XML Reversion

Back some time ago, when I was doing major work on Castle Tilemap Editor, I had posted that I didn't like XML, for various reason, although the one I primarily was complaining about (despite the way that post might read) was difficulty to work with. Apparently, as it turns out I was doing it wrong.

While working on figuring out how to save data for Spiral Island, a few weeks ago I stumbled on a .NET structure called the XmlSerializer. This is pretty much an XML parser on steroids: it will automatically take some structure and with a couple commands, either export a complete XML file or import the data from an XML file to whatever I specify. In fact only 1 command, setting aside the commands for opening the files to write to or read from them.

In light of that, I've been a lot more friendly towards XML usage, since it's much simpler to set up then what I was doing in Castle Tilemap Editor. I still think it's unnecessary space waste, though.

Semi-machinated

A  new part of Red Ice is now posted. And I'm not sure how exactly to pronounce the name, to be honest with you, it's been ages since I did any study of German and so the character's proper pronunciation escapes me.

For the spell, I couldn't really think of much due to fatigue. Translated, it is "From the ice of the north, From the fires of the south, from the forests of the east, from the cities of the west. Messerweiß (White Knife), I am your servant. Accept my oath!" It's German version, though, I'm only fairly confident in.

What I did was use Google Translate and Yahoo Babelfish to machine-translate the phrases, and compared what I got against a German/English dictionary. I went with whichever was closest, first of all, and made other word adjustments as I got from the dictionary. Hopefully all the words should be right, but I'm not entirely sure about the sentence structure.

And as for the name of the device, Messerweiß, I'm not even sure if I can concatenate words like that in German. I'm basing that solely off of the word Sinneslöschen, or "sense-delete" (although Google Translate instead gives me "clear meaning" which seems to be the opposite meaning), the alleged developer name of the urban legend arcade game Polybius. (I plan on going more into Sinneslöschen in the future so I won't digress onto that topic right now).

Navigational Emphasis

For the most part, navigating around Salt Lake City is a peice of cake, compared to some places. The city is laid out in a grid system, with major streets running North-South and East-West at a certain distance from the center of the city, Temple Square. So if you want to find an address, the easiest way is to give it's coordinates, and worry about street names later. Not all the subdivisions are mapped in straight lines like that, of course. Land claims, zoning restrictions, landform anomalies, and so on and so forth dictate that individual roads curve as necessary. But the main roads make it easy enough to navigate to a zone and go from there.

In the subdivisions, though, things aren't so simple. And my example today comes from the area around the city capitol, directly northeast of Temple Square. A roomate and I had to navigate there this last night to get some stuff. It took us a while to find the address we needed to go to because we ended up turning down the wrong road initially. Driving down narrow alleys, dead ends, and steep hills trying to backtrack and start over took up a fair amount of the trip time. However, the most unusual part of the trip was a couple of the roads.

This was a pair of roads, running parallel to each other going North-South (I believe, I didn't know what direction I was going by the time we got back out of there and onto State Street, so I might be wrong). There was about 50-60 feet separating the roads, not any houses in between them I believe just parkway. But the real problem was in their names. They both had the same name: Canyon Road.

But they didn't quite have the exactly same name. As I looked at it, there was a difference. One of the two roads, the East one (presuming they went North-South, as mentioned above), was spelled in capitals: CANYON ROAD.  All the signs I saw indicated this, one as "Canyon Road" and one as "CANYON ROAD", leaving me wondering how they determined that road naming. One of the two roads more important or something? Or was the surveyor standing in the same place and the person giving the names had to shout from the far road and so they decided to name it accordingly.

Randomly Seven

The below can be blamed on me singing the Five for Fighting song 100 Years into the Speech Recognition in Windows Seven. Pay it little mind.

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Finite Infinity - Delayed Reaction

It's been two weeks now since I upgraded to PivotX. It's worked well, and I'm really digging the Page function. However I had forgotten one of the first things I had wanted to do with it, until now.

One of the problems with working graveyard shift is there isn't really anything on television to watch in the middle of the night.  Not that there's much worth watching during daytime TV either, but I can always manage to find something or other then. But nights make things more diffucult. As I sat yesterday, finishing up coding on a script editor for Spiral Island, I searched for something to watch in the background, but found nothing better than Matrix Revolutions.

As I watched the film play out, I had the urge to go back and read through HEHEHEE! The Story, and the amusing continuation of the story we came up with there (as opposed to the official continuation that the course of Matrix Online has played out). As I did that, I remembered that I had wanted to post all my written material when PivotX came out. So that's what I'm finally doing now.

There will be four stages to this. The first, going up now, will be a dump of my main HEHEHE.ODT document, where most of what I had written was located. Second will be the collection of the few other documents I had saved information in separately, which, at the moment what I can recall, is a segment of Aura visiting a zone based on OS-tans, and a summary document of the six fragments The Anaconda splits himself up into in Chapter Six. Third will be my second main document, BACKSTORY.ODT, which is where all my backstory work was done, telling roughly what happened between the end of the Chobits series up to the machine war in the Second Reniassance.

Those three documents will be posted unformatted, unedited. The first document has something struck out in it, since I had meant to re-edit the wording on the line but never got back to it, and in both sections not every event is in it's proper chronological order. The last document will be from two hand-written sections I penned while at a family reunion, the first describing the fight between Freya and the Architect, and the second the final ending of Ties to Infinity (not counting the extra GU-based chapter), the fragment I actually got the tile of the story from. Since I have to type both of these in, I might add some more to them, depending on what I'm in the mood for when I write it.