assistance can help other Java programmers be able to use this feature in the future.

There was also C&C3, which kept me away from making updates to Red Horizon. Nothing like a good sidetrack to keep you going eh?

Well it didn't take long for me to use the sketch mentioned in my previous post:

• Wallpapers - Shelter From The Storm

With the Christmas season approaching, I'm hoping to have more time for things like these. I'm gonna have a nice 2-week break over the Christmas / New Year period; plenty of time to do whatever the hell I want :)

Just some minor updates to the last post. First of all, one new sketch to the Artwork section:

• Sketches - Apparition

Secondly, I've added 2 semi-old development screenshots of Red Horizon. The first has the program simply displaying the Red Alert title screen, the second shows it drawing the map tiles of Red Alert's first Allied mission. Note that the map is drawn in 800x500 resolution, instead of the older 640x400.

Another small update, but this time on the state of Red Horizon. The small subsection dedicated to this project is pretty much done, but will only be a (very long lived) temporary home. It really is a mess, especially the progress section. For something of this magnitude, I should create a whole new look-and-feel subsite using that 1 subdomain I get with my hosting plan :P

As for progress on the program, I've got pretty much everything done EXCEPT gameplay! So it installs, starts, shows some options, but when you hit play... nothing happens! When you hit the close button of that 'nothing happens' phase, it shuts-down, hopefully taking with it all of the resources that it took. I'm pretty confident that it does, but I should write some small aspect profiler to verify that.

In other news, my entry for the art competition didn't receive a pedestal position, so I guess that's that :(

Very small update: made a few 1440x900 (16:10 ratio) versions of my wallpapers for a friend of recently bought an Apple MacBook. It's a cool little thing with a cool little widescreen monitor.

Time to cross-off one of the items on my new to-do list: my entry for the unknown-prints art competition is done:

• Wallpapers - In The Embers Of Dying Stars

A print version is in the works, and when that's done, both will be submitted to my deviantArt gallery, store, and the art competition. I hope you like it. Heck, I hope whoever is judging the competition likes it!

Not long after my previous picture, I've finally had a change to give Terragen a go. Here's the result:

• Coloured - Boundaries Of Heaven 2.0

In the future I'll probably do a very polished version of this picture (v3.0 anybody?) once I get my head around how to work this Terragen thing properly.

With PlanetCNC's recent facelift, the Red Alert Tech Center is currently in a little transitional phase with regards to hosting. Even the link I used in the last news post to the RATC is already old! So at the moment, the only place serving Campaign Ultraq 2.0b, is, err, right here.

I've also got a new space picture to add to my gallery. I get the feeling that it's not as 'in-your-face spectacular' as the other ones, but I'll still put it up anyway:

• Wallpapers - Safety In Light

I'll upload this picture to my deviantArt gallery sometime soon, and I'll upload a print version of another of my earlier pictures at around the same time.

The small bug found in my campaign (a crash when trying to select mission 10 in part 1) is now incorporated into the downloads for my campaign. Well, not all downloads. Only the one available from this site is up to date; I've just asked the guys at RATC to update their copy, and I've asked PlanetCNC if I can update the file that's still in their queue. Yeah, it's been several months since I submitted it now, lol. I'll update this news post when each of the sites have updated their copies.

As for my space pictures, I've finally opened a prints account with deviantArt, and have had my first picture, Sacrifices, accepted for sale! It's currently available in 12x9 inch and 24x18 inch sizes. But because it was my first one, it's not of the same 'original' quality as my later works, and so isn't available at the largest size of 40x30 inch. If you're at all interested, go check it out!

If you're reading this, then your DNS has been updated and now points to my latest host for my website :)

After the debacle with my previous host and their JSP hosting issues (their short answer about whether I can get JSP hosting fixed: NO!), I've finally moved on to a host that can supply those services. But what does that mean for you? Probably nothing at all :P

This whole migration to JSPs was both a learning experience, and to make maintaining my website much easier for me. But that doesn't mean you've gained nothing out of it. Firstly, the space wallpapers are now available at maximum JPG quality (the ones via the links to the various resolutions, not the display image). Secondly, I've been working on adding a few walkthroughs for some of the more difficult missions in my campaign. If you go to the Campaign - Missions page, you can now find that some of those missions names have become links! Give 'em a click, you know you want to ;)

(I've used 3 smileys in this news post alone; I must be in a good mood)

And a very belated happy New Year's day to you all.

I've been looking into putting my space wallpapers up on deviantArt prints so that I can maybe make a dollar or two from doing something I enjoy. Sorta like work, except that it's the work you want, the work you like. I've received a few comments here and there encouraging me to do so, hence my slight interests in it. If only I could find-out if my work is of a quality (in terms of image size for printing) high enough for the sizes of prints I want to make available, before putting forward the printing subscription fee. So before making any hasty moves, I'll ask around for some more opinions before committing to anything.

Speaking of space wallpapers, I have another one to share:

• Wallpapers - From the Ashes

This one was intended from the beginning to be a potential print: a large portrait-oriented wall-scroll/poster. I've made it into a wallpaper as well, but because of the orientation, it doesn't really fill the screen like the previous ones. Still, don't let that stop you from checking it out.

Looks like I'll have to wait a bit for my hosts to fix their Tomcat/JSPs problem. In all honesty, I didn't expect instant results 'cause it is Christmas; everyone is entitled to their holiday. But after that, then I go medieval on them ;) So I'll have to maintain ye olde HTML files for just a little bit longer. Either way, welcome to the new home for my website. To celebrate, I've got another space wallpaper to share with y'all:

• Wallpapers - The Path Of Angels

OK, so I didn't make this wallpaper to celebrate the move to my new domain, it just happened to be finished now. Once again, it was inspired by very strong elements in my life. But worry not, the theme isn't sad or emo this time.

I've also got myself a deviantArt account. To visit it, you can click on the link to the right under the 'More of me' header. Alternatively, you can type ultraq.deviantart.com into your browser.

I've just been re-arranging some content on this site as the stuff for me to watch over just becomes more numerous. The most noticeable change is the assigning of the Wallpapers section to be a subgroup of Artwork. The most un-noticeable change is the biggest one: the re-writing of the JavaScript that is used to display the content. Hopefully there shouldn't be any broken links, and any that were caused by the new scripts I have caught. If there are some dead links leading to pages that look like there should be something going on, it would be really nice if you would let me know. Contact e-mail address is on the left, where it has always been :)

Keeping everything at Brinkster in-synch with my local copy has always been difficult. Trying to get by without FTP isn't easy, and that upload interface of Brinkster's isn't top-notch either. But hey, it was all free.

So, as a Christmas present to myself, I'll be moving the site on to bigger things (ie: a paid service). Goodbye ads, and hello convenience!

2 new pictures, 1 for the Artwork - Sketches section, and the other for the Artwork - Wallpapers section. The first being another short comic I drew for a friends' birthday, and the other an extension of my foray into space drawings, respectively:

• Sketches - Janna And mE 2: Work
• Wallpapers - Sacrifices

I'm pretty proud of Sacrifices, and so have made it wallpaper sized at the request of family. So at the moment it only exists in the formats my family and I use (1024x768, 1280x1024), plus the 800x600 one I use as a preview. If you really really want it in another resolution, just send me an e-mail, and I'll see what I can do.

So in amongst all the reading, the playing computer games, and free time, I've managed to create another drawing. Loosely inspired by a view from a balcony and some shiny lights, it's a huge departure from my usual drawings of people:

• Coloured - Boundaries Of Heaven

In other stuff, a computer game I'm playing nowadays is a combat flight simulator (my first since 1993's Strike Commander, yikes!) called Falcon 4.0: Allied Force. Can you believe: 30 training missions and a 700+ page manual? I'm not kidding, but seeing at how realistic this game is made, I'm not all that surprised now. There really is a lot to learn, and all I've learnt with arcade-style action games (FPS anyone?) has no place in this game: I'm a total n00b here. It's graphics are pretty sub-par by today's standards, but it's not a game you buy for the pretty textures.

And I've also gone and got myself a Myspace profile, lol. If I'm going to continue along these lines, I may find myself a deviantART profile too; that place is primarily for artists.

Only a weekend has passed, but already I'm taking full advantage of my free time. A drawing I've been sitting on for a few months (but put on hold due to priority university commitments) has finally been completed:

• Coloured - The Red Head

With only 3 weeks until I start some HOT full-time work ACTION, I'm already filling my available time with some of my old hobbies. Reading books, playing some downloaded mods of computer games I already have, maybe even learning another tune on that guitar or piano. I've also got a couple more drawings, except most of them are still ideas, not just put-on-hold sketches like the one above. Oh yeah, and without the stress of classes, I've actually been able to remember my dreams again! Hahaha, oh wonderful days.