Sonnack.com

Et Cetera

Hello!

Welcome to the site! This is a personal site; there's nothing to buy here. There's no login, no ads, no popups, no blog, no comments, no Twitter, no Google Search Engine, no Facebook, no Digg. (Ya dig?) Just good old-fashioned content. (And, honestly, a lot of it is stuff I wanted online for my own use; I really don't expect others to find much value here.)

Caveats

As with most sites, this place is dynamic and evolving. It shouldn't be necessary to actually say, "Under Construction" anywhere. You can take that as given! (And I'm sure there's a few lurking broken things here and there.) See the News Page for recent additions and changes. You might also want to read the Disclaimer!

Credits

I write my web pages "from scratch." Like baking bread from scratch, it's something you chose to do because you like it, not because you don't know any better. Or like building a ship in a bottle: lots of picky detailed work, all by hand and by heart. So, for what it's worth, these pages are hand crafted with the help of some very cool tools:

Vim

To create and edit the page text, a wonderful Windows implementation of UNIX's (in-)famous Vi by Sven Guckes. It's called gvim (for GUI Vim) and adds many features that Vi does not have (but which have been wanted for a long time). Many features have been improved, hence the name: "Vim - Vi IMproved" (although Vim is also reported to be the most "vi compliant" implementation of Vi). I especially love it's user-definable syntax highlighting ability.

Yes. You read that correctly. This entire website was written — by hand — in vi.

Python+

Much of the underlying work for parts of this website owe a great deal to Python. (All the baseball stats and charts, for example.) I haven't loved a language for its sheer fun and elegance this much since Lisp. The xkcd cartoon nails it exactly. It's no coincidence that both hail from the realm of freeware programming.

Special mention to the SQLite and Matplotlib packages for Python. More awesome freeware from quality programmers!

IrfanView

IrfanView is a great image-viewer that started out good and has become better and better. (Although it's beginning to suffer from bloatware from my point of view, because it now does far, far more than I need (or really want) it to.) I don't use it's image manipulation features, but it's my default image browser, so I do use it quite a lot (I also use the thumbnail tool a bit, mostly for viewing. And since a website is a visual effort, and I've used IrfanView a great deal, I thought it was worth honorable mention! IrfanView is a way cool tool, a Freeware personal effort by Irfan Skiljan. I recommend it unconditionally!

Paint Shop Pro

To create and edit images, JASC Software's Paint Shop Pro 7 and the PSP Amimation Shop for the original animated GIFs. It's kind of a poorman's version of the Adobe Photoshop program. I've been using this since version 4, and think it's wonderful.

POV-Ray

I use a ray-tracing freeware, POV-Ray, to create the three-dimensional stuff, such as the TARDIS and the Enterprise. (Note: In the movie business, “POV” means “Point of View,” but this product's full name is “Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer”.

ffmpeg

Lately, I've tried a freeware product, ffmpeg, to create animated movies of POV-Ray scenes. More about that as it develops. (7/23/2017: As it turns out, I used it briefly to make some mpegs and haven't gotten back to it since. It's very complicated, and my need hasn't risen to the point of wanting to invest the time learning it. I got acceptable, but not great, results, and despite some tweaking couldn't improve the results (image-quality-wise). So obviously further progress depends on taking the time to learn the product. Someday.)