WeirdLooking.com: Michael Barton's Blog

which portable avatar is right for me?

2006-10-02T09:08:46Z

I like the idea of avatars that travel with you, but which of these is the “right thing”?

Gravatars are really popular and easy to implement, but it seems like the centralized nature would make it failure-prone and a privacy debacle waiting to happen.

Favatars are a cool idea. On the plus side, they’d start working right away. On the other hand, I’m not sure how many people have their own favicons, and the implementation would be a bit “fun”.

Pavatars have all the same problems as Favatars, they can just be bigger than 16x16px and aren’t tied to the favicon displayed by browsers.

using pngcrush in windows

2006-08-31T10:00:05Z

I pngcrushed this image.

Disclaimer: I don’t know what I’m doing.

As we all know, png images are the best thing that’s ever happened. Unfortunately, lots of image editors wantonly save gama and other chunks in them without asking. This can cause pngs to be rendered a different color than elements in the web page they were supposed to match. So I fixed XP to have an option in the context menu for .png files to run them through pngcrush. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s improved my workflow. And this is how I did it!

First, you’ll want to go get pngcrush. If you manage to navigate you way through sourceforge’s download region, you’ll wind up with a win32 executable and some other unimportant junk. You should put that executable somewhere safe – Mine is called C:\pngcrush\pngcrush.exe.

Next, create a couple of files:

C:\pngcrush\pngcrush.bat:

copy %1 %1.bak C:\pngcrush\pngcrush.exe -rem gAMA -rem cHRM -rem iCCP -rem sRGB -brute -l 9 %1 %TMP%\pngcrush-tmp.png copy %TMP%\pngcrush-tmp.png %1 del %TMP%\pngcrush-tmp.png

pngcrush.reg:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\pngfile\shell\Pngcrush] @="&Pngcrush" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\pngfile\shell\Pngcrush\command] @="\"C:\\pngcrush\\pngcrush.bat\" \"%1\""

Obviously you’ll have to adjust the paths if you’re a sissy and don’t save everything in a directory off C:\ the way I do. And if you don’t like my pngcrush options, you don’t know what you’re doing. Anyway, run that .reg file. If successful, you should now have a “Pngcrush” option when you right-click on .png files!

web-based mud client?

2006-03-26T06:11:26Z

This blog post about Google’s web-based instant messaging is making the rounds:
http://alex.dojotoolkit.org/?p=538

So here’s my thinking… If I can open up a second port on my mud and run a simple HTTP server on it (lots of people have done this already), I can pretty easily hack write_to_descriptor to send information to a persistent HTTP connection. In fact, it’ll practically be a regular mud connection except color codes and newlines and stuff will be parsed into their equivalent HTML (fairly straight-forward modification of the color code). And interpret will be called from an HTTP post. Then some work in javascript and I can have a web-based mud client.

I’ll have the first Web 2.0 mud.

so...what's up?

2006-02-07T22:29:16Z

I’ve been pretty busy with work lately, so I haven’t had much time to play around (which would lead to posting on here). I’m still working my day job, and I spend evenings writing PHP for a startup. I can’t talk about that too much (I had to sign an NDA!), but it’s challenging and I’m working with some interesting people who can also drink more than me.

I’ve gotta renew my domain name soon, which means I’ve had this website for almost a year. Not counting domain registration, I’ve actually spent less than $3 on hosting. Not bad!

So… what’s up with you?

i don't like (comment) spam!

2005-12-23T06:06:20Z

You know, all of the comment spam is coming from the servers of Web hosting companies. Which makes sense; they rarely monitor or charge for outgoing connections. I assume that this page made its way into an automated comment spamming tool or something. I’m going to delete most of that spam, I think. Then I can remove the lame rel=”nofollow”s on comment links.

As mentioned, I assume that this spam is posted by some sort of automated tool. So, I have put an end to automated posting. How, you ask? I just hid one of those evil Unix timestamps in the form. If you post a comment 30 minutes after that timestamp, it gives you an error (and a preview where you can click Submit again, so it’s not evil).

Yeah, that’s easy to circumvent. The form also includes a checksum of the time (generated via fantastic, super-secret cryptographic methods that you’ll never figure out, so don’t even bother trying). The end result is that stale instances of the form, like those I assume live in a spammer’s database, won’t work.

They could still easily download the page and scrape out a valid timestamp and checksum, but I think it’s probably enough for now to not be the low-hanging fruit.

human-readable date differences

2005-12-21T11:29:32Z

I had an idea today. I wanted to include human-readable ages beside some of the dates on my blog (e.g. “1 day, 8 hours ago”). I searched around a bit, and all of the solutions I found just divide the difference in seconds by 31536000 to get years and so on. It doesn’t take leap years or different-sized months into account.

Today is December 21, 2005. To me, 2 years, 2 months ago was October 21, 2003.

It took a while to write. The first version used brute force to get the difference out of mktime. That worked perfectly but was slow. I used it to generate a bunch of test cases, though.

What I eventually figured out is that you can just subtract the beginning years, months, hours, etc. from the current ones. After that, use borrowing similar to long subtraction to get rid of any negative numbers. Seconds borrow 60 from a minute, hours borrow 24 from a day, days borrow from an array of month lengths. You get the idea. Anyway, here’s the code, which I’ll post on the SmartyPlugins wiki as soon as I figure out how.

<?php

/**
 * Smarty plugin
 * -----------------------------------------
 * File:    modifier.human_age.php
 * Type:    modifier
 * Name:    human_age
 * Params:  from_time    unix timestamp (required)
 *          to_time      unix timestamp (default=false (means now))
 *          strip_zeroes remove units with zero values ("0 days") (default=true)
 *          limit        limit the number of units returned (default=no limit)
 * Author:  Michael Barton (http://www.weirdlooking.com/email)
 * Purpose: Returns a human-readable difference between two times
 *          e.g. "1 day, 8 hours, 48 minutes, 57 seconds"
 * Remarks: Correct for leap years and different-sized months.
 *          Well, my idea of correct.  Turns out it's slightly subjective.
 *
 * @link http://www.weirdlooking.com/blog/45
 * -----------------------------------------
 */
  require_once $smarty->_get_plugin_filepath('shared','make_timestamp');

  function smarty_modifier_human_age($from_time, $to_time = false, $strip_zeroes = true, $limit = false)
  {
    if ($to_time === false)
      $to_time = time();
    $order = array('year', 'mon', 'mday', 'hours', 'minutes', 'seconds');
    $names = array('year', 'month', 'week', 'day', 'hour', 'minute', 'second');
    $sizes = array(12, 2=>24, 60, 60);
    $month_lengths = array(31, 31, 28, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 31, 30, 31, 30);
    $from = getdate($from_time);
    $to = getdate($to_time);
    $delta = array();
    foreach ($order as $unit)
      $delta[] = $to[$unit] - $from[$unit];
    for ($i = 5; $i >= 0; $i--)
      if ($delta[$i] < 0)
      {
        $delta[$i-1]--;
        if ($i == 2 && ($to['mon'] == 3 && !($to['year'] % 4)))
          $delta[$i] += 29; // fix this before the year 2100!!!
        else if ($i == 2)
          $delta[$i] +=  $month_lengths[$to['mon']-1];
        else
          $delta[$i] += $sizes[$i-1];
      }
    $delta[2] -= ($week = floor($delta[2]/7)) * 7;
    $delta = array($delta[0], $delta[1], $week, $delta[2], $delta[3], $delta[4], $delta[5]);
    $ret = array();
    foreach ($delta as $i => $val)
      if (($delta[$i] || !$strip_zeroes) && ($limit === false || sizeof($ret) < $limit))
        $ret[] = $delta[$i].' '.$names[$i].($delta[$i] == 1 ? '' : 's');
    return join(', ', $ret);
  }
?>

atom enabled-ing

2005-12-19T07:38:12Z

Does anyone know of an Atom equivalent to <wfw:commentRss> and/or <slash:comments>?

I have read that this should work for comment threads, but no luck (at least not in my reader):
<link rel="replies" type="application/atom+xml" href="" />

2005-12-13T20:06:33Z

I’ll assume you’re reading this via RSS, considering how very broken my web page is at the moment. I decided to clean up the markup so I could go all CSS Zen Garden on it. After working on that for a bit, I decided to rewrite everything using Smarty templates. So right now, roughly half of my web page is converted to templates, half of it is using a stylesheet that no longer applies to the markup, half of it has no stylesheet, and half of it never worked anyway (Archives, I’m looking in your direction). I’ll have time to put it back together now that school’s over.

I guess I should retract all of the bad things I insinuated about my class. Any time I get an A, it couldn’t have been all bad. So, school is over. I guess after the holidays I’ll have to figure out which way is up.