I've been working hard on Anima for the last several weeks, including a facelift on the home page. I'm working on the drag and drop stuff in the image thumbnail window, and also on the underlying undo mechanisms. I'm using the same undo strategy that I used in Deluxe Music Construction Set - a pair of bits for each deletable item, one that says that the item is "hidden" (because the user deleted it), and another which says to toggle the hidden bit when the user hits "undo". Thus, a newly added item will have hidden=false, toggle=true, which means that "undo" will cause the item to disappear. The hidden items are really deleted at the start of each new command.

I also took a day or two to learn about XSL stylesheets. Xalan is cool. I put together a little demo that generates Java source code from a DOM (similar to what JSP does), and then plugged that in to the output of Xalan. I'd like to do a JSP-style servlet engine, similar to Resin, but which runs together with Apache-JServ. If I had more time, I would do that. But I don't want to get distracted. It's very easy for me to get distracted, and when I do I tend to lose interest in a project.

I've been living a very hermit-like existence for the last month or so. The lack of interpersonal contact is really driving me nuts. Unfortunately, most of my friends seem to be out of contact much of the time (the dot-com lifestyle I guess.) I have very little in common with most of my co-workers in my day job, and I find it difficult to have a deep conversation with many of them.