I love google. Lately it’s been bringing me lots of visitors. It brought me 55 yesterday, which is a pretty damn cool (and pretty good for a small site like this one). However, this past weekend when I messed up my .htaccess file, it brought me no one. In case you weren’t here: I screwed up my 301 redirect links and no one was able to access anything in the /software, /downloads, or /programming directories of this site (you were just redirected to one of my blog pages). I will now do a total site checkout after touching that file. I can’t believe I was that stupid.

Like an idiot I let this error sit around for a few days before I realized something was terribly wrong. That something wrong was that google was no longer bringing me traffic. I’d fallen in my page rank. I quickly fixed the error and my page rank mostly returned. However, my ranking for the term Patrick Gillespie seems to have disappeared. I was actually kind of hoping to grab the top spot from that stupid news article on the pervert named Patrick Gillespie. Though then again, it was my Tiburon entry that was climbing the top ten of that page, and I’m not so sure that article would look good next to one titled “Patrick Gillespie arrested for failing to register as a sex offender.”

Back to the topic at hand though. Luckily google forgave my foolish .htaccess blunder. I was reading an article on some other blog earlier this week where the site owner wasn’t as lucky:

Google Penalty Nightmare

Google penalizes sites for certain offenses. Usually this is because a site is trying to do something artificial to raise its page rank. But since google doesn’t tell these sites the reason they are penalized, no one can be sure why a page suddenly drops in its page rank – or in some cases, is removed from the search results. Sometimes you mess up and things go back to normal (like me), and sometimes you mess up and things are sucky for a decent amount of time (like the girl in the blog entry above).

I find the whole idea of a secret penalty system quite interesting. It makes sense that they wouldn’t release all of the details, because then people would know exactly what to try and get around. Not knowing what you’re up against means there are more mines you could potentially step on, and when those mines are things like being removed from google’s search results, you’re less likely to do something to try and cheat the system. At least that’s what I think their reasoning is.

Not surprisingly, webmasters have tried to understand this system and some have even put together lists of possible google penalty filters. Below is one such list:

Google Filters

Jargon you’ll need to know to understand that article:
SERPS = Search engine results pages
SEO = Search engine optimization

If you’re a webmaster, that article is worth reading. It’s even caused me to think twice about the naming of my “links” section – though it’s late now so I’ll rename it later.

Oh yeah, in case you’re wondering, the title of this entry is a reference to a famous Homer Simpson quote. I figured it would probably be a good idea to mention that :).

There’s been a decent amount of hysteria on some of the social news web sites about a new campaign to block Firefox users. The reasoning behind this is because Firefox has a plug-in that allows you block ads.  Proponents of this campaign argue that this robs website owners of the opportunity to make money from their site. You can see the campaign’s website here:

http://whyfirefoxisblocked.com

The majority of people who are reacting to this seem to be upset about this. However, after doing a bunch of googling, I was only able to find one site that is participating in this campaign (and it sucks).

Anyway, I figured I’d give my opinion on this issue since I’m sure I’m in the minority. Frankly, I don’t see why so many people are getting upset. If a website is going to block you, just don’t visit that website. There are millions of places to go on the internet, if a handful of sites want their ad revenue and you don’t want to look at ads, just don’t go to those websites. For every site that blocks Firefox, I’m sure an alternative will spring up somewhere.

I kind of like the ad revenue based system though, since it allows a lot of stuff to be free. Most sites I visit have a tasteful display of ads. If I go to a website and they ambush with lots of crap, I just never go there again. I’d hate to see this model replaced with a model where ads are injected into the actual content (movies and TV shows sometimes do this). I wouldn’t put it above sites to do this either. They’re going to make their money one way or another (or disappear).

As a site note, according to my web stats, 37% of the people who visit this website use Firefox. 52% use Internet Explorer, and the rest use a variety of other browsers. I guess that’s indicative of a more web savvy audience.

VB Arrays Tutorial

I noticed from my stats page that chicanerous’ VB Arrays tutorial was getting between 8 and 10 views a day. This made me realize a decent number of people were reading it and I felt sort of bad that I had it displayed with such a crappy layout. The grey background and white text on a stand alone page made the tutorial look very low quality, so I decided to give it a make over and add a section on the Split and Join functions:

http://www.patorjk.com/programming/tutorials/vbarrays.htm

Also, there will be more updates to the programming section soon. It’s been pretty sparse for a while.

Links

I’ve created a formal link section. On my old website, I had a link exchange program. I will no longer do this. Mainly because I had a lot of crappy links submitted to me, and at the time I figured it was better to be nice and do the link exchange than to reject someone who probably visited my page regularly. However, I actually ended up having a few people email me asking why I had a couple of really crappy sites linked (I wont name names). I’m sure this caused them (and others) not to trust the link suggestions I gave. There was also the problem with people unlinking me after I linked them, which was annoying (especially if I didn’t like their site to begin with).

So now I’m just going to limit it to sites that I like, think are interesting, have useful/relevant content, and feel are worth checking out. As time goes on I hope to add a lot more than what’s there now. I haven’t decided if I want to focus on smaller sites or just interesting sites in general. My gut is to go with smaller sites, but we shall see.

Sleep

I haven’t been getting much sleep lately. I guess there’s no point to me saying that here, but I’m pretty tired right now and felt like sharing :P. There was actually going to be more added today, I just didn’t get around to it, maybe this weekend though.

One thing that has always bothered me is software patents. They just seem wrong. How can someone own a way of doing something? Or own a technique that others would come up with when trying to solve the same problem? They seem like unnatural restraints, like patenting the solution to a math problem. I can understand wanting to protect your ideas, but I honestly don’t think most software ideas are novel enough to warrant a patent, especially at the rate that the US government seems to be giving them out. I’m mean hell, who can be expected to know about all the stupid things people have patented? There is no fucking way that there were 40,000 patent-worthy software ideas that came out last year. That’s completely absurd.

One example that always comes to mind when of thinking about why software patents are bad is the story of what happened to id Software while they were developing Doom 3. Essentially John Carmack, the technical director at id Software, came up with a neat way of doing real time shadowing, which he called Carmack’s Reverse. After discussing the technique on his blog, it was discovered that two researchers had already patented the idea. In order to be able to use the technique, Carmack had to come to an agreement with them. Someone else, independently of these two parties, had also discovered the technique and presented it at a conference before the patent was filed. This person offered to let id Software use it for free, but id Software decided to play it safe and strike a deal with the patent owners [1].

Its things like that that bother me. Someone is toiling away writing a piece of code, they come up with a great way for solving a problem, implement it, and then later learn some researcher in a lab somewhere has patented the idea – probably just so they can say they have X number of patents – and now they have to pay to use a technique that they came up with on their own.

But I digress. I could go on for 10 pages about why I don’t like software patents. My focus here is that I’ve learned that a patent has been granted for the creation of photomosaics, those neat images that are made up of smaller images. The abstract reads as follows [2]:

A mosaic image is formed from a database of source images. More particularly, the source images are analyzed, selected and organized to produce the mosaic image. A target image is divided into tile regions, each of which is compared with individual source image portions to determine the best available matching source image by computing red, green and blue channel root-mean square error. The mosaic image is formed by positioning the respective best-matching source images at the respective tile regions.

I honestly don’t blame the person who filed this patent, since they were one of the first people to create mosaics with photos [3], and they wanted to make sure people didn’t profit at their expense. However, I still really dislike the idea of patenting a way of doing something, especially when the method seems rather obvious. I was able to write a photomosaic generation program when I was in 11th grade, and I didn’t have to look up an algorithm, I just made one up (yes, Mosaicer was written when I was in high school).

The only part of that abstract that seems outside the normal algorithm for creating your basic mosaic is the part that mentions the “root-mean square error” in relation to the color difference. That part is significant because it does a much better matching job than taking a simple color difference (what Mosaicer does). However, spend any time in a reading up on color differences, and you’ll learn that that’s the way to do color differences in RGB color space. So I’m not sure why this abstract as a whole was considered so novel.

Furthermore, the RGB color space is flawed in that it’s a non-uniform color space. Instead of using the RGB color space, one could use the L*a*b* color space, which is a uniform color space that has some of the most precise color difference formulas ever developed.

There’s also another way of creating photomosaics, outside of simply changing the color space and color difference methods. 90% of the people who read what follows will have no clue what I’m talking about, but try to follow along because this is a completely different way of patch matching than what is described in the patent abstract. Instead of dividing the target image into blocks and seeing which input images best fit the blocks, one can use Fast Fourier Transform patch matching [4, 5]. This technique wasn’t discovered until 2002, and I haven’t seen anyone discuss it with relation to creating photomosaics.

When using this method you transform you data into frequency space, perform some calculations, and then you transform your data back into the normal space. Because frequency space is a weird place, multiplication becomes addition. Therefore your computation time is greatly reduced when calculating squared color differences in frequency space. Kwatra et at [6] wrote about the speed up this matching technique provided in their paper on graph cut texture synthesis. With the simple RGB method, generation time for a particular video was 10 minutes, with the FFT method, generation time on the same video was 5 seconds. This is actually how I came across the FFT patch matching. I had to implement Kwatra’s paper for a graphics project I was assigned.

After reading the FFT paper, I immediately saw the possible application to photomosaics – however, after implementing the FFT patch matching method and seeing its nuts and bolts I wasn’t sure how much of a speed up it would actually provide, since it performs more calculations than needed for photomosaic patch matching (it tells you how well the image matched at every offset instead of just the subset of offsets needed for tile placement). In fact, I wondered if it could end up slowing things down. But there are ways of optimizing it for photomosaics, so it was (and is) unclear to me how much of a speed up or slow down effect it would have.

As you can probably tell, I never got around to trying out the above method in relation to photomosaics, mostly because I’m not that interested in photomosaics anymore. But I did put it on my list of possible things to do in the future. I will never patent any of these ideas discussed here so they’re free for anyone to use. However, I have no clue if someone has already thought of them and patented them. So I can’t make that guarantee. Though I figured I’d make a post noting all of this in case no patent for this exist, just so there are patent free methods for photomosaic creation out there.

References:
[1] http://techreport.com/onearticle.x/7113
[2] http://v3.espacenet.com/textdoc?DB=EPODOC&IDX=US6137498
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photomosaic#History
[4] http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~torsten/Publications/Papers/icip02.pdf
[5] http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~mark/ftp/Icip02/images/icip_2002.jpg
[6] http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~turk/my_papers/graph_cuts.pdf

One thing that annoyed me about my TAAG program was that every time you changed fonts, the top frame had to be reloaded. This was because the program needed to talk to the server to get the information about the new font. However, technically, nothing on the page needed to be redrawn, so refreshing the whole frame seemed like a little much, and when you change fonts a lot, it gets annoying. Anyway, this week I was reading up on AJAX, which is a way of talking to the server without reloading the webpage. Since this was just was I was looking for, I decided to incorporate the technique into TAAG:

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

The top frame will still reload is you change the “Font Type” or if you select a font from the preview page. However, it should not reload if you change fonts via the drop down font list. Also, there is a bug in Firefox where the “onchange” event isn’t triggered for keypresses on listboxes, I’ve set things up so you should now be able to change fonts with your keyboard on Firefox. A few other things were updated as well, but it was all small stuff.

If you’re thinking about developing web applications or interactive webpages, AJAX is worth reading up on. I wish I’d known about it sooner. Later this week I think I’ll start on my next program, it’ll be another web program and I’m unsure of how long it’ll take to make.

Visits were up for the month of July, I’m not exactly sure why, but it’s certainly encouraging! Thanks to all of you who come here, it motivates me to keep working on this site. As far as stats go, I’ve actually sort of been wondering how to best promote this site. Towards the end of the month I realized I hadn’t submitted this site to any search engines, so I did that. However, I was listed on most of them already, so I’m assuming manually submitting a site doesn’t do a whole lot. I did find some interesting web tools available from google though:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/

If you have a website you may want to check that out. It’ll give you interesting information about how your site is ranked in their search engine. Stuff like your highest ranked page, sites that point to you that count in your page rank, when the last time your page was crawled, and a couple of other things. Anyway, here are the stats…

July Stats:
Average Number of Visitors a Day: 120.94
Total Number of Visitors: 3749
Total Amount of Bandwidth Used: 2.91 GB

June Stats:
Average Number of Visitors a Day: 84.00
Total Number of Visitors: 2520
Total Amount of Bandwidth Used: 547.01 MB

I was one of those people who waited out side the book store in a long line, right before midnight, when “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” was released. The atmosphere was great: There were people in costumes (one group showed up dressed as jedis - which made no sense), lots of excited people, and lots of cute girls. I was actually pretty astonished. There are a lot of cute girls that read the Harry Potter books.

It was kind of odd for me to be there though, I felt sort of like a charlatan since I was only 100 pages into the fourth book (even now I’m still on the fourth book). I was picking up my mom’s reserved copy though, and I couldn’t resist the idea of a midnight book release. It seemed like a fun thing to be a part of.

Anyway, it’s that time of year again. Since this is the final book, I knew it’d be bigger and there’d be more crazy stuff going on. But unfortunately for me, it wasn’t to be. I’ve been sick as hell the past 3 days, and right now my throat hurts so much that I can barely talk. So I had to pass on the opportunity to check out the madness. My brother did drive by one of the local book stores though, about 15-30 minutes prior to midnight, just to see what was up. Here are some pics from the front lines:

I feel sorry for the people who work at the book store.

On an unrelated note, I’ve changed the root directory of this site - patorjk.com - so that it’s a frame that points to this page. I felt this was better than having a crappy looking page redirect you here. A brief check out of things seems to indicate that all is well. Let me know if you have any problems though. It’s actually a frameset with only one frame object in it. I had no idea you could do that until I tested it out (on IE and Firefox).

I’ve added a few things from my previous site:

• Visual Basic Arrays Tutorial by Adam Wehmann - An array tutorial that covers the basics of arrays and how you use them in VB.
• API Spy Tutorial by Digial Rampage - Wonder what an API Spy is and how to use it? This is a short and simple tutorial that’ll cover what you need to know.
• Mosaic Gallery - A collection of mosaics generated by Mosaicer 2.0.

Basically, two programming related tutorials that were written for this site and a gallery of mosaics. I think I want my programming section to consist of just tutorials this time, instead of downloadable examples. Well, I may do a little of both, but tutorials appeal a lot more to me. And for the moment being, I’m not taking any submissions, even though I’ve had a few people offer to write examples. Somewhere inside of me there is a Regular Expressions tutorial, but I want to wait a while, and I need to think up some really good examples for it. In school when I was taught about regular expressions, they were presented in the most boring way possible and we were shown no real world application of them. It was only recently that I re-discovered them and realized how great they really were.

I’ve stopped doing Spot Lighted Site posts and no one has called me on it. Not that I’d think any of you would lose any sleep over it, I felt kind of corny doing a weekly feature like that anyway. From now on I’m only going to sporadically feature a site or an article, since a lot of “Spot Lighted” posts might clutter up the main page and make it harder for people to find the real news. I’m also kind of torn on what kind of sites to feature. In the past I’ve featured some completely non-programming related sites like antigirl.com and sullen (now defunct), but it doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense for me to do that. I think I want to keep this site mostly on focus - though deviations from time to time are good. So I guess with all this rambling what I’m trying to say is that there’ll be less Spot Lighted Sites (like what’s been happening for the past month), and when something is talked about, it’ll hopefully have some kind of interest to the people who come here.

During my senior year of high school I had the bright idea that I could make a living developing shareware - or at least pocket a few extra bucks that would make life a little easier. So I set forth on an idea that I had been throwing around in my head - a program that would allow you to easily create image maps for your web pages.

This decision was not made after examining the market and realizing there was a demand for this product. No, I decided to make an image mapper because:

A) I thought it would be fun to develop the moveable shape interface (shapes you can draw and then move around). It seemed like an interesting challenge for a visual basic app.
B) I saw some shareware image mapper that was selling for $15 and it royally sucked. I knew I could do better than that - and I figured I could make my product half the cost.

The development itself went pretty smoothly. I remember being at school, making notes on how I’d design everything. The pre-hype for the program also seemed to be pretty good. After my API Spy, Form shaper, and Mosaic app, a lot of people were interested in what I’d put out next - especially as a shareware app. I was even able to coax the then well known graphic designer Plastik into doing my intro graphic. So I had high hopes for the program.

However, when the release date came, I was getting kind of sick of the application and didn’t do much promotion besides posting up a notice on my main page. This wasn’t just because I was bored of the program, college was coming up and I had agreed to work for some start up (long story). So to make a long story short, I spent a lot of time making the program, but didn’t spend enough time promoting it. And because my audience at the time (VB developers, mostly prog developers) had no need or interest in the app, it didn’t make much of a wave.

I think I made a total of $100 after the first year, which kind of bummed me out. I realized I had picked the wrong application to make and I had not promoted it correctly. It left a bad taste in my month and whenever I think of the program, it sort of reminds me of failing. However, every time I actually open it up and look at it, I think it’s a pretty cool. It reminds me that I was a pretty good developer while in high school, and for some reason, I always forget that I was able to get Plastik to do the intro art, which blew my mind at the time. Anyway, I opened up the app earlier today and thought to myself “why did I decide not to post this??” So without further ado, I’m re-introducing this program for download. Below you’ll find some screen shots and links to two different zip files.

[Download] - The setup file.
[Download] - Just the exe and help file.

I’m a big fan of stats and seeing what works and what doesn’t work. At the end of the day, it appears that TAAG was a worth while program to write. Hopefully I can continue to think up new stuff that will be interesting for people to check out. My end of the year goal is to be getting 500+ visitors a day. However, that may be a pie in the sky dream because even if I kept increasing my visitor count by  18.3%, I wouldn’t make that goal.

Also, based on the search engine results, I think I can conclude that google is awesome.

June Stats:
Average Number of Visitors a Day: 84.00
Total Number of Visitors: 2520
Total Amount of Bandwidth Used: 547.01 MB

May Stats:
Average Number of Visitors a Day: 71.00
Total Number of Visitors: 2201
Total Amount of Bandwidth Used: 154.19 MB

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.

Alas, I was unable to finish my updates to the TAAG program. I’ll shoot for this weekend.

New York was a lot of fun. Unfortunately my camera broke, however, my friends took lots of pictures. I may edit this post later with one or two of them.

Edit: Eh, I’ll just link by buddy’s flickr account:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/iamstuffed

I’m the guy in the Radiohead t-shirt.

Even though the reception for my TAAG program has been somewhat quiet, I’m going to continue my plans to finish it up. I hope to by the end of this week add support for FIGlet font file types - that will open TAAG up to using hundreds of different ASCII Art fonts, which will be pretty cool. I also have a few more “advanced” features in mind. All in all, I’m shooting for being completely done with it in two weeks.

After that I’m going to look at my list of ideas and pick what I think would best fit this site. I’ve actually had a wealth of good ideas in the past few weeks, so I’m actually kind of excited about getting started on a new project. I just have to pick something of the right size (I don’t have a lot of free time) and something that would appeal to people who already visit this site.

For a couple of weeks I’ve been talking with some of my grad school friends about possibly starting up an online business. We’ve had a couple of really cool ideas, but due to them still being in school, we haven’t really had a chance to implemented anything yet. We were going to have a meeting about some new ideas tonight, but one of them decided they wanted to get drunk instead so things have been postponed I suppose. I think if the project with them goes no where, I may eventually strike out on my own and try my hand at an online business. I see so many websites offering interesting little services and most of the time I think to myself “man, I could have done that!”