Wednesday, 8th August, 2007

Code GalleryImage Functions

link code colour

"A helpful collection of image processing routines. Some convert between colour spaces and others process the image." — really useful for converting RGB to HSB (whch is what I was Googling for) [Zend Technologies]

There's something very specific I wanted to do with this — but I'm bookmarking it for the future because I think there's a hell of a lot of use in this.

Love how the functions colourise() and colorize() do the same things BTW

Gender Trouble

link book gender

"Gender Trouble (1990) by Judith Butler is a highly influential book in academic feminism and queer theory. It is also the book credited with creating the seminal notion of gender performativity." — I really must read more stuff. [Wikipedia] (via supernaut)

The Eternal Struggle Of Man Against Nature

random bugs

Really pissed off, and slightly concerned today.

I'm taking advantage of the summer vacation to work a bit from home this week (as you might have noticed), and this morning I'm ploughing my way through a rather fun little piece of code that I'll no doubt write up in my usual Way Too Excited™ way.

The thing is though, every time I pop downstairs to make myself a cup of coffee (which is far too frequently for the good of my health), I'm confronted by some 'visitors'.

Little buzzy visitors.

Flies

We seem to have gotten ourselves into a little routine: I open the windows and shoo them out with a copy of the local free 'paper' (its only actual practical use, I feel), then they spend the next half-an-hour (or so) finding cunning and secret means by which to get back in the house and annoy me again¹.

A couple of things to point out:

1. My house isn't in its usual state of Hygenic Meltdown™. It's actually pretty clean at the moment — ther result of an uncharacteristic bout of enthusiasm the other morning. I immediately suspected that one of the kittens had brought me a 'present' and had left it somewhere in the house for me to find — somewhere concealed enough for me not to find it, but obvious enough for whichever bluebottle it was to lay their evil little eggs all over it.

   But I've looked in every nook and cranny, under every lumpy bit of furniture — and found nothing. And besides, what with the warm weather and all (hurrah!), if there was a formally tasty furry kitty-treat somewhere in this house, I believe I might be able to smell it by now. No?

2. I know that this is a fact that has been observed many times throughout history, but why are flies so fucking stoopid?!

   They buzz all round the living room — from on end to the other, bouncing themselves off the glass in the windows, obviously wanting to escape to the outside world, yet completely cretinous enough not to be able to find te open part of the window.

   Even when you point it out to them.

My current tactic is to just leave all the windows open, and hope that the little shits leave of their own accord. I bet it doesn't work.

¹ No, I know. They're not getting back in. They're new ones. I just like pretending, is all.

Chatlog Parsing (Take #2)

secondlife chatlog

I wrote a bit about this the other day — essentially, not wanting to repeat myself too much, it's a web script that takes a plain, unformatted chatlog (from Second Life, but could be tweaked to work with other things), and tries to present it in a way that's a little more 'readable'.

There are a few modifications I've made to it since I linked to it before:

1. For avies without a profile picture, their text is now coloured based on a chunk of their key, rather than all being a default grey. Where a profile pic does exist, the colour is still the average pixel value.

2. I've used the code I link to above to extract the hue from this colour, so that I can standardise the saturation and brightness across the whole chatlog. This means you don't get overly bright (or dark) 'speech bubbles'.

3. The shade of the text of the avie's name takes into account what colour their background is, so they should all be readable regardless of hue shifts.

4. The upload form is now working, so anyone can create their own chatlogs.

5. There's now a link to a plaintext version on each chatlog.

Obviously though, there are shed-loads of things I still need to do...

1. A version that was half-way between the 'rich' and the 'plain' styles would be nice — something that didn't have the cunning colours and graphics, but still retained some sense of 'typographical implementation'. Something you could print out maybe.

2. A proper index page that listed recent chatlogs, and let you search through them by tag.

3. Some sort of properly thought-through legal disclaimer, considering that I'm kinda keeping a database of potentially personal information.

4. An option to be able to 'cut-n-paste' the output into an external page. I've kinda done this, but it's a bit kludgy in the way that it handles styles (they're all inline CSS at the moment)

Anyways, here's the log from the first Art and Design Educators Meetup from yesterday, where a few of us from the UK who are involved in teaching in SL from the point of view of Art and Design disciplines got together to just have a chat about what we were all up to at the moment.

Alright, "my new tactic"

If you get two consecutive 'bubbles' from the same person, could you combine them to save space or would it cause problems?

Well, I could, but I rather like the approach I'm using at the moment — that the orientation of the 'bubble' only switches if the person isn't the same as the previous.

It also keeps the 'style' of a text-chat intact, I feel.

sl2flickr

secondlife flickr

I'm on a bit of a roll today

You may remember ages back I wrote a little thing that let you use the "Send a Postcard" option in Second Life snapshots to automagically upload photos to Flickr, and add them to the SL Pool, complete with tags giving geo-location data.

A week or so ago, Linden Lab changed the format of the postcards, which although gave lovely higher-rez photos, totally broke my script

So I've redone it, and implemented the machine readable tags that a few of us were discussing.

If you want to take advantage of it, you just sign up to the site, send all your postcards to sl2flickr@eyefood.co.uk, et voilá

(Changing the tags though, means my map-mashup thing is now borken¹. Which is OK, because I really probably needed to rewrite the thing anyway)

¹ That's a typo, but I kinda like it.

"Women prefer feminine men"

link

"...what we are finding is that they prefer more feminine and definitely more healthy men" — bugger. Thought I was onto a winner there. [The Guardian]

Lune

photo lancaster

I've never noticed this before. On the slipway down to the river, next to the Millennium Bridge, these great big stone letters have appeared.

I can't help but be slightly irritated by the kerning between the L and U though

Sentries

photo lancaster bottlebank

I like these guys Why does the brown one only have one eye though?

OK, I'll bite — elaborate

You mean in seven years no-one's bothered to fix the kerning?

You know, I think my favourite ever "Lune-based Joke" is this one from Selina...