It’s here folks, check it out:
http://www.patorjk.com/software/colorfader/
About a month ago someone emailed me requesting I put my old online color fader back up. You can find it at the web archives here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20050310095844/www.patorjk.com/ColorFader.htm
It’s a neat little app, but I figured I could do a lot better, so I told that guy I’d write a new one and post it up in a week :P. It took a little longer than I suspected, mostly because I was distracted with other things (I didn’t start on it until last week). This new color fader is MUCH better. It can fade up to 100 colors, and has a nifty little feature that allows you to create background fades. Example:
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With this app you can generate faded images 1 pixel wide which you can use as the background for certain page elements |
I like the idea of generating images with PHP. I’ll probably play around with it a little more and see if I can make anything interesting. Though right now I’m still feeling pretty sick so I think I’m going to go lay down. Let me know what you think of the new app though!
I like this one. You may want to block hotlinking of generated images if you already haven’t to keep bandwith at a minimum. I like this though.
Thanks. The PHP is set up so the image outputs to the browser and isn’t saved on the server, so as soon as the user closes the browser window the image is destroyed. I was actually a little concerned about the bandwidth issue when I decided to output background images and I was actually quite happy when I found out I didn’t need to save them anywhere. I’m doing the same kind of dynamic image creation for my email address on the contact tab for this blog.
I love the whole technological aspect of dynamic image creation. I remember back in 2004 I had asked about doing this in Visual Basic 6 on your forums, and I believe DigitalRampage helped me out with an example. You know what I would really like you to explain (I thought if anyone you would know how to do it)? An image “reader”.
I’m referring to an “Optical Character Recognition” program that would be capable of extracting ASCII characters from images and what not. I know you’ve made examples in the past for converting images to HTML and ASCII characters, but was wondering if you knew how to take it a step further, and then have the program actually figure out what the character is. That’d be a cool example, because I haven’t figured such a thing out yet.
There are working algorithms out there that can grab the plain text in images. I did a little poking around and found this:
http://jocr.sourceforge.net/
About 10 years ago, while on a tour of an ARL building (Army Research Laboratory), I met a pair of guys whose active research area was getting the text out of images. So it’s not an easy problem.
A more recent area of study (and a little more interesting) is deciphering the text in CAPTCHA’s:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA
I read a while back that spammers had figured out how to decipher most of them, but I hadn’t bothered looking at the solutions until just now. I’d have to read up on Object Recognition, and maybe get more of an AI background. It’s not something I’d try to do in the near future, but it is an interesting area.
I actually wish I could go back to school and take some more courses. There are certain areas that I just don’t know that well – AI, compilers – which I wish I knew more about. Some of the compsci courses I took now seem completely worthless (visualization, wearable computing, robotics – all fun courses, but I’ll never use anything I learned from them).
In the AOL days there was a rather huge following to a game/prog called ‘scrambler’. A word was sent into a chatroom, and other chatters had a certain amount of time to de-scramble it for points, etc. When AOL started to die out, this community dissappeared. I would love to see a dedicated chat server via winsock implemented for the game. I’m not too bright with VB but I could make the chat server, but not implement the scrambler into it without atleast a carton of marlboros. What say you?
I remember scrambler, I even wrote a bot for it once. I never really played it that much though. I’m not sure people would come to a chat room just to play scrambler, it’s really one of those things that people like as an extra feature. I can help you out if you get stuck though.
Yeah the reason I brought up the whole subject of O.C.R. was because I know there are several pieces of software available for reading CAPTCHA images, but I was interested in writing my own for other purposes. As for Scrambler the last good example I saw of it was by Anphanax in early 2004.