2003-09-23 00:05 UTC Reopenings, green tints, and myths
I've been quite busy recently, mainly with stuff I'm not at liberty to talk about, and with other stuff that I don't really want to talk about. All in all, though, things are looking good at the moment. I might even rebind my F2 key at some point... last week I unbound it after bug 00002 was invalidated, but the bug was reopened and even reconfirmed, so who knows.
One of the things I've been working with is ImageMagick with ActivePerl on Windows. I have a large bitmap in memory (aquired through some Win32 APIs), I pass it to ImageMagick, and I tell it to save it to disk as a PNG file. For some strange reason, the PNG file comes out with a green tint, where it should be pure white. I've tried playing with the gamma settings, the rendering intent settings, and some other stuff, but nothing seems to have changed the result. I'll have to look at this more tomorrow.
I've also been occasionally updating test cases to match the new CSS2.1 text, and also doing some CSS2.1 test suite work. It's slow going. There comes a point where you have so many tests that before writing any new tests you have to first look at the existing ones to make sure you haven't covered it already... Otherwise you end up doing what I did the other day, which is write a test case which is almost byte-for-byte identical with an existing one. So I'm being careful when it comes to the 2.1 tests.
As part of the 2.1 test suite I'm going to have to write some scripts to help me name the files, as well as helping me import files from other tests suites and then converting them to the new format. I'm not going to be doing that any time soon, though. I have a TODO list the size of a small planetoid at the moment.
I've also been involved with some forms stuff recently, one example of which is a thread in www-international about what to do when the user has entered characters into a form that can't accept those characters. I'm hoping we can either get an errata into HTML4 for this or maybe we can get an all-out update to the HTML form controls.
While relaxing, I've been reading the MYTH series. So far I'm loving it. I've also started playing in a concert band, although I'm reserving judgement on that for now. Since I don't speak a word of Norwegian, it's a somewhat weird experience. Still, it gives me an excuse to do something else on the weekends, which I'm told is good for slowing life down and preventing panics. I hope it works; it's not something I know much about, really. Although I'm doing my best to learn as fast as I can.