Knowing that I’m 26 makes me feel old. When I don’t think about the number, I feel like a young guy. At work, I’m the only person on my team who’s in their 20’s. Less than 2 years ago I was in college working on my masters. So on one hand, I am sort of still young, but knowing that college is completely behind me and that I’m more than a quarter century old makes me feel like I’m beginning to exit the “young” era.

Time seems to just fly by, doesn’t it? It was actually almost 10 years ago that I started this site up. I don’t remember the exact date the site went online, but I believe it was sometime during the Spring of 1998. Here’s an early screen shot from its first incarnation (the very first version of the site was just the main frame without the left hand navigation panel):

I still remember getting email from people who said they loved the content of my site, but hated the design. Each page had its own crazy background image and moving gifs. I had no clue what I was doing though, it was just a fun project. It’s cool to think that its survived so long.

As an interesting side note, I was originally inspired to start this site after getting an email that said “Your site sucks”. See, back in ~1996 I found a free personal webpage service called Geocities. Since no one had their own web page back then, I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. So I created a Geocities webpage. However, since I wasn’t very computer literate, I fumbled around with their online editor, got frustrated, and then left. The site ended up being a black background with black text, the text being a list of jokes I had swiped from some other site. And for no apparent reason, the page had a picture of Spock in the upper left hand corner (they only had like 5 sample images that their editor would let you use). This guy must have found my forgotten creation while browsing the Geocities’ website directory. Apparently it upset him so much that he felt like he needed to send me an email. I was so annoyed with the message that I decided to go fix the page up, and while doing that I decided to make it about my current interest – which at the time was programming.

Had I not gotten that email I probably would have still eventually started this web site, however, it would have had a different history and it might have even gone in a different direction. It’s odd that a piece of hate mail motivated me to create something that evolved into what you now see before you. The butterfly effect at work.

Anyway, going back to age, I suppose you’re only as old as you feel, and at the moment, I feel pretty young.

TAAG

I’ve been trying out some new Javascript tools for possible inclusions in upcoming apps, but nothing I really want to get too much into now. TAAG has seen some significant updates in the past few days though. I completely changed the interface in the control panel and added two new features:

• A feature that lets you open your text up in a new window. So you can more easily share what you type with your friends. Check it out. Right now the feature is still in beta and doesn’t have all of the capabilities of the normal text that’s generated (colors, alignment, etc). I hope to add that by the end of the week (it’s a quick addition, I’ve just been really really short on time).
• This one was a request, it’s a feature that allows you to replace the white spaces with whatever character you want. This feature can be found in the “More Options” section.

Originally I had been aiming to update the “Image Color Palette Generator”, but I ended up getting stuck on something so I decided to take a break and work on some TAAG updates. Hopefully there will be a new version of ICPG out sometime this month.

Forums

Despite not catching immediate fire, I’m keeping the patorjk.com forums alive and active. I plan to check them out at least 3 times a day. So feel free to look around or make a post or two. I’ve recently changed the “SEO” forum into a “Web Related” forum. It’s sort of a catch all forum for anything interesting that’s web related.

A Real Programmer?

“I’m not one of these younger guys who don’t really know anything. I’m an older guy, a real programmer with real experience.” So those weren’t his exact words, I’m paraphrasing from memory, but it contains the basic idea he was expressing. I over heard this from the cube next to me while I was eating lunch. Honestly, I was pretty shocked to hear someone say this. While experience does make one a better programmer, I actually haven’t noticed that much of a quality difference between the younger programmers and the older programmers. In fact, the most talented programmer I’ve met at work is 27. It almost seems like programming skill grows logarithmically. You learn and a lot in the beginning, but then as you get more experienced, the skills you pick up only make you slightly better over all. And people who aren’t that great after a year or two, never really become that great.

So hearing some old guy go on and on about himself while bashing on the younger guys sort of ruffled my feathers. Since I had been pretty busy running around all over the place, I wasn’t at my cube but at a “general use” cube (so to speak), so I didn’t know who sat in this area. I was just kind of by myself, eating a sandwich and surfing the web. The voice sounded familiar though. The man continued to trumpet his own skill and put down the “less experienced” when I suddenly realized who he was.

I had actually spent the whole previous day fixing his mangled software. He hadn’t been able to get it to work, even after a 2 week extension, and he had now moved onto another project, so his work had been tasked to me. And I, a younger and “less experienced” programmer, had done what he could not do, and in a day, and now here he was bashing on the younger guys. I was actually pretty annoyed. Even if he had been a good programmer I would have been annoyed. I’m by far the youngest person on my team (by at least 8 years) so part of me had to wonder if he was thinking about me while he gave this little speech. He may have just been trying to talk himself up to his new boss, but what he was saying was still BS.

Anyway, I had enough sense not to interrupt his diatribe or let him know I was around, but I did file it into the back of my mind. Hopefully when I’m 40+ I don’t have an arrogant streak where I go around thinking I’m better just because I’m older, especially if it leaves me blind to my own incompetence.

Image Color Palette Generator Update

I’ve thrown in the towel and done away with the image uploading. The new Color Palette App simply wasn’t being consistent in what it could handle. The ability to upload an image is extremely useful to the user, but since I’m currently under shared hosting (ie, lots of other sites are hosted on the same server), I apparently don’t really have the horse power to handle some of the more heavy duty stuff.

The app is now set up to take in a URL to an image. This shields me from having to worry about people uploading unsavory content (though for safety reasons the app was deleting all images after they had been processed) and it keeps the user from having to worry about me spying on what they upload (something some webmasters do – always be careful about what you upload to websites).

In the future I definitely want to have apps that take in images from a user’s computer, so eventually this issue will be worked out. Anyway, for the time being you can check out the new version of the app here. If it dies on you let me know. This has sort of thrown a wrench in my plans for more image oriented apps, however, I’m still going to charge on and see if I can make the best of this. If worse comes to worse, I’ll just make C# versions.

Oh! And before I forget, I changed the formula for calculating the complimentary colors. I now convert the color space from RGB (red, green, blue) to HSL (hue, saturation, lightness) and then shift the hue by 180 degrees, then I convert back to RGB space. This appears to give much more accurate complimentary colors, though I’m not sure if this is the correct way of doing it. I still cannot find a proper formula for calculating them.

New Blogs

chicanerous – Chicanerous is the author of the popular VB Array Tutorial on this site. And I do mean popular, it now averages over 200 visitors a day. Chic also used to be a regular contributor to a message board I once had. On his blog he says he’ll “probably post poorly written proofs, unastounding thoughts on literature and criticism, overgeneralized musings on strength training and conditioning, and half-hearted ruminations on various other subjects.” Chic’s a cool guy so you should check his site out. Hopefully he doesn’t mind me spamming it here :P.

After upgrading to PHP5, which was much less painless than I thought it would be, I decided to take a deeper look into how to do image manipulation in PHP. This is usually done with the gd library, which provides an assortment of useful image handling functions. There are certain aspects which were annoying (no Windows bmp support, difficulty in displaying images I didn’t want to keep on the server), but overall it appears to be a pretty handy toolset. If all goes well, I hope to create more image-based online apps. I’ve already got a big list of ideas, but I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself.

Anyway, the new application is Image Color Palette Generator – not the catchiest of names, but it describes what it does, which is create color palettes from images. This is useful when you’re designing a website and you want it to have the same look and feel as a particular image. This program will tell you what the most frequently used colors within an image are. It will also generate a color palette of the complimentary colors to the most frequently used colors. This can be useful if you want a look and feel that’s totally different from your input image.

The current implementation works by placing colors the app encounters into “buckets” which represent similar looking colors. After the image has been fully examined, the color palette is created by taking the average color from the “buckets” that contain the most colors. Pretty simple algorithm, eh? The complimentary colors are generated in RGB-space (Red, Green, Blue). If anyone knows the formula for calculating a complimentary color in the traditional artist color space (Red, Blue, Yellow) please let me know! I googled for at least an hour but couldn’t find any info on how to do it.

In the future I hope to make the program a bit more sophisticated. I’ve studied colors a little bit so I know the human eye is more sensitive to green than it is to red or blue, so colors with lots of green should probably have more weight than colors with less green. People also tend to notice areas where there is change going on in the image, and whether one notices the change can be estimated using the contrast sensitivity function. That may be getting a little too fancy. Though I’ll keep it in mind since it could be a nice tweak to the algorithm.

The app worked great on my machine, but I’m noticing now that it’s on my server that it’s struggling and timing out when larger images are inputted. So for now try and stick with smaller images (less than 40kb). I’m going to look into ways of getting around this. I may be doing something in an suboptimal way which would explain why it’s dying. Or it could just be because I’m on shared hosting and they don’t want me using a lot of resources. I’m not sure.

If you have any problems or suggestions relating to the new app itself, just post a comment in this blog entry or email me (see the About page for an email address).

Update: I’ve made some modifications and the program should now be able to handle images up to 200kb in size without timing out. It looks like the server only gives the php file a certain amount of time to do its thing and then it kills it. I may have to separate the functionality out into several files (even the it’s a small app). Also, right now I’m doing extra processing for gif images, so the program will work best with jpgs or png files.

Spam Blogs

Has anyone encountered these bot generated “automatic blogs” that seem to be all over the internet? I have no idea how long they’ve been around, but as this site has grown, I’ve become more aware of their presence. They seem to work by either grabbing content from other sites or from article databases. They then display this content and hope to grab visitors from search engines. Since these blogs are full of ads, and since 1-2% of users click ads, these phony blogs end up turning a decent profit, even though they don’t really serve a useful function.

To gave an example, on my stat page I noticed an incoming link from the Jessica Alba is Hot Blog (possibly NSFW). This site apparently has some bot that combs the internet looking for posts on Jessica Alba. It found my previous post, and then copped the begining of it saying:

Emily wrote a wonderful post today on “Slider Puzzle Source Code And Other Nonsense.” Here’s a quick excerpt:
I’ve finally gotten around to releasing my Slider Puzzle source code. Hopefully someone out there can find a good use for it. I was tempted to set up a Jessica Alba puzzle on some free web hosting site […]

Normally I welcome incoming links, but there’s something unsettling about an automatic blog spidering through my site just so it can grab content it can use to promote itself. I suppose it’s not really hurting anything, but it does leave a bad taste in my mouth. So far it’s only happened a few times, but I may end up blocking these sites.

No Housewarming Party

My roommate and I have opted not to throw a house party. The majority of you probably don’t know me in real life so you could probably care less, but I figured I’d say something here since I know there was a bunch of talk about it when I first moved in and some of my friends do read this blog and I don’t want them thinking they weren’t invited or anything. The main reason there will be no party is because my roommate and I are kind of lazy and we’re not really the type to throw huge social gatherings. We kind of prefer smaller groups of like 3-6 people. Anyway, if you haven’t seen the place and want to, feel free to shoot me an email. There’s not really a whole lot here, but the apartment complex itself is pretty damn cool.

C#

I’ve decided to make C# the next language I learn. On Sloat’s suggestion, I download the free Express Edition, and have been playing around with it a little the past few days. I have a few ideas running through my head on apps I want to make, but before I jump into anything I’m going to try and get a decent background (via online tutorials – right now I’m using what comes up on Google, if anyone has any suggestions for some good resources, let me know).

Later on I may take a look at VB 2007, but since there currently doesn’t seem to be any advantages to using it (at least from what I can tell), I’ll probably delay learning it.

Scrolling Text Time Waster

While looking around on some old CDs I found this, a fun little scrolling text time waster. It’s a PHP version of one of my old Javascript apps. The PHP version was originally located at my UMBC personal page, though at some point I took it down. After looking over the script, I touched it up a bit and figured it was amusing enough, so I decided to post it up.

As a side note, my decision to post it up was partly because of these people. I had honestly never received any feed back on my old Javascript app and had actually wondered if it ever got used at all (or if people thought I was childish for posting it). It’s neat to see how stuff can find its way around the net. As a side note to this side note, I sometimes wonder if my googling skills come off as creepy. My old suite mate Mike (who I talked about in the last post) helped me refine them a little bit when I lived with him. He was actually kind of legendary for his googling skills. I have some funny stories about Mike and googling, but I’m sure he’d kill me if I posted them here.

More AOL Macro Fonts

The number of AOL fonts has doubled in the TAAG app. You can view them by selecting “AOL Macro Fonts” from the Font Type combo box and then running the Test All feature. In addition to these new fonts, the “TRaC” and “Cheese” AOL fonts were fixed (woo!).

This deludge of new fonts comes from various old apps I obtained through lenshellarchive.com. It’s a pretty neat place, it aims at having the largest archive of old progs. What one can do with progs written for software that isn’t used anymore is anyone’s guess, but it’s cool to see they’ve been saved somewhere. However, even though it says everything has been run through a virus checker, I’d be cautious before downloading anything. Some of that stuff is kind of shady.

Interestingly enough, the site actually hosts my old fader program, giving it the low rating of 5/10, which I thought was kind of amusing. It honestly wasn’t that good of an app, though it was the first program I released on this website (when I was at geocities), and it actually generated a lot of positive feed back, so it encouraged me to keep going. How it ended up at lenshellarchive is anyone’s guess. I had no idea anyone else hosted it (btw, I encourage outside hosting of any of my downloadable apps), but according to a txt included in the zip I downloaded:

You Should Have Downloaded This From
Kamz Domain [ http://www.kamzdomain.com ]
If You Did Not Please Email Me At
Kam@kamzdomain.com
and Let me Know Where You Got It So
I can End This Link Stealing Bullshit

|¯|’/¯/    /¯/\ |¯|\/|¯|
|÷|/_/ ‘  /÷/\¯\ ‘ |÷|\/|÷|
|÷|\¯\ ”/÷/ ¯\÷\ |÷|  |÷|
|_|’\_\ |_|    \_| |_| |_|  

According to archive.org, kamzdomain.com existed for a brief period of time in 1999. It’s neat to find stuff like this, I feel like an internet archaeologist. I wonder if the app made any more stops before ending up at lenshellarchive.

Color Fader Update

I’ve been annoyed at the job I did on my updated color fader since it was released. The interface was squished, awkward and clumsy, the color scheme was bland, and it over all just looked bad. I decided a few days ago to break from what I was doing and work on a re-design of it. I think I’ve come up with something that’s cleaner and easier to work with:

http://patorjk.com/software/colorfader/

The ASCII Art heading is kind of cheesy, but nothing else seemed to fit that heading area and it seemed to fit the ambiance so I left it in. Along with the new design, I added a few new features:

• Vertical text fading: Now you fade lines of text along with fading character by character.
• Multi-color image fade: I always felt it was a HUGE design flaw to have a separate 2-color area for image fading. I’m not sure what I was originally thinking, perhaps I was just lazy.
• Background color selection for text fades: You can now see what the faded text looks like on different colored backgrounds.

Ultra Edit

I’ve been looking around for a good text editor that I can use for development purposes. At the moment, most of what I’m doing is Javascript and PHP. Recently I’ve come across Ultra Edit, which appears to be a pretty snazzy editor. It has syntax highlighting, grep-like searching abilities, a customizable tool bar, line number information, the ability to hide nested code, and lots of other nifty features. It’s only negative is that it’s not free. It’s $50 if I want to use it past the trial period. I’m actually thinking about shelling the doe though, since it would be a big step up from WordPad. Anyone know of any other good Windows text editors I should try before I purchase a license for this one?

Garfield / Realfield

Some clever folks on the internet have discovered that the Garfield cartoon strip is actually pretty funny if you remove all of Garfield’s thought bubbles. It actually works on a whole new level, it’s pretty cool:

• http://blog.org.es/realfield/ – Garfield replaced with a realistic cartoon cat and thought bubbles removed.
• http://www.truthandbeautybombs.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=4997 – Just the thought bubbles were removed.

Google Ads

I’ve been mulling over the idea of possibly placing a few Google Ads on this website. Nothing crazy or annoying, but something that’d be reasonably discrete and only on a few choice pages. I was doing some calculating and with what I read I could probably make enough a month to cover hosting costs if I placed ads on the Color Fader and the VB Code Bank. I think that would be pretty cool – this site paying for itself.

My fears in doing this though would be that I could scare away visitors or annoy those who regularly visit. Or I could turn off people who think I’m just trying to cash in. So I’d probably only do it in a few select areas, and not in areas that would cause clutter. I dunno, I’ll have to think about it some more, but I just thought I’d give everyone a head’s up.