Ascii art

Yup, good old classic Ascii art.
Getting more and more high tech here at Palmnet by the minute!

Anyway, though this may sound like a trivial topic, and you might just be right there, I have been fiddling round with a script I started a few weeks back.
While on MSN with a Mr. Dan Horgan I was trying to find something to busy myself with, and something other than the Computing college work I was meant to be doing.
Thus the idea of an image to ascii art generator was spawned!
The original challenge was to see how much of it I could do in an hour, and in that time I managed to get about 4 greyscale levels going on from a full colour jpeg. This wasn't too pretty, as I'm sure you can understand.
However, since then I have bumped it up to 6 shades of grey, yes, a massive 6!
It also has colour, plain shading, no shading, scaling (antialiased) and back colouring too!

Anyway, that's far too much waffle, so if you actually read this point I guess you deserve some screenshots:




Or to try it out yourself, visit: http://sandbox.palmnet.me.uk/ascii/test.php
And use the parameters: 'scale=', 'colour', 'backcolour', 'plain', 'blank'.

RSS / PWnet

Also from recent news, PWnet has just had an update of the main site.
However Phil Wylie, head of PWnet was having a few issues with an RSS feed display on his contact form that would notify prospective contactors of any known issues, to save him getting lots of emails all based on a common theme.
20 minutes with me and his script was ready to go!
Check out the RSS notifications on his contact form now. (Take note there might not be any if PWnet is running smoothly, which it always does of course :P)

College

Well, computing work was finally handed in!
Coming up to 100 pages of pure drivel, reminds me of this rather long blog post...
Anyway, just a bit of electronics to do, hopefully done by tomorrow and then I have a week or two to play about till serious revision time kicks in!
In that time I hope to maybe add a couple of new features to the new Palmnet system, update the blog system a little, iron out a whole heap of bugs and perhaps even start on the shoutboxes next version: MNAH.

Anyway, Lack of posting recently is my excuse for this HUGE post. I'll try post shorter stuff, and post it more often though

Well today I went to Slashdot and got a little not above my normal news saying I was invited to a beta system called "Firehose".
This new system has been set up by the Slashdot admins because unlike some news sites, the news that makes the front page is moderated by a group of admins, rather than chosen by popular opinion.
This has its ups and downs, The best part about this kind of moderation is that news that des make the front page is really good news.
However it means it can be old news as the moderation time can be lengthy.

This new Firehose system is designed to flag the popular stories up for the admins via a rating system.

Anyway, enough talk, lets take a look shall we?

The basic interface lets you select between rating Journals, Stories and things I have rated.
You rate a story by clicking a nice little 'Thumbs up' or 'Thumbs down' icon on each story.
The little icons on the top right of the Firehose header bar are for sorting through stories, so you can find those hot stories faster, or find the ones that are yet to be discovered.

You also get an extra option where you can save custom filters. You just click the 'Unknown' link and type in a filter like 'story Linux' for Linux only only stories:

You can also see in this screenshot more clearly the temperature style filter too. The coloured bar lets you scroll between hot stories (Red) and the not so hot stories (Black).

When you change filters the list below refreshes dynamically with AJAX. This is pretty slick looking, and it didn't lag up much, apart from when you select all stories and it spends a while organising them and sliding things about.
It was pretty hard to get a screenshot of this, obviously, but here is a mid-refresh shot as it loads a new filter:


So all in all I'd give it a 8/10.
It has a purpose, and this system carries it out very well. However it wasn't all too intuitive, unlike other rating sites from YouTube with its star rating system to Digg and its very basic one click rating.
I'll leave you with a nice colorful screenshot, probably what I like best. Slashdot is usually a very dull site to look at, but this looks very modern and the bright colours of the temperatures really stick out.

Hotlinking:Bandwidth theft is the intentional usage of someone's bandwidth without that person's authorization.

Basically linking to images without permission.
Normally if a person asks me I'll be more than happy to let them use the bandwidth I have, but now I have a contact form there is no excuse to link to images here without asking.

So, in retaliation I did the customary thing: The old switcheroo!
Where I upload a different image in place of the old one. this is usually a rude or disgusting image, swapped in place to make the hotlinker regret ever stealing my bandwidth, but I decided to go one step further and make a custom image for "Mr. Jez K".
Here is the result:


Or, if you want to see his myspace which might stay pony-style for some time to come yet: http://www.myspace.com/jezk