Over the last few weeks, I have been working tremendously hard on the DragonDocs Engine, updating it from version 2.0 to a modest bump up of 2.1. The new version allows image uploading and has worked really well over the last few days since I brought it in. But DragonDocs version 2.2 is already under development, with the DragonDocs AI Engine being the core feature of this iteration.
In fact, I trialled out the DragonDocs AI Engine today, and it works so well! This is still in the experimental stages and is being looked at in-depth for the next version.
As part of the WISP, I intended to release a full UI package called BalfUI. BalfUI will include both BalfPick and BalfSlider and will be fully modular - using my website, you can pick exactly what parts you want and receive a minified package of CSS and JavaScript containing just what you need. This was actually requested early last year, and I had originally considered it but decided against it. BalfUI will also include a flurry of other things, including BalfRibbon; I'm hoping for an early release of my Phoenix Font and other UI elements.
All of my projects are open source and hosted on GitHub for anyone to use. BalfBar also features a menu generator on my website to simplify the generation of the HTML.
USB-C was supposed to be the one connector for all. It's definitely not lived up to that purpose well. USB-A is still by far the more popular connector for most devices and the wall chargers where USB-C aimed to take over. USB-C was delivered to us in 2015 by none other than Apple with their MacBook, which featured it (and only it), showcasing the port for the first time as a connector that does it all.
DisplayPort and HDMI are still outpacing USB-C on the A/V side of things. Sure, USB-C can carry DisplayPort and is much smaller than the big DisplayPort connectors. Not only that, but it can also carry data at the same time
Not many companies are pushing USB-C as Apple has been on their Macs and iPads, phone chargers and Watch chargers over the last few years, and they don't seem to care that the world hasn't caught up with them. However, Apple did continue to use their rubbish Lightning connector up until October of last year when the iPhone 15 was released.
USB-C hasn't delivered. And I say that because of the inconveniences it now causes. For Mac users and many Windows Ultrabook users (which I have been), devices such as mice, keyboards, USB drives, webcams or printers all become a pain to use because of their USB-A connectors. I normally use my Windows machine to do anything with hard drives or USB drives simply because of its USB-A ports.
My new MacBook Pro that I got in December is a fantastic little machine. It's a wee bit chubby, and that's what I like about it. It's not a chunky machine by any standard, but it's thick enough that Apple could have included some USB-A ports on it - even if just one. Though, as I have said in the past, Apple was the first company to ditch parallel and serial ports from their computers when they were the standard, they were the first to ditch floppy disks when they were the standard, they were the first to ditch the headphone jack and now the USB-A port.
To conclude, I do not think USB-C has made massive changes to everything it promised. It's lacklustre in some areas and has made things more inconvenient in other areas. I love the connector, and back in 2015, when I was invited to try out a USB-C product for a company, I was so very excited at the prospect of it.
This day in 2018 was the most significant in the history of my website.
The plan was formulated in late 2017 to refurbish my website performance in a huge way.
The first step was to replace DragonScript 3 with a much faster version called DragonScript IV. DragonScript IV allowed my website to handle up to 6 times more requests simultaneously (up to around 1 million requests).
The second step was inline optimisation and caching. My caching system is substantial across my website and relies on several different technologies, such as cron jobs used to clear and freshen caches, automated scripts to generate cached data and my analytics system to determine what needs to be cached. The inline optimisation feature is similar to the caching system on my website, and it's what ensures that all data transferred is compressed before it is sent. If you take a look at my gallery on my website, you'll see that all photos are watermarked. The watermarking is preprocessed and cached and then reread when it is needed.
The third and final part of this was a bit more manual and required me to optimise other images and content across my website.
The result was that my website went from loading in 100 milliseconds to around 10 milliseconds.
YES! That's what I shouted when I made a breakthrough with LAME that improved its performance (retrospectively named X1) by a whopping 2 to 5 times. The new version of LAME, LAME X2, will come to ZPE throughout the year. The theoretical improvement comes from compiler optimisations that improve LAME performance so much by reducing the number of iterations needed on a mathematical or logical expression.
In LAME X1, mathematical expressions were processed up to four times before the result was generated. With LAME X2, a mathematical expression needs to be processed precisely once. Assume you have k expressions within that expression; version X1 must process all expressions up to four times, leading to a worst-case computational time of O(4k + 1). LAME X1 is fast, but LAME X2 is faster.
With LAME X2, the worst-case scenario with k expressions is O(k + 1).
Another improvement coming this year is the Zenith Parsing Engine version 1.5. 1.5 will bring some performance improvements, although I am not quite sure how substantial these will be yet.
balf.io is a new domain I aim to use as a nexus or portal to content on my website. For example, docs.balf.io is used to host documents from my website on a separate domain, and the main domain, balf.io, is a redirect site to make redirects easier and it uses the same URL redirect system as found on my website.
In fact, the codebase for balf.io is entirely the same as my website. So the slide viewer on it uses DragonSlides and the document system on it is my DragonDocs.
Happy New Year for 2024 everyone! I thank you for following or using website!
Let’s hope 2024 is another amazing year!
New Zealand has just celebrated New Year for 2024!
I just wanted to say Happy New Year to all my friends in New Zealand!
ZPE 1.11.12 is available to download as of today. The last release of 2023 brings a few improvements and features, a fix and one new and very useful function.
The features and improvements that come to ZPE are the new -h changes feature which will display the ZPE changelog, and the array_get_data_type function is now the list_get_data_type function and works on lists as well as arrays.
The new function added to ZPE is the string_compare function, which can be used to compare strings and see which comes first or last alphabetically.
2023 has been a pretty decent year for me, albeit there have been a few bumps.
Firstly, it was the start of my second year working at my school, somewhere I enjoy working. There have been one or two times when I have wondered what I am doing working here but generally, I enjoy my job and want to continue to work here.
My mental health has been great this year again, leading to my fourth year in a row where I haven't struggled with any form of depression!
Let's talk about ZPE. ZPE 1.11 has been another incredible release of ZPE with inline iteration, type casting, and compiler directives, the build version has finally returned to ZPE, and improvements to the editor; particularly the editor area now being public, YASS Unfold, powerful new list reference functions, the new string_compare function, which is very useful for sorting lists of strings and finally, more public features through ZPEKit.
Next, let's talk about what I have managed to do with teaching. Further to what I said last year, I have made major improvements to my slideshow engine and DragonDocs Engine. My slides are now all in 16:9 format which took an absolute age to do, but I have finally done it. My slides underwent another style transformation and look even better than before. I cannot forget to mention my new Apple Watch app that I developed for this too! The app allows me to control the slides using my Watch - pretty cool!
I cannot forget that I also got my car in June after a six-month delay and I've loved every moment with it! I'm planning on doing a review of it when it gets to 9 months with it, so keep an eye on my reviews for that.
I also started my Master's Degree which is going well. I'm excited about the next part of my degree!
To finish the year off, I got myself an iPhone 15 Pro (which is great and the phone I've been waiting for for a long time), an Apple Watch Ultra 2 (which is an amazing Watch) and a new MacBook Pro 14" with an M3 Pro (which has replaced my M1 MacBook Pro, which itself was a very capable machine).
2023 has been a fantastic year for me and I'm hoping that 2024 is just as good if not better!
