All posts by patorjk

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Interesting Statistics

6 Comments

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):

ascii 67 22.2 %
art 52 17.2 %
generator 40 13.2 %
text 26 8.6 %
api 9 2.9 %
spy 9 2.9 %

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

Software

TAAG has been updated

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!

General News

Alas

4 Comments

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.

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Updates on Updates

Today I modified TAAG and made it so it could work with FIGlet font files – however, I have NOT updated the version on this site. This is a pretty cool addition because it’ll let the program work with a ton of pre-existing ASCII Art fonts. After getting the app to load the files, I decided I’d implement most of the FIGlet font file parameters, which includes something called “smushing” which lets the author of the font determine the spacing between characters and how they should overlap. Me describing it probably sounds pretty boring, you can read more about it here:

http://www.jave.de/figlet/figfont.txt

Actually, that will probably be pretty boring too, unless you’re interested in developing your own ASCII Art font. Anyway, the reason I’m updating is to say I’m shooting for updating TAAG on Tuesday night. I’ll be in New York city the next 3 days (hanging out with friends), so I wont be able to work on it then, but I hope to polish off the small bit of coding I do have left on Tuesday (I’m taking the day off to rest). So if everything goes as planned, TAAG should have between 20-40 new fonts on Tuesday.

Until then, if for some reason you find yourself bored out of your mind and in need of something entertaining, check this out:

http://www.1-click.jp/

Interesting News Articles

“The man who owns the Internet”

2 Comments

It always pisses me off when I hear about people buying up domain names for cheap and then selling them back at a huge mark up. I’ve heard everything from people snatching up domain names as soon as they expire to people registering the names of possible future basketball stars.

Some people argue that this is the same as buying up land. I see it slightly differently. People don’t create land, it’s already there. People do create domain names though, it’s basically their product name. Buying up all the domain names, to me, is like buying up all the possible product names one could use without ever having a product yourself. Maybe I’m totally off base here, but it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth when I hear about people buying up all the domain names they can think of just so they can screw over people who may actually want to use them.

Anyway, this little tirade was inspired by what has to be the most interesting article I’ve read in a long time:

The man who owns the Internet

If you’re a fan of reddit.com (which was, interestingly enough, started by someone I went to high school with – though I didn’t know him), you’ll probably already have seen it. However, to those of you who haven’t seen it, it’s worth a read. Highly recommended!

General News, Uncategorized

Future Plans

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!”

Uncategorized

Spot Lighted Site 05/13/2007

Hackers and Painters

http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html

One day while I was sitting in my graduate level Operating System class, bored out of my mind, the professor went on a tangent and started talking about coding styles. He mentioned a man by the name of Paul Graham and how Paul thought coding / hacking was similar to painting. This immediately caught my ear and I made note of a famous essay, entitled “Hackers and Painters”, that Paul had apparently written.

Reading Graham’s essay was like a shot in the arm. It reminded me why I was a programmer and why I went to school as a computer scientist. So many people go into computer science for the money, and so many of the people who teach it are “researchers” or theorists, I think it makes someone like me forget why they liked it in the first place. I related to that essay very well, and I highly recommend it to anyone who programs as a hobby.

General News, Software

TAAG

2 Comments

It’s unfinished, it’s unpolished, but at least it’s something new 🙂

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

While I was looking through some old AOL stuff I was inspired by the old “Macro Shop” art of the late nineties. I hadn’t seen it in a long time and I remembered an old idea I had back in 2000. So I figured it’d be fun to program up. A lot of those fonts were incredibly hard to find. If you have any, please send them to me (txt files only). I also added in 2 non-AOL prog fonts that I saw while surfing the web.

As you can probably tell, it’s just a for fun program. Though it can have some possible uses if you want some cool looking letters. I’ll be adding onto it throughout the next week or two. There will be a ton of more features (right now the “Advanced Features” are commented out since they don’t all work) and a whole lot more fonts. I’m going to set it up to read Figlet font files, which will allow it to use an incredible number of fonts. I’m also going to make it open source. That way, if an ascii art font writer wanted, they could use the program on their website to show off the fonts they make.

Software

Color Spy 3.0!!! I found it!

6 Comments

Holy crap, I knew I had to have a back up copy of this program lying around somewhere! I actually use it all the time. I found a copy on a backup disk for my CS635 (Advanced Graphics class) files. I guess I was using it for one of my assignments. Woo! I’m actually really glad I found it. You can download it here:

http://www.patorjk.com/downloads/colorspy30.zip

I may do some updates to it. If you have any suggestions just let me know. Also, I initially tried to find a copy online, but I wasn’t able to. I did find some German guy recommending it though:

http://www.faqboard.info/printthread.php?tid=1510

Makes me feel kind of cool that someone way across the globe was using and recommending my program.