I found the following blog entry on a leaked memo from Microsoft about life at google really interesting:

http://no2google.wordpress.com/2007/06/24/life-at-google-the-microsoftie-perspective/

Basically, a new Microsoft employee, who formerly worked at Google, is dishing out all the info he can about his former employer to Microsoft so that they can better understand their competition. Some of the more interesting pieces of info:

* All of the food at Google is free – breakfast, lunch and dinner – however, they stop serving hot breakfast at 8:30 and they don’t start serving dinner until 6 or 6:30, thus encouraging people to come early and leave late.
* A lot of people don’t get around to doing their 20% project.
* The culture is very college-like.
* People tend to take their work home with them.
* Office space apparently sucks.

However, though this memo tends to try and put everything in a negative light, I still think Google has some pretty awesome perks. Hell, if Northrop Grumman served free hot breakfast before 8:30, I’d probably try and get in earlier, and if lunch was free I’d probably eat there instead of packing a lunch. In fact, I hope the whole free food thing catches on, because food isn’t that expensive and a large company could easily buy in bulk and save its employees some cash.

I also like the idea of free t-shirts and free soda. Though maybe I’m living in a dream world.

At Northrop we do get free brownies on Friday, however, that’s only because one of the ladies on the floor bakes them for everyone. We also have giant snack room, however, you have to pay for the snacks you take.

I’ve talked to many of my non-techie friends and they’re surprised by the perks I get, so maybe I shouldn’t be so selfish. However, I hope the trend of free stuff continues and spreads to other companies.

I had this big long journal entry in my head that I wanted to write, but at the moment I’m completely exhausted, so I’ll just give you the basic talking points:

* TAAG has had some major updates
- 11 New AOL fonts were added
- The code was optimized a bit, so it should run faster
- A preview page has been fully constructed with all of the fonts. Lets me know how this looks. I plan to spruce it up a little and maybe add a few more features in.

* I’ve been thinking it’s time to move onto my next application. I’ve got 2 ideas in mind that I want to implement. One is something easy that someone suggested through email, and the other would take a little bit of research and a little more time. Both would be online apps.

* I’ll probably be buying a new car within the next two weeks (maybe even on Sunday). My current plan is to get a Tiburon. I know it doesn’t have the highest ratings in everything (though it has gotten decent ratings and all the reviews I read were positive), but it looks awesome – yes, not a reason one should buy a car, but it’d be nice to drive something that actually looked cool.

Clear your caches people, TAAG has had the following updates made to it:

- 136 FIGlet fonts were added. Many of these I haven’t tested out yet, however, they should all work fine.
- “Smushing” should now work 100% correctly. Each FIGlet font has a series of rules that determines how its letters “smush” into each other when they are side by side. You can turn this option off/on by unchecking/checking the “Horizontal Text Smushing” checkbox.
- Some behind the scenes stuff that you wont notice but makes the code nicer.

View TAAG here: http://www.patorjk.com/software/taag 

I’m not sure I’ll finish the preview page today, which is why I’m updating this so early. If I do get it done within the next few days, I’ll just edit this entry to announce it.

Also, within the next few days around 10 new AOL fonts will be added. Awesome Andrew was kind enough to send me a copy of my old prog “Fallen Legion” which had a whole bunch of them. For more info see the comments in the post below this one.

TAAG

Big updates coming for the TAAG program. On Sunday, I hope to have the following:

- 100+ new fonts uploaded
- A preview page that will show you all of the fonts

Pic to HTML

One of ideas I’ve been toying with for a future project is a Pic to HTML program. This appeals to me mostly because I made one way back in the day and have lately had a few requests for it, I have a few new ideas that I think would make it worth writing, and because it would sort of compliment the TAAG program. I was thinking of making it an online web app, so I decided to survey what else was out there. One of the apps I saw had a disclaimer from the author, saying you had to login before you made anything. This was because someone was apparently uploading gross/illegal images to his server.

I would assume, and I may be wrong on this, that he knew the images were gross/illegal because he was logging what images people used in his program. Though he did later say he wasn’t doing this, so I’m not sure how he knew. However, this did give me some pause. I guess I’m naive, but using these web applications I would assume everything I do is private, however, this is most likely not the case in every web app. When the app isn’t on your computer, you don’t really control where the data goes. Hell, someone could write an online app and then funnel all your data to some marketing firm or use it to spy on you.

These ideas kind of creeped me out, and made me realize why online apps probably aren’t more popular. So if I do decide to make a Pic to HTML program, I’ll probably make 2 versions – one you can download, and one you can use online. Though I promise you all that I’d never log any info you inputted into one of my programs. However, we’re talking about weeks from now (hell, TAAG isn’t even done yet), and I have some other ideas I’m playing around with, so at this point in time, I don’t know what my next project will be.

Fourm

On my stats page I’m noticing I’m getting around 20 hits a month to http://forum.patorjk.com. I’m not sure if there’s a link somewhere on the web pointing to that, or if people are checking to see if the message board still exists, but there are no forums on this site. At the current moment I’m averaging 70-something hits a day (though the past few days I’ve been getting 100+ visitors, which has been cool). I have no plans on bringing the forums back until I’m getting 500+ visits a day, and even then I’ll have to think about it. I did really like the community this site once had, but you can’t grow something like that overnight, and I don’t want them to be a ghost town (what they ended up turning into the past few years).

Blogroll

Are there any likeminded sites out there? In the past, I felt like I was part of a community of sites, these days, I sort of feel like I’m out on my own. Like I pointed out a while ago, a lot of my previous contemporaries have either abandoned their sites or gone on to other things. Hell, I don’t regularly visit many programming sites / blogs anymore. I feel like I should be though. I was linking to my (real life) friend David’s site, but he hasn’t updated it in 7 months and it’s mostly just for his personal photos anyway.

Last night I made two major updates made to the Text Ascii Art Generator:

- A whole crap load of fonts were uploaded, probably between 80 and 100.
- I added some Javascript that converted URLs into hyperlinks in the sections about the FIGlet font authors (the “Click for Info” link). I figured this would be a nice gesture toward the font authors since most people, including myself, are usually too lazy to copy and paste a URL. You can see this script in action in the information section for fonts like “AMC razor 2″ and “Sub-Zero”, as well as many others. Alas, after implementing this I discovered most author’s homepages were long gone. Oh well, I still think it’s a nice addition.

To those of you curious as to how this was implemented I used regular expressions. This changed what could have been a lot of code, into one simple line of code! Check it out:

String.prototype.urlsToHyperlinks = function()
{
  return this.replace(/\bhttp:[^ \)\n\<]+/g, “<a href=’$&’ target=’_new’>$&</a>”);
}

And then to use it, do this:

var urlText = “blah blah blah http://www.patorjk.com/ blah blah blah http://www.google.com/”;
var hyperlinkedText = urlText.urlsToHyperlinks();
alert(hyperlinkedText);

Feel free to use this however you want.

If the above code just looked like a bunch of gibberish, don’t worry, regular expressions are easy to pick up. You just need to get the syntax down. Here are some links that should help you get on your feet pretty quickly:

http://www.webreference.com/js/column5/
http://www.javascriptkit.com/javatutors/re.shtml
http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_replace.asp – Make sure you read example 4. Too many people don’t realize that about the Javascript replace function.

It’s weird that I’m not getting much feed back on the TAAG program. Normally I would take that as a sign that people aren’t interested in it. But it’s definitely causing my bandwidth to go up and it’s causing me to get visitors from google. So I’m not sure what to make of the silence. It’s cool to finally get people from google though. I’ve almost always relied completely on word of mouth or links from other sites to get traffic for this site.

Top 6 keywords used in search engines to find this site (from the 1st of June to this posting):

For the whole month of April, the top keyword was “patorjk” (who searches for that?) and it brought in 39 visitors.

TAAG (Text Ascii Art Generator) has been updated with new fonts and features:

http://www.patorjk.com/software/taag/

New goodies:
- Support for FIGlet font types
- Font alignment
- Smushing – This feature is currently a little buggy / incomplete. PLEASE tell me if you notice errors with the fonts while using this
- Font categories
- Info about the font authors
- Loads of new fonts added

There will be more to come, but I figured it was best to give some kind of update since I said on here I’d do it a week ago. I hope to update this as the week goes on and work out any kinks. There will also be more fonts added soon, currently I haven’t had time to go through all of the fonts in the FIGlet database (http://www.figlet.org/fontdb.cgi).

Again, if you notice any bugs (most likely in the font smushing), let me know!

Also, if you have any of the old AOL fonts, send them my way!