My laptop (a Dell Precision M70 called Ganesh — the last and gruntiest of the single-core models, AFAICT) runs Windows XP and its driver database had become corrupted. So I'm re-installing Windows XP SP3 from scratch — by choice, I must add. Time-consuming, but the end result is of course a much snappier computer. So I'm adding some notes here as I go.
Apple iTunes wasn't happy that U.S. English wasn't installed as a language, and displayed using an Asian character set. Adding U.S. English and re-installing gave me iTunes in Suomi, which at least allowed me to find and change the language preference to English of some sort.
The EmacsW32 home page has apparently been suspended by its ISP. Hopefully it'll come back soon so I can download the latest version (1.58, based on GNU Emacs 23.0, which would be impressive since the latest stable GNU Emacs is 22.2).
Using ShadowProtect Desktop 3 has been great. You can mount your drive images (read-only or read/write) which is very handy. A worthy upgrade from Norton Ghost.
Anyway, a slow, tedious business, but hopefully my lean, mean machine will last me a bit longer now. But I think I'll stick Ubuntu on the last 20GB, just to see how that runs. I know Bevan's enjoying it.
I would like to develop interactive process visualisation tools that use 3D and virtual reality techniques to provide better, more powerful user interfaces. These tools should be delivered to the user's web browser and should follow modern Web principles such as Web 2.0 and REST where appropriate.
I suspect that eventually 3D capabilities (i.e. the ability to use the underlying hardware acceleration via OpenGL or Direct3D) will appear in Adobe Flash and modern browsers (there is already a Canvas 3D for Firefox 3 and something similar for Opera). But in the meantime browser support for the X3D standard is non-existent, and some sort of plug-in is required to view and interact with 3D content.
Adobe Flex provides the browser with good communication links to server-side code (e.g. true bidirectional sockets) as well as a nice 2D user interface platform. The combination of Flex (or other Ajax techniques) with an X3D plug-in on a web page has been termed Ajax3D.
According to the NIST VRML Plugin and Browser Detector page, there are currently no free X3D browser plug-ins that work on Windows, Linux and OS X that don't display some sort of "nag" logo or are otherwise impaired (and/or in beta).
I guess my options for cross-platform browser-based Ajax3D can be summarised as:
Since I mainly use Windows (since my clients all use Windows) I could ignore other platforms until I have something of interest to the world at large. Then I could use whichever plug-in I wanted (probably the Player formerly known as Flux). The problem then is that your content won't work on any other player/platform without (I would expect) some serious re-engineering. Perhaps this could be anticipated in the initial design.
I could pick one plug-in (and one browser, i.e. Firefox 3 at this point) per platform and make sure that my code works on those three OS/browser/plug-in combinations. Then at least I'll know my code is reasonably cross-platform, and other people will be able to try out my code much sooner. This is important, as I'll need feedback for both motivation and "navigation"; I need to find out what's actually useful to people, so I head in the direction of something actually marketable.
The third option is to use the OpenVRML library and its plug-in wrappers on Windows, Linux and OS X. This might limit my initial audience (possibly not a bad thing) but would give me the greatest flexibility (for the features it actually supports) if I'm prepared to work for it (yay, another big C++ project to work on. At least it uses Boost).
Something to think about, anyway.
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