With my continuing ventures into Processing [processing.org], I return to something that I promised I would get back to [riemannscut].
This is a continuous line, which ungulates based on the values of Pi. The function is as simple as this: Each number is taken in turn, and the line is continued that number of pixels, along either the x or y axis. The key aspect to the process is that with each number, the direction is changed by 270. This is what creates the spiral effect.
The resultant images were a substantial 196MP (14000x14000), and I wonder if I went any further than 10 million places, would I once again be face finite resource issues.
While it was logical to assume that using the same function in two different programming environments would produce the same image, it was still nice to see the "horse" appear in Processing, after drawing 1,000 places.
But what does it all mean! Who knows. Some might suggest that the basic shape of the 1,000 image looks similar the the 10,000,000 image. I noticed that "bone" shape appear a few times throughout various runs, and it might be interesting to keep track of it when I hopefully get around to animating this function in the future. Perhaps there's a mathematical or statistical reason for this, when using a base10 number system, or something. That's for others to worry about.
Click for larger... Colourised version on right. Each value given an arbitrary colour value. Red dominance purely coincidental.
I might try this with the largest prime number, recently discovered [flickr].
Pi values generated and provided by Sebastian Tomczak [little-scale].
I always felt that I left out one crucial experiment in my original post [riemannscut] on the matter of rotating and saving jpegs, and that was to have a control subject, to test against. With a little bit of coding in Processing, I was able to create both, in one environment, and in parallel.
To load images and use the standard rotate/transform methods in Processing is resource heavy, and I could only get to about 1300 saves before the whole thing blew up. There might better ways to do it that are already built-in, but 1200 operations were enough for my purposes. For the 180 degree comparison I just reordered the pixle array instead, which didn't have any such limitations.
As you can see, now more clearly, it is the process of rotating, that really does the damage. Straight saves just dull the red values a little, even after 25,000 saves. As Bill P. Godfrey [billpg.me.uk] commented on my original post, image degradation from rotating won't happen if the image dimensions are a multiple of 16. This is because jpeg sampling blocks are 16 pixels by 16 pixels, thus unaffected by re-orientation. The problem arises when you rotate an image and the new 16x16 sample block overlaps and truncates the earlier block, creating a new transition information. This is actually clearer to see along the edges of the "180 degree" version.
Here I am, killing the HAMAS people. With jump-cuts, to keep it snappy.
I've been struggling with trying to record some video game footage for the past few days. The old reliable VirtualDub just doesn't like it. Something keeps going wrong with the audio sync and it randomly ups and downs the sample rates while recording. I thought it might have something to do with the CPU speed stepping up and down, but still happened even when I fixed the speed.
I then happened upon a piece of software called Bandicam [bandicam.com] which will record audio and video from a game, or window, or area within a user defined rectangle. Very like FRAPS I guess, but the free version of Bandicam is a little more generous than the FRAPS equivalent Videos are watermarked, but are easily cropped out if that annoys you, or you could always buy it.
I'll refrain from spamming this place with game videos. I don't play that often anyway.
Video hotlinked from euscreen.eu. If problems arise, use link below.
A nice little treasure, found on EUscreen [euscreen.eu]. Irish TV presenter, Pat Kenny, discusses the computer equipment used producing the graphics the coverage of the 1982 General Election. On show are units manufactured by DEC (d|i|g|i|t|a|l) and Apple Computer Inc.
Pat, here, looks very dashing. Like a cross between Christopher Reeve and Tom Cruise. I could only imagine the sex in RTE cloakrooms was savage. Contraband condoms flying in all directions.
Photographed in November 2012, an elderly woman travels with a custom painted suitcase, in Armenia. The paint work includes an aeroplane and the letters DDR and CCCP, references to East Germany and the Soviet Union, respectively. Along the side there is some découpage of young women.
The plane depicted appears to be a Ту-154 [wiki], albeit in a distorted form, where the wings sit underneath the tail fin, giving it an ungainly appearance.
The first image caught my attention, and if it weren't for the second candid photo, I would have assumed it as a mere art installation. The life story of this object has me intrigued.
I've been sketching these things ever since my blog post a few weeks back [riemanns cut]. Images [flickr] [King Carl XVI of Sweden] [NASA Astronaut Bruce McCandless II] [unknown US' soldier]
When I reviewed Windows 8 a few weeks ago [riemannscut], I said I had a inkling that Microsoft would keep the low upgrade price going indefinitely. Shortly before the January 31st deadline, Microsoft announced the new prices [google+] and as shocked as I was, I still held on in deluded hope that this was a scam to get people into panic buying. No. It turns out I was wrong. Completely wrong. Awe inspiringly wrong [microsoft.com/windows].
Microsoft, in all their glorious reasoning, have priced the Windows 8 Pro upgrade at roughly the same price as as a cheap laptop. Ok fine, charge a premium for full and OEM versions, but the cheap upgrade is surely key to getting more people using 8, which is still something people are still frightened by.
These prices have been well discussed all over the internet, so I don't need to discuss them anymore. I just wanted to say I'm sorry; I'm sorry that there is a lunatic in charge of Microsoft.
N.B. old stock of €60 physical Windows 8 upgrades still floating around retailers.
Everytime I hear the name of "Chuck Hagel" mentioned in the news, the video above plays in my head. It's so bad that when I went to search for Chuck Hagel's Wikipedia page [wiki], I typed in "Chuck Testa". I also can't listen to the original version without missing the extra drum track.
Back in the day (the 1990's), before modern digital encryption was used to secure the likes of Sky satellite broadcasting, a simpler, more analogue approach was used to keep unauthorised eyes from viewing premium satellite channels. One of these techniques was called VideoCrypt [wiki].
Click for larger...
Keeping things very simple. The video element of television broadcasts were/are made up of series of horizontal lines that make up each frame. What VideoCrypt would do is take each line, split it at a certain pseudo-random point and swap both ends, creating a scrambled image. Each frame would get different line cut sequences also. To decrypt the image, a viewer would have to purchase a card from the broadcaster that contained the necessary codes for the decoder box to reassemble the image in the correct order, on-the-fly. Nothing was done to the audio however (not in early implementations anyway) so freeloaders often tuned in just to listen, for music stations etc.
Being someone who grew up in a household where satellite television was a hobby, much like HAM radio is, I was well accustomed to seeing scrambled channels, as well seeing them unscrambled, and not always by legal means. During the era of VideoCrypt and it's ilk of satellite scrambling, pirate cards became very popular. Some were simple clones of the official cards but others were programmable PCB board monsters, that stuck out of the front of decoder boxes, studded with microchips and ribbon cables that attached to daughter-boards. These pirate cards were very popular for Scandinavian satellites. They used a similar encryption called EuroCrypt. These were interesting channels to have because Scandinavian TV didn't suffer from the same censorship laws present in Ireland and the UK. I remember watching A Clockwork Orange (1971) [imdb] on Swedish TV, while it was still banned in Ireland.
Click for larger...
Anyway, feeling a bit nostalgic one evening, I decided to practise my Processing programming by implementing a similar scrambling technique, the results of which you can see through-out this post. I compiled a video below which outlines a few experiments that one can do with VideoCrypt-like encoding and decoding. There are two plugins available for VirtualDub [virtualdub] which will encode and [attempt to] decode VideoCrypt video [frisnit]. For the video below, I modified my code to keep the same line breaks for each frame, to see if it made it any easier to decode.
Depending on how you look at it, this brute-force decoding attack is either very successful or not worth ones time. If an image was critical to be recovered then it certainly provided some help, but given that each of these short 6 second segments took over 10 minutes to render, it certainly was very brutish. The resultant image quality was also unacceptable for viewing. Others promise smarter brute-force attacks that provide decent quality decodings, such as the fast Fourier transform method below [cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25]
It's all academic now, since VideoCrypt is long since gone, but I did get thinking if a similar encryption has any use on the internet today. Perhaps if you wanted to share images to specific people, and only wanted to use free image hosting providers that didn't offer any form of privacy. You could freely distribute the scrambled image, which could be scrambled in both vertices so it appears just as a 2D matrix of random noise, and only those with the correct pixel order could put the "jigsaw" back together again, perhaps using a piece of JavaScript. That's a fairly eccentric way of keeping images private I must admit, and partial image reconstruction is always going to be open to attack.
I visited the new Irish Tourism website [ireland.com] when it launched recently, but was greeted with a black screen. Thinking that it was just having some teething issues, I left without giving it further thought. I visited it again this evening and the same black emptiness stared back at me. I was using Chrome so I tried the URL in Internet Explorer and few a things appeared. Not pretty things mind you, it looked so disorganised that I'm not sure if it was displaying right, but it was more than just black, at least.
I figured my Ghostery Chrome plugin [ghostery] must have been blocking dozens of scripts, but no, it was just blocking three. It turns out that one of them was the culprit: a "Gigya Socialize" script, the purpose of which is to integrate "social services" (like Facebook) into your website. So in essence, if you don't want Facebook tracking what websites you visit, and you then visit Ireland.com, you'll end up with nothing.
And this website reportedly cost €3million to build... [bocktherobber]
