chaotic.signal
whatever Phil it's just random crap
Youtube caption fail
Mar 6th
I was really looking forward to the inclusion of automatic captioning from Youtube, it seemed like a really easy way of providing information to deaf people and really giving more of a sense of completion to my videos. However, the whole system hinges on the accuracy of Youtube/Google’s voice recognition software. A few of my videos have been transcribed and by god they are terrible!
Not a single video transcribed is anywhere near accurate, I think there was one sentence in all of the videos I have checked that were slightly correct. Most of the text is complete gibberish and seemingly completely unrelated to the audio on the video. I assumed that as they are introducing this system to millions and millions of videos it would at least be half competent but I don’t even think that you could refer to it as speech “recognition” it’s more like a complete guess.
It’s and F to Google, please try harder.
More PHP and UFOs
Feb 26th
I had a bit of a UFO Enemy Unknown binge the other week after I bought the whole series on steam for £2, I played it for hours and hours. It reminded me of the old UFOpedia site I made a few years ago which replicated the interface within the game. So I decided to make it again, however, the way I coded it back then was extremely time consuming and not very adaptable. I had to go through 115+ HTML files and put all the right links in the right place. These days knowing how easy PHP is I decided to use PHP to do it all. You can check it out here: X-COM UFOpedia
Having coded every link to parse the URL parameters I only had to code one page, sure it may have taken close to the same time but it was a lot less tedious and a much better learning experience. It also means that I can update the page to fit into any design I wish with the minimal of effort. I think I will code up a Terror From the Deep USOpedia, should be pretty easy now I’ve basically got all the code.
Edit: USOpedia is now online too: TFTD USOpedia, I also added an index page which displays all the images on one page like so: TFTD USOpedia maybe someone will find it useful, probably not.
Transparency Thinger
Jul 15th
Got bored again and as usual coded some completely random an useless piece of php. This one basically lets you input the url of any image on the net and then outputs the image on 4 different shades of background from black to that lovely chequered “transparency” image.
It took a little while to perfect everything, and as usual I kept adding bits when I thought I had finished it already, not to mention the ballache I had trying to get it to look exactly the same in IE as it does in FF. Probably completely fails in other browsers but FF and IE are basically everyone. The other issue it took a while to get around was the transparent background as usually it makes what’s in the cell transparent too I used transparent PNGs to get the effect of transparency without coding it in HTML.
I also added the ability to look at a sprite on any background colour of your choice, thise outputs a different page with just the transparent image and the image on top of the HEX colour of your choice 
Mobile sized chunks
Jun 17th
I’ve been using my G1 quite a bit to browse the web lately and as you know I have an extensive image gallery which I like to use in posts on forums etc. Well now I can both directly upload to that gallery by using a handy ftp program on Android and browse the gallery in a specially designed environment. I sat up for a little while last night making a compatible and dinky gallery that reduces bandwidth and increases the amount of images I can view on the screen at once.
Before: 105Kb |
After: 32Kb
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Mobile Blog:
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As you can see in the first screenshot 2 images can barely even fit on the screen, after streamlining and making the thumbnails quite minuscule 32 images can easily fit on screen at once, I also upped the amount of images shown per page so there’s less clicking of links. I also streamlined the image page so that images fit easier and it is easier to get a link to the image to post elsewhere. Of course it still retains (and utilises) the ability for me to resize the images however I need to and to do a bunch of other image manipulation too.
I can’t leave without mentioning the last screnshot, which is of the mobile version of this blog, it’s clean, neat and fast. I used to use a more flashy version but I think it was a little cumbersome. This version just puts the posts ups there with no superfluous crap.
As usual it’s unlikely anyone will even visit the site on a mobile device except me, and as usual it’s mainly an exercise to teach myself more. But of course I will be using it all the time to continue the tradition of posting random images.
Coding pointless stuff
Apr 11th
Yeo that’s right, there’s nothing more time consuming than coding php and html for random stuff that no-one is ever going to see. But again that’s half the point of this site, to test things out and to see what is possible. It’s also fun to learn. Using this site and my own curiosity I have learned a great deal about php, flash, multimedia and more. I just wonder what use it will all be in the end.
Yummy tech demo
The first thing of note is the directory script @ http://media.csignal.org I was only using this to store the files, but now it’s easy to browse them all too. The script originally used JavaScript code to pop FLV videos up and play them on the page. However I recoded the thing to generate an actual html page with the FLV inside it, I also modified it to play MP4 extension too. So now anyone can watch any of the FLV/MP4 files on the domain without having to download them and I don’t have to make an individual page for each file. All I do is upload the file and the script generates the html code of a page for me, oh I also used mod_rewrite to make the URIs short and make sense. Check it out if you want 
I also coded a quick index script for small images, namely sprites, I had a small collection and felt like uploading them and displaying them in a visual fashion. It’s extremely basic and all I really did was take a simple file listing script and put image tags in it, no formatting so it the page just wraps the images as needed. Very simple and very effective 
Finally I implemented a proxy script so I can browse sites without disclosing my ip address. I know there are proxy servers all over the place, but at least this way I know where it’s going to be and I can customize it as I wish.
A few new pages
Apr 4th
New hotness
I was snooping through Google Webmaster tools I was intrigued by their 404 error page helper which tries to add useful links to your error pages. So I decided to set about making my own error page which was as helpful as possible, I know that it’s not the most popular or important site, but it’s nice to do things like this just to see how it works and to get practice.
Main features;
» Dropped the ‘404′ as a lot of people don’t know or care what ‘404′ is.
» The message ‘Page not found’ displayed in French, German, Japanese, Russian and Italian, it also links to Google translate pages to translate the error page.
» Links to popular pages.
» Links to the latest posts.
» Search within the blog and the entire site through Google custom search.
» A link to the archives.
I understand some of it may be superfluous, but I tried to keep is as simple looking as possible whilst adding as much function as possible. You can have a look at how it works here.
I also posted up the 3360×1050 wallpapers in a post so it would be easier for people to find, check it out here.
Remote controlled spider car climbs walls
Jan 10th
Stumbled across this on Youtube earlier, it’s a radio controlled car that drives up walls! First I thought it was a joke. But no, these things work by sucking air through the bottom sticking to the wall. I want one! But it’s totally only a fad, the fascination would last all of 10 minutes, if I can get one for less than £10 I might, anything over is definitley not worth it, same with those radio controlled helicopters. The cars were also on Top Gear here, quite funnny.
Streaming video
Nov 14th
After hours of trying last night I’ve finally perfected video streaming from my server, basically this means that like on Youtube I can now put videos up and be able to seek to any point within the video without having the whole file loaded, something which I thought was not possible without custom server side software. However xmoov changed all that, check out the Far Cry 2 video a couple of posts down, as it’s a relatively long file you might want to skip through it, as we speak I’m updating the flv files so they will work.
I’ll probably write a quick guide on it at some point because as simple as the setup seems it did take me quite a while to get it working properly, especially with large files (the code needs a fix).
You may also notice the new skin on the latest videos; I found a nice skin for the JW FLVPlayer which I used originally, this and the [now] easy streaming capabilities mean that I’ll be using the JW player from now on. It also means I can skin Youtube videos too
Statistics!
Nov 8th
Not that this website gets enough hits (or ever will) for stats to be important or even relevant, but as usual this site is acting as a testing ground, I’ve been looking for a stats program that looks nice and has everything I need and assumed I did not have access to install stuff on my server, however, it appears I have shell access and set about installing the lovely AWSstats as I’ve used that before.
Took a little getting used to but I got it working perfectly, set up the hourly cron job to update the files and then found the fantastic JAWStats, which is a quick modification to make AWStats look and play very nicely, take a look, there’s not much in the way of statistics there at the moment as my host was only keeping a few days of stats at a time, now the stats program is up and running I would have continuous stats from now on, and I’ll be installing this stat package wherever I go as its probably the tidiest most complete one I’ve found.
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