Walk Like An Egyptian

The Bangles - Walk Like an Egyptian (Video Version)
TheBanglesMusic

With a title like this post's, I'm naturally going put up The Bangles video. So I'm searching YouTube (um yes, I'm sure I posted it here before, but Google's search function works better than Blogger's. Blogger's search function is rudimentary, at best, and if I did find it, there is no guarantee that it hasn't been taken down for one reason or another. So I'm searching YouTube and I'm wondering if there is a better video of this song. I'm seen the bar performance more than once and that's enough. I'm mean it's fine, cute girls and all. Oh, okay, twist my arm and I'll watch it one more time.) Well, here's one that looks like it might be interesting. It's the right song and there is a whole lot of something going on in the video, but the resolution is so poor it's almost painful to watch. As it goes by I start to realize that the video portion was taken from somebody's music video and then they spliced The Bangles onto the audio track. And you know what else? That guy in the center might just be Michael Jackson. Pop over to YouTube and found Michael Jackson - Remember The Time. It's kind of a long video (over 9 minutes). It starts off with a scene in the Pharaoh's court, with no music. This goes on for a while (I skipped most of it). They finally get to dancing at the 6:15 mark. There is a bunch of dancing but I can't say much for the tune. I gave up after a minute.

Okay, back onto main topic. I've finally taken the first rudimentary steps to drawing stuff on the screen in a browser window. This requires knowing something about html (hyper-text markup language) and javascript, which is a programming language. I've gotten a couple of things to work. I started with a couple of samples I found on the internet and mucked about with them until I got them to do what I wanted. So they work, they don't do much, but they work. But there are some things in the code that I don't understand. I have no idea what they are supposed to do, other than if you take them out the program won't run. So magic.

The first sample I started with was an example of 3D drawing. The keyword here is gl (graphics library), and that sounds like the same scheme I ran into when I was doing a standalone graphics program. Maybe I'll just be able to copy and paste some code directly from my old project into this one. I mean Javascript and C look and work very much alike. It could work, couldn't it? Hah. It is to laugh. Not a chance.

Not a problem, I can recreate the equations easily enough, it's all new stuff I'm having to learn that's dragging me down. Back in the day when I was getting paid for this, programming was pretty straight forward. You marched forward and dealt with the problems as they arose, bim, bam, boom. But this new stuff is like a jumble of mystery hand signals. It's like I have to learn to Walk Like An Egyptian. Maybe if you grew up with it might appear to be straight forward, but for me most of the documentation is gibberish.

There's two problems I'm working on. One is the way you create objects (like squares or circles) on the screen. One way is declare them right up front. But that only works for static objects. 

Static Polygon Declaration

Anything you want on the screen has to be declared in the file. It doesn't allow you to create objects on the fly.

There is another way but it involves making a call to Doggy McApplefart and passing him the secret code which everybody knows, but you have to say it anyway: 

var polygon = document.createElementNS("http://www.w3.org/2000/svg", "polygon");

Near as I can tell, you could replace the magic phrase (the URL) with anything at all and it would work. I've yet to test it.

I don't know exactly where I got the second sample. Mozilla has a pretty good website devoted to programming for the web. Funny how such a good reference site doesn't need to carry and ads. Funny that they are still in business. Guess I don't understand how the computer programming business works. No surprise there, I never did.

Oh yeah, progress: