chaotic.signal
whatever Phil it's just random crap
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 
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.
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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