Introduction
RDWonline v8.0: The Quasareclipse is the flagship project of the RDWonline domain, and is the personal website of webmaster Ronald D. Willis. This website and its sub-domains feature an assortment of new additions and enhancements and adhere to HTML5 and CSS3 standards. To navigate through this website, please use the main navigation to the left or click on a tab to the right to expose the contents of its panel. Please enjoy the web experience presented here.
News & Updates
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Tuesday, January 24, 2012, 4:06 A.M.
New critique of this website was posted at About.com!
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Sunday, January 8, 2012, 3:09 A.M.
RDWonline v8.0: The Quasareclipse is a featured website on the HTML5 websites page!
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Friday, January 6, 2012, 7:40 A.M.
Added Liquid Spirits and Loop Session to the Recreation > Music section
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Sunday, January 1, 2012, 12:00 A.M.
Happy new year to everyone! Arducane Development is kicking off the new year with two new websites and five website upgrades! The Arducane Development company website was consolidated to a more concise layout for better ease of use. Also, the RDWonline flagship website RDWonline v8.0: The Quasareclipse went through a major rewrite and redesign, along with its sub-domains! The wait is finally over and all the new websites are online!
Biography
– Proverbs 4:7
Ronald D. Willis moved to Bloomington, IN to attend college at Indiana University (IU), where he studied chemistry as an undergraduate. During that time, Ronald became heavily involved with computer work and held many computer-related occupations that allowed his interests of information technology to be nurtured. Ronald's efforts would eventually offer him several work opportunities, including assisting with the inception of the crystallographic data exchange system Chemviz/Reciprocal Net at the IU Molecular Structure Center. In addition to computing, Ronald also acquired an interest in learning web graphic design concepts, which he eventually decided to pursue as a career rather than working in the chemical field. After completing his chemistry degree, Ronald picked up a PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor book and started to teach himself web design and development using open source tools.
In May 2006, Ronald was offered a position that allowed him to transition into the Microsoft technologies. That summer Ronald took a strenuous crash course in classic ASP, Visual Basic.NET, Visual C# 2005, ASP.NET 1.1/2.0 frameworks and SQL Server 2000/2005. Today, Ronald still divides his time in both technologies - .NET work at his employer and PHP/MySQL work for leisure.
When Ronald is not putting in an assiduous number of hours on the computer, he enjoys bowling, playing pool, going to the movies, listening to "non-commercialized" music, planning social events and hanging out at the local bookstores and cafés in town.
Interface History
RDWonline v8.0: The Quasareclipse
Release Date: January 1, 2012
After the release of Volume 7, it had been decided that a subsequent installment of RDWonline would not be released until PHP6 became available. That hiatus turned out to be well over four years before Volume 8, and even then an official release of PHP6 has yet to surface. However, most of the new features were made available in PHP 5.3.x, and in 2009 Ronald set out as planned to tear down the entire application layer used to run all websites under the RDWonline domain and creating a more solid object-oriented foundation for subsequent versions. In addition to software upgrades from PHP, MySQL and PostgreSQL; Google released its Chrome browser to the masses. Furthermore, the new standards for HTML5 and CSS3 were being introduced to the current web browsers, and several JavaScript frameworks jumped onto the bandwagon as well. Needless to say, with all this new software and technology released, things really had to settle down a bit before work on the new RDWonline commenced. The interface for The Quasareclipse uses very few graphics (barring the splash screen), and utilizes more dynamic client-side behaviors to control and modify its "page panels" to display the information featured within using the jQuery framework.
RDWonline v7.0: The Seoquouloxolocadium
Release Date: July 7, 2007
The work done to produce the Epoccontinuum and the newly-divided sub-domains required for Ronald to focus more on the scripting and databases, while the graphics were pretty much an after-thought. Although the RDWonline series finally had a bright incarnation to list in its history, Ronald decided that it was time to bring the design back to more of a darker, abstract yet professional vibe. Furthermore, a more concerted effort to push the PHP codebase over to an object-oriented tree was made, as each page now executes a single derived object in order to render the markup for display. While this tableless design was more compacted than its predecessors, the overall execution was indeed harmonious and required little effort in ensuring that the design rendered as intended across the major web browsers. There is no real reason why this website has the surname Seoquouloxolocadium, but it seemed to fit with the somewhat abstract theme of the website design. This is also the first website produced by Ronald to exhibit full separation of structure, presentation and functional behavior.
RDWonline v6.0: The Epoccontinuum
Release Date: May 16, 2006
On September 6, 2004, Ronald embarked on yet another long journey to redesign and rearchitect RDWonline. The interface for the OmniFireball was enclosed, and all the predecessor websites used dark colors with white text for the staple layout. So this time around, Ronald brightened up the color scheme a bit, modeling his old black-purple-teal Reebok pumps (sans black). This website has the surname Epoccontinuum not because it was a work-in-progress for 20 months, but because the design and theme was formulated to integrate elements of time, clouds, ice and glass to better illustrate the elevation of Ronald's web prowess using the same tools as before and new technologies such as Ajax and JSON.
RDWonline v5.00: The OmniFireball
Release Date: September 24, 2003
The Internet is plagued with poor web designs and horribly-formed web pages. One major reason Ronald felt the need to rearchitect (not just redesign) RDWonline is to reinforce the importance of creating structure and presentation that is W3C-compliant for the most part. With graduation from graduate school coming in the following semester, Ronald melded RDWonline Designs & Productions and his personal website together with The Gravity Realm, rdwmusical and rdwmagicollection to create a 200-page website that he actively used as his conversational piece for forthcoming job interviews in demonstrating his web graphic skills and web programming prowess. The website has the surname OmniFireball because of that, and the fact that Ronald used 10 different applications in variance for its design and assembly.
RDWonline Personal Website v3.0
Release Date: July 8, 2002
Ronald redesigned his website in hopes of using it to supplement his application to the School of Library and Information Science graduate program. The website was renamed to RDWonline, and in celebration of that the audio theme was chosen after Ronald created a stereo using only Photoshop. Ronald likes to consider this website the 'minimalistic' and 'self-titled' incarnation since he focused on the basics of web design and development, using only Photoshop (with no 3rd party filters), Fireworks and Dreamweaver to create this entity.
The Personal Website of Ronald D. Willis, Volume Two
Release Date: July 23, 2000
While working on the beginning artwork for The Gravity Realm, Ronald took one conceptual piece and developed it into a large red pipelike structure, which ultimately became the interface to this website. The content of this website had almost tripled with the addition of Ronald's final chemical research thesis and information on other favorite pastimes. At One of the cooler features about this website was the Javascript double rollover used for the navigation.
The Personal Website of Ronald D. Willis, Volume One
Release Date: July 7, 1999
The first release had very humble beginnings. It only consisted of five static HTML pages with Ronald's picture and a gradient image for the background. At the time, Ronald was still very much a neophyte when it came to web design, however it only made sense at that time to develop a small website dedicated to his chemical research papers and favorite pastimes. This website would set the foundation for all of its succeeding incarnations.
Questions & Answers
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Volume 7 was released over four years ago in July 2007. Why so long between releases?
So much has occurred since that release. Got a new job the month after it dropped. Had to deal with some other personal things. It was always in the plan to do Volume 8 - it was just a matter of finding the time to do research and development and the time to get it all done. When the current web browsers started to support HTML5 and CSS3 and the PHP group decided release most of the PHP6 features in PHP 5.3.x, it was time.
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How are you able to balance your responsibilities as a web designer and a web developer?
It's not easy. Everyone has only one head, so you wear the hat you feel like wearing at that time. When you're tired of wearing that hat, take it off and put on a new one.
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Hey, what happened to the TransFormers™ section on this website?!
It's no longer on this website, but it's still on this domain. It's been integrated into RDWonlineTransFormersInventory.
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The RDWonline.com domain is 10 years old now. Are you at all surprised about the direction that the website has gone over the years, or was this the plan all along?
From a personal perspective, it has been pretty impressive to see this domain grow over the years from five static HTML pages to a domain comprised of seven web apps powered by a relatively large centralized codebase and backed with five databases. The greatest reward is the knowledge and experience procured during each revision, as that has helped with working through real-life scenarios in the workplace.
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In your honest opinion, what are the two absolute BEST rap/hip-hop groups ever?
The absolute best rap/hip-hop group ever is Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. The second best group is The Lonely Island (yeah, that's right). Anyone who can take The Chronicles of Narnia and Pirates of the Carribbean and make them into solid songs deserve "the throne".
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Is there going to be a Volume 9 of this series, and if so when will it be completed?
There will more than likely be a Volume 9. As far as when, it's anyone's guess, but it definitely will not be any time soon.
Downloadables
DISCLAIMER: Any reprinting, sublicensing, modifying, publishing, assignment, transfer, sales, or other distribution of any of the wallpaper images below, in parts or as a whole, is strictly prohibited without the prior written consent of Ronald D. Willis/Arducane Development. These terms of this agreement are subject to change without notice.
Ronald had been a Microsoft FrontPage (please don't laugh, no seriously...stop) user up until April 2002. FrontPage is good for people who wish to create static websites with images, and can enhance that power if and only if they understand the code to put it all in manually. This notion was indeed the case for Ronald's earlier projects, including The Gravity Realm. However, Ronald felt that his subsequent work needed to follow the current trend of dynamic web pages, and so he began to work on server-side scripting using PHP and Perl (mostly PHP). As of now, Microsoft FrontPage cannot support either language. Adobe had been well-known for their website developing tools Dreamweaver and Dreamweaver UltraDev. However, both programs contained annoying little popup windows that blocked about half of the screen. Because of this, Ronald continued to use FrontPage until the preview release of Dreamweaver MX was released. Adobe had done away with the popup windows and instead created a collapsing menu interface, which was ideal for increased workflow. It also supported PHP and contained references as extension modules that could be installed within the program. Moreover, document editing was a lot more efficient, as excessive and useless HTML is not inserted into pages. With all that in consideration, Ronald vowed from then on to work with Dreamweaver for all subsequent projects, and has done so for over a year. It also has the ability to interact with cascading style sheets and MySQL databases and other live data sources using ColdFusion. Adobe Dreamweaver is also excellent in tackling accessibility issues, making it one of the best commercial web page editors on the market today.
Dreamweaver has been an asset for its color coding and native PHP function hinting. The problem that arose starting with Volume 8 of RDWonline is that there was an immediate need for an integrated development environment (IDE) to be able to use reflection to determine which methods and/or properties were accessible depending on the current context of the current class, similar to how the IntelliSense functionality works in Microsoft Visual Studio. This can only be accomplished in Dreamweaver if and only if the methods and properties were contained in the current class, but cannot "tell" the developer of the other methods and properties defined in other classes and interfaces within the same namespace. A few applications were able to accomplish this feat, but the one that Ronald settled on was NetBeans. This open-source IDE made short work of keeping all the class methods and properties straight among the immense namespace that now powers this entire domain, and considering that PHP is a dynamically-typed language. It would be nice if one day the IDE was able to identify which objects were indexers by determining whether the object implemented the ArrayAccess interface. Nonetheless, this application was very helpful in picking up where Dreamweaver fell short.
Before Volume 8, Ronald was perfectly fine with having to write the necessary SQL statements for his web applications inline with his PHP scripts. The statements would be tested using 
Now what's a website without graphics? Graphics are what initially sparked Ronald's interest in website development in the first place since they were the easiest to create in the early days. In the search to find a graphics package that was worth learning, he found that 97% of the websites surveyed used Adobe Photoshop in some way, shape, or form as the staple graphics editor. Overjoyed, Ronald began playing around with Adobe Photoshop 4.0 in the student computer labs on campus. His perseverance with the program has provided many opportunities for him as a graphic designer, including the official Indiana Science Olympiad 2003 logo and the IU OneStart website. Nowadays, most of Ronald's graphic work gets imported into Photoshop for manipulation in some degree, and in the case of the RDWonline websites, almost entirely produced and generated. Ronald favors the glass/plastic, metallic and industrial styles, but does so in his own unique way. Several websites later, Ronald has learned much of what Photoshop can do, and is still learning more to this day.
As stated previously, Ronald does a vast majority of his graphic work using Adobe Photoshop. However, at that time the JPG compression algorithm implemented by it and Adobe ImageReady is inferior when compared to that of Adobe Fireworks, which could certainly explain why Adobe discontinued ImageReady. Ronald generally uses this program for image slicing and optimization, and chooses it over similar programs because of its straightforward approach. Adobe Fireworks is ideal for graphic designers who wish to interact with sharp vector graphics for navigation bars and menus. Graphics created in Fireworks can be seamlessly imported into Adobe Flash for rich multimedia and Internet applications. Ronald has utilized this program extensively for 
Initially overwhelmed by the complexity of 3D applications, Ronald first decided to ease into 3D graphic design using a more controlled environment: landscape generation. The first program Ronald was able to use to initiate this was Bryce, which was surprisingly powerful to him at that time. However, over time, the atmospheres, especially the clouds, were simply not as realistic as desired. One night, while discussing 3D with some people online, Ronald learned about a 3D landscape application that far surpassed the power of Bryce with relative ease. Vue d'Esprit, a 3D atmosphere generator developed in France, is indeed an interesting program with similar capabilities of Bryce. The interface of Vue d'Esprit looks like it was made for the Mac because of its heavy use of the aqua pills for buttons and headers. Furthermore, Vue d'Esprit is argued to be so intuitive that people decline to open the printed manual until after they have played with many of the program's features. Ronald first became acquainted with the program at version 4 and did not begin to really produce serious work with the application until its 2007 release of Vue 6 Infinite and Vue 6 xStream. The latter program operates exactly like the former when run in standalone mode; however it is different in that a host 3D application such as 3ds max, Lightwave, XSI, Maya and (in Ronald's case) Cinema 4D can open scenes created in the application and can therefore commingle with the environment of the host application to create even more astounding graphic creations.
The two main graphics used for Volume 8 make heavy use of particle effect stills as layers within Photoshop. Before the creation of particleIllusion, graphic designers had to rely on particle plugins and render them using high-end 3D applications, which can take several hours depending upon the level of detail desired. This application works solely in two-dimensional space and utilizes the OpenGL to accelerate rendering speed, which speeds up the application's performance and rendering times considerably on inexpensive video cards. particleIllusion can export animations in various formats, including each individual frame in JPG format.
Ronald spent a lot of time researching standard 3D applications in hopes of discovering one that would create astounding 3D renders without a egregiously steep learning curve. After several months of deliberation, Ronald settled on Maxon Cinema 4D over Autodesk 3ds max (at least for the time being). To some 3D designers, Maxon Cinema 4D is a lot more "powerful and stable", though it is quite a pain to find books on the software at your local bookstore. Recently, Ronald has been using Cinema 4D to render different shapes and/or Booleans, or manipulating vector splines into 3D shapes using HyperNURBS. Fortunately, Ronald was able to add in a couple of abstract renders from Cinema 4D into this user interface. Expect to see more 3D renders and compositions produced using this application in the coming months.
Social activities are generally done with two or more smaller groups of people who interact with one another, share similar characteristics and collectively have a sense of unity among peers. Adolescents have fewer responsibilities than adults, and so they have time to participate in a myriad of social activities, including hanging out at the mall, going to the movies, or just having pizza and drinks over a friend's house. However, as people get older, other priorities tend to supersede social time, including school, a career, dating, marriage and raising a family. As a result, the number of people to socialize with drops drastically, thus causes those people in waiting to often times throw themselves into their career. Furthermore, the advent of computing technology is causing people to become more sociable in a virtual sense, resorting to communicating through chat rooms, online community forums, social networks (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and texting. While these methods do facilitate socialization among others, it causes people to lose sense of socializing in reality.
It really is important for people to have SOME face-to-face interaction with people outside of work, and there are many ways to get involved within your city. There are opportunities at volunteer centers, church functions and ironically, on the Internet. 
It can become very easy to get immersed in work and personal affairs, and this is not to argue that those issues should not be dealt with at all. However, you don't have to be alone nor antisocial unless you so desire. Make some time. Chances are, if you are looking to meet and socialize with people in your city, there are others in the same predicament as well. The first thing is to have the desire to socialize with other people. The second challenge is to get out of your comfort zone and out of your home and GO to the event. Starting with a conversation and a healthy desire to socialize, that conversation can turn into longer conversations, friendships - even relationships if the chemistry is there. So get up, get out and mingle!