Sprite avatars in Gravatar
After the release of Google Buzz, my Google profile which I had for years finally became somewhat useful. Seeing that I really liked the avatar I've added to that profile, I decided, that Frog should henceforth be my official avatar.
This also meant that I wanted to add Frog to my Gravatar profile which, unfortunately proved to be... let's say interesting.
The image resizer Gravatar provides on their site to fit the uploaded image to the sites need apparently was not designed for sprites as it tries to blow up sprites way out of proportion only to resize them back down. At first I though I could get away with cheating by uploading above picture with a huge margin added to it, but that only lead to a JavaScript error in their uploader.
In the end, this is what I have done:
- Convert the picture into the TGA format
- Scale it using hq3x (explanation of hq3x)
- Convert it back to png and re-add transparency (hq3x had trouble with transparency in the TGA file)
- Scale it to 128 pixels in height
- paste it into a pre-prepared 128x128 canvas
- upload that.
This is how my gravatar looks now, which feels quite acceptable to me:
The one in google's profile was way easier to create: Paste the original image into a 64 by 64 canvas and let google do the resizing. It's not as perfect as the hq3x algorithm, but that suffers by the downsizing to make frog fit 128 pixels in height anyways.
The other option would be to scale using hq2x and the paste that into a 128 by 128 canvas yielding this sharper, but smaller image:
But what ever I do, frog will still be resized by Gravatar (and thus destroyed), so I went with the image that contains more colored pixels at the expense of a bit of sharpness.
linktrail – a failed startup – introduction
I guess it's inevitable. Good ideas may fail. And good ideas may be years ahead of their time. And of course, sometimes, people just don't listen.
But one never stops learning.
In the year 2000, I took part in a plan of a couple of guys to become the next Yahoo (Google wasn't quite there yet back then), or, to use the words we used on the site,
For these reasons, we have designed an online environment that offers a truly new way for people to store, manage and share their favourite online resources and enables them to engage in long-lasting relationships of collaboration and trust with other users.
The idea behind the project, called linktrail, was basically what would much later on be picked up by the likes of twitter, facebook (to some extent) and the various community based news sites.
The whole thing went down the drain, but the good thing is that I was able to legally salvage the source code, the install it on a personal server of mine and to publish the source code. And now that so many years have passed, it's probably time to tell the world about this, which is why I have decided to start this little series about the project. What is it? How was it made? And most importantly: Why did it fail? And concequently: What could we have done better?
But let's first start with the basics.
As I said, I was able to legally acquire the database and code (which is mostly written by me anyways) and to install the site on a server of mine, so let's get that out to start with. The site is available at linktrail.pilif.ch. What you see running there is the result of 6 months of programming by myself after a concept done by the guys I've worked with to create this.
What is linktrail?
If the tour we made back then is any good, then just taking it would probably be enough, but let me phrase in my words: The site is a collection of so called trails which in turn are small units, comparable to blogs, consisting of links, titles and descriptions. These micro-blogs are shown in a popup window (that's what we had back then) beside the browser window to allow quick navigation between the different links in the trail.
Trails are made by users, either by each user on their own or as a collaborative work between multiple users. The owner of a trail can hand out permissions to everybody or their friends (using a system quite similar to what we currently see on facebook for example)
A trail is placed in a directory of trails which was built around the directory structures we used back then, though by now, we would probably do this much more different. Users can subscribe to trails they are interested in. In that case, they will be notified if a trail they are subscribed to is updated either by the owner or anybody else with the rights to update the trail.
Every user (called expert in the site's terms) has their profile page (here's mine) that lists the trails they created and the ones they are subscribed to.
The idea was for you as an user to find others with similar interests and form a community around those interests to collaborate on trails. An in-site messaging-system helped users to communicate with each other: Aside of just sending plain text messages, it's possible to recommend trails (for easy one-click subscription) .
linktrail was my first real programming project, basically 6 months after graduating in what the US would call high school. Combine that fact with the fact that it was created during the high times of the browser wars (year 2000, remember) with web standards basically non-existing, then you can imagine what a mess is running behind the scenes.
Still, the site works fine within those constraints.
In future posts, I will talk about the history of the project, about the technology behind the site, about special features and, of course, about why this all failed and what I would do differently - both in matters of code and organization.
If I woke your interest, feel free to have a look at the code of the site which I just now converted from CVS (I started using CVS about 4 months into development, so the first commit is HUGE) to SVN to git and put it up on github for public consumption. It's licensed under a BSD license, but I doubt that you'd find anything in this mess of PHP3(!) code (though it runs unchanged(!) on PHP5 - topic of another post I guess), HTML 3.2(!) tag soup and java-script hacks.
Oh and if you can read german, I have also converted the CVS repository that contained the concept papers that were written over the time.
In preparation of this series of blog-posts, I have already made some changes to the code base (available at github):
- login after register now works
- warning about unencrypted(!) passwords in the registration form
- registering requires you to solve a reCAPTCHA.
Life is good
Remember last week when I was ranting about nothing working as it should?
Well - this weeks feels a lot more successful than the last one. It may very well be one of the nicest weeks I've had in IT so far.
- The plugin system I've written for our PopScan Windows Client doesn't just work, it's also some of the shiniest code I've written in my life. Everything is completely transparent and thus easy to debug and extend. Once more, simplicity lead to consistency and consistency is what I'm striving for.
- Yesterday, we finally managed to kill a long standing bug in a certain PopScan installation which seemed to manifest itself in intermittently non-working synchronization but was apparently not at all working synchronization. Now it works consistently.
- Over the weekend, I finally got off my ass and used some knowledge in physics and and a water-level to re-balance my projector on the ceiling mount making the picture fit the screen perfectly.
- Just now, I've configured two managed switches at home to carry cable modem traffic over a separate VLAN allowing me to abandon my previously whacky setup wasting a lot of cable and looking really bad. I was forced to do that because a TV connector I've had mounted stopped working consistently (here's the word again).
The configuration I thought out worked instantly and internet downtime at home (as if somebody counts) was 20 seconds or so - the TCP connections even stayed all up.
- I finally got mt-daapd to work consistently with all the umlauts in the file names of my iTunes collection.
If this week is an indication of how the rest of the year will be, then I'm really looking forward to this.
As the title says: Life is good.
pilif.ch is back
It has been a while since I lost pilif.ch. Two years to be exact.
Fortunately, it looks like the domain grabber who took pilif.ch after that unfortunate accounting incident has since lost interest, so now pilif.ch belongs to me again. About bloody time!
Aside of the fact that my online identity has always been pilif (despite lipfi sounding much friendlier when pronounced in swiss german), there are other reasons for me wanting the domain back:
- it's in my MSN-ID (passport@pilif.ch)
- various other @pilif.ch addresses are registered at various services I've since forgotten the password for.
- it was the very first domain I bought - ever.
So it's back to the roots for me. MX, Web and DNS are already configured (the zone file is actually symlinked to lipfi.ch - I have no idea whether this is a legal thing to do, but it works).
Home - sweet home!
Nice weather
it has been a while since I've last talked about the weather, but the current official forecast by the Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology makes me really, really happy. Especially after a very wet and cold April.
The days of barbecues are back!
Shell history stats
It seems to be cool nowadays to post the output of a certain unix command to ones blogs. So here I come:
pilif@celes ~
% fc -l 0 -1 |awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
467 svn
369 cd
271 mate
243 git
209 ssh
199 sudo
184 grep
158 scp
124 rm
115 ./clitest.sh
clitest.sh is a small little wrapper around wget which I use to do protocol level debugging of the PopScan Server.
Thanks, Ebi
Yesterday, Ebi invited me and my girlfriend over for dinner and a round of trivial pursuit.
I fail to find words to describe how awesomly good the meal has been. I would have wanted to get a fourth serving, but I just couldn't stuff in even a microgram more.
And the trivial pursuit was fun as ever - that game just shines if you don't take it seriously.
Thanks Ebi. I had a blast!
Recursive pottery
Yesterday evening, my girlfriend and I had an interesting discussion about pottery techniques. She's studying archeology, so she has a real interest in pottery and techniques used. I in contrast have my interests in different subjects, but this method of potting we came up with was so funny that I thought I just had to post it.
Let's say you want to create a vase.
Our method involves the following steps:
- Gather a vase that looks exactly like the one you want to build.
- Fill the vase with something that gets hard quickly, but crumples easily.
- Wait for that material to dry out, then destroy the original vase.
- Put clay around the hardened up filler material.
- Wait for the clay to dry up and burn the vase.
- Remove the filler material.
Obviously this method will never allow you to produce more than one vase as in the process of creating one, you are destroying the other.
We continued our discussion of how such a method of pottery could have interesting side effects. One is that the only way for a potter to generate revenue of his work is by renting out his current vase. And should the vase be returned defective, the whole business of the potter is over - until he receives another initial vase to continue working.
Of course, getting hold of that would be quite interesting a job if every potter only used this method.
And the question remains: Where do you take the initial vase from?
Stupid. I know. But fun in its own way. Sometimes, I take great pleasure in inventing something totally stupid and then laugh at it. And believe me: We really had a good laugh about this.
The mother of all rubber duckies
Last sunday I came across the beauty you are seeing on the right and of course I had to have it.
I took a picture of her (Ebi suggested that it must be female and recommended me to call it "Emma") standing next to a bottle of soap to give you some sense of scale.
Crazy. Cute. Perfect.