After reading up on a lot of different things today, I've came up with quite a few ideas.  So, instead of sharing them by talking about them like a social person might, I'm putting them up on my blog.  Because I'm a hermit.  And a geek.

Battle Tracker's Interactive Map...

I've been working on an interactive map for TTORP (a.k.a. "Battle Tracker" or "cs-battletrack") after having given up on Darkman ever completing one.  :)  Anyway, right now it's all in Javascript, and got it to the point where movement works via selecting the piece & clicking the destination or using arrow keys.  I was pretty happy until I started trying to make my grid line-up with a picture of a map...

Thursday night, also known as "guy's night" or "game night" came, so I showed it off to one of my other geek friends, Prophet.  He's good at the math thing, so he figured out my problem almost immediately: something about the grid lines on my table taking up an extra pixel, and the lines on the map image being one more pixel... it was painful.  I started to figure out how I would compensate for this off-by-more-than-one problem, which promptly made my head hurt.

Dungeon Tile Mapper to the Rescue

Prophet found me a cool little Javascript-based utility that builds maps called "Dungeon Tile Mapper".  First we looked at just using the tiles, which were 32x32 pixels (just a bit smaller than my 40-pixel tiles.  Anyway, after looking into it a bit further, I found that I could probably just use that system to build my maps, and my pieces & movement stuff could just overlay that.

The Conundrum

So I started looking at what it would take to incorporate this code into my own open source code.  I couldn't find any license or contact information, so I started searching... my peeps at the Linux User's Group, very familiar with the concept of open source and these particular licensing problems, started pointing me in the right direction.  I'm still looking into it, but I think I can use it without too many problems, though I still need to contact the creator (hopefully).

Anyway, as I started figuring out how to incorporate their code, I saw that the Javascript library they used could conflict with mine.  It was the old Prototype vs. jQuery debacle... which I actually found out wasn't nearly as much of a problem as I thought.  

jQuery, the Software Freedom Conservancy, and Kickstart

I found out that jQuery, an insanely popular/powerful Javascript framework, was part of the Software Freedom Conservancy.  So I looked it up, and found that it could be a really good fit with my own goals: protecting FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software), promoting its use, and being protected from litigious bastards. 

So I'm going to try to join the elite ranks of the SFC to help deal with donations, fundraising/promotions, and some legal protection (in theory).  More on that to come.  Anyway, CrazedSanity.com will continue to develop & test FLOSS software.  jQuery will help make it more "Web 2.0" and stuff.  And maybe, just maybe, with the help of some generous people at Kickstart.net, I'll be able to have enough money to consider doing just this for a living...

Stay Tuned

For those of you that are interested (and actually made it this far into the post), I'll be posting updates here.  Probably nothing tonight, but hopefully I'll have some time tomorrow.  Stay tuned!