chaotic.signal
whatever Phil it's just random crap
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.
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.
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.
The survey said
Oct 31st
Have just finished learning how to do a bit of flash, which was nice. I was trying to make a simple site which played a sound on clicking, as I knew nothing of flash I tried to find ways to do it via javascript, but that turned out to be very lame. I also tried a free button creator which worked (after lots of tinkering because of some random error) then when I uploaded it there was a big “unregistered” banner all over it… DOH!
Then I found Swish, which is a nice and easy flash creator of which there is a barely limited free trial… Again after having some random problems with the thing I managed to output a decent looking and working piece of flash. I then coded up a bit of HTML, added some “favourite links” and there you have it, thesurveysaid.com. Broll-o pads!
Bite me photobucket
Oct 15th
Yet again boredom made me do random things, I decided to pick up a little image upload program so if I wanted to host a pic I wouldnt have to use another site or load up FTP, so I grabbed a simple image uploading script and spruced it up with some preset bbcode & html copy/paste boxes and with the experience I’ve gained of PHP thumbnailing, look at the lovely thumbnails it makes me;
As you can see it adds the file size details and a nice little magnifying glass just for no apparent reason obviously they’re a little low quality, but who cares its a thumbnail, less bandwidth. Man I love mod_rewrite, it makes life so much easier changing a string like /thumb.php?w=250&fltr[]=wmi|zoom.gif|TL|85|0|0|&fltr[]=bord|2|&fltr[]=wmt|^Xx^Y\ (^FkKB)|11|B|FFFFFF|arial.ttf|100|7||000000|100|x&src=26446.jpg into /thumbs/26446.jpg is chronicles of ridiculous.
Time I went to bed, more random crap tomorrow, might start posting some interesting stuff! In the mean time play some spore 
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