Programming Log

3:45 PM Today I will try to revisit what I tried doing a few months ago. Creating a communication channel between two different mobile devices connected via hotspot/wifi. I am doing this with android studio and Java. I would first bind all the apps to a certain port number. Then I would ping the broadcast IP address to find out which applications are already bound to the above mentioned port. After that, I would try to send a message on the broadcast IP. Let's hope it works..

This is not a classic time oriented project post. There was a lot going on with family reasons, then the Midsems, and what not. Also most of my time (at least the time I didn't waste) went to developing Littlehelp. Littlehelp in it's current form ( http://littlehelp.epizy.com ) is just a pile of unorganized code jumbled together (as students of 1st year could have managed), and hosted on a platform that regularly suspends the website because of over usage of resources (Thanks to the huge load of traffic near Midsem and endsem). Also, it was written in PHP, so we didn't hade that dynamic nature of the website we so wanted. So since the past month, Me and my friend have been working to migrate the website to Heroku, and change the backent to NodeJS. This has been a cumbersome task, not only coding it from scratch, but also migrating the material from the previous website. Still, the work is pretty much complete, and I think the website will be live before the end semeste...

4:45 PM I have been busy today, so didn't have any time for going further into the WebGL concepts. Thus, I just created a small representation of a bouncing ball, that shrinks when touching the ground and expands when bouncing back. It is just a matter of scaling it based on its y position.

4:00 PM Going off the track for a little bit, I wanted to draw some real 3D shapes. So I started with a circle. Yes, I know, it's a 2D shape you will say. But to be able to draw a sphere, I should at least know how to draw a circle.  So I tried drawing it with the dividing polygon method. That is, first I drew only the 4 vertices at the ends of the principal axes. After that, I increased the segment count, by drawing another vertex between every two vertex. This new vertex point was calculated using sin and cosine, and multiplied by the radius. Applying this for increasing segment numbers, we get a very good approximation of a circle.  For the sphere, we need to have 2 angles, Lattitude and Longitude. Longitude are the horizontal lines of the sphere, and lattitude are the horizontal ones. computing x, y and z according to a known formula, here is what happens: