Hi there, Here you can see three new fun technologies at work to enhance an old picture. You can originally find that picture at the start of Scene 5. It's a decent picture and it may be the first line that I like in JF. I'm going to be redoing all the script for JF Final to make certain a few things that are uncertain now:

1. You get to know and like Javantea.
2. The comic is not too short.
3. The comic has substance.
4. The comic feels good.

You may think that those are obvious goals, but I haven't achieved them yet. If I haven't achieved those obvious things, then I certainly need to focus on them. The truth is that I wrote JF a year ago and the script is awesome. Only one of the secondary characters who really spice up the conversation has been formally introduced. But that is no reason for JF to be as silent as it is. It's like a Charlie Chaplin manga. Hahaha! Okay, so while I'm going and redoing JF in such a way to make it professional and exciting, I'm going to enhance the conversations to make it more interesting.

So, what is needed for good conversations? You can see three out of five of them right here. The first is the oval with directional mark. Most comics use these and there's a good reason for it: it looks better. While it is wasteful, things that are essential are not wasteful. How did I make it? I used MS Paint. ^_^ I have a demo that does this procedurally without the use of MS Paint, but it's not even close to becoming a working model.

The second is the Japanese text. That's pretty sweet, right? By using Japanese, I've set up the fact that Javantea is talking with Japanese-American people who were raised by Japanese parents. It's kinda hip, ya know, to have a bilingual comic. I'm learning Japanese bit by bit, so I'm able to use what I know. How did I make that wonderfully done Japanese hiragana? A simple META tag changes HTML charset to Shift_JIS. <META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=Shift_JIS"> Of course, then you need a program that writes Shift_JIS. I got a demo of NJStar. I like it, but I can't afford $50 for it. Oh, about the actual Japanese text of it: I'm not certain that it is grammatically correct. I have to look it up in my new phrasebook, but I haven't had the time or patience.

The third part of this wonderful little translation with outline below it. I showed you yesterday how to do it. Just put white text (non-anti-aliased) on grey background and use select-by color, grow, and fill in GIMP. I think it looks good. I'm definately going to use it here and there, ya know? Probably for the info boxes, translation, and shouting.

Yup, I've decided that I'm switching my internet habits to open source as soon as possible. You may notice that I use GIMP, an open-source imaging program. I also use libPNG instead of GIF. I have recently converted a few of my mp3s to Ogg Vorbis. So the other day I downloaded Apache for Windows and PHP for Windows. I got Apache to work after a little while, but not very well. I might have better luck next time, but the main problem is Win32. However, when I am running Linux, I'll probably run into a bunch of other problems, so getting it to work on this system is important. I got PHP to run with Microsoft Personal Web Server 4.0 for Win98SE. That's a pretty big feat. I even got it to load an XML, parse it, navigate the DOM tree, search using XPath, display the normal page, and save the XML. That means that I can convert all of JF Development over to PHP. But that means I still rely on PWS. But once I get Apache working, then I'll be almost all open source on JF Web Dev. After that, I have to get a browser that works and is open source. That should be fun. Netscape 7 isn't horribly bad, but it's not open. Mozilla is open source, but I'm not sure if it has a lot of bugs and compatibility issues. There's also the fact that I'm using EditPlus, which is not open source, but made by a pretty decent company. jEdit looks pretty good. Then I'd be all open source as far as that goes. Then there's the whole AltSci3d thing which I'm not going to get into for a while.

The lesson for today is to go open source and do something with it. You aren't going open source so that you can watch movies for free. You aren't going open source to spite Micro$oft. You are going open source, because you like free control of source code and rights. Because you are a hacker.

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