Posts Tagged geek
js1k: an allRGB entry in <1k of JavaScript
Posted by Howard Yeend in javascript on August 30, 2010
It’s contest season! The An Event Apart 10k JavaScript app contest has just ended (my entry got 2½/5), there’s a node.js contest, and the JS1k contest is ending on Sept 10th. JS1k is a much purer contest, disallowing any external libraries, while the 10k contest allowed things like jQuery and external web services. As Frederick Polgardy puts it, js1k is “An exercise in constraint, resulting in a kind of executable haiku”.
For js1k, I’ve entered a port of my PHP allRGB entry. The allRGB project is a great idea in itself – create an image which contains every possible colour in the RGB space exactly once. That’s 256*256*256 colours (=16777216), in a 4096×4096 image. Quite a challenge for PHP, and certainly not the kind of thing you’d attempt in JavaScript, right? ;D
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allRGB Entry – PHP Image Manipulation
Posted by Howard Yeend in PHP on February 10, 2010
The objective of allRGB is simple: To create images with one pixel for every rgb-color (16777216 to be exact); not one color missing, and not one color twice.
What a cool project! As regular readers will know, I love messing about with image manipulation in PHP, so when I heard about the allRGB project I knew I had to make an entry for it. A few false starts and about half an hour later, I proudly submitted my first entry, a 4096×4096 PNG image containing every single possible RGB colour. As one redditor put it, “It’s like poetry, just without words.”

Click for the high resolution (only 173Kb)
And now on to the code:
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GIFexplode – community powered web development
Posted by Howard Yeend in PHP, web on August 2, 2009
Let me share with you a very cool story about strangers coming together and building something.
I was browsing reddit yesterday, and I saw a thread entitled “Someone needs to make a Firefox add-on that lets you step through animated gifs frame by frame“. I thought “hey that’s a nice well defined simple idea” – just the kind of thing I love, so I registered a nice-sounding domain name and started looking at how to use PHP to split an animated gif into its component frames – I figured it couldn’t be too hard. Read the rest of this entry »
Adaptive Web Sites
Posted by Howard Yeend in Adaptive Web Sites, web on June 14, 2009
(this is a slightly expanded transcript of a talk I gave at Oxford in June 2009 about my work there)
Hi! I’m Howard Yeend, my supervisor is Vasile Palade, and the title of my project is:
“Implementing Adaptive Web Sites using Machine Learning and Ajax“.
But before I talk about what all those buzzwords mean, I’d like to give a little background information about why this is an important research area, and why I feel it’s the right project for me.
When I was trying to think of a project title, I had a question in mind:
How can we improve the web?
And I think that’s a hugely important question for us to ask.
3D PHP – playing with ImageCreate
Posted by Howard Yeend in PHP on March 19, 2009
A PHP city (it gets better after the break):
Basically I was bored one day and decided to play around with ImageCreate and ended up making this “crate” demo (click the image for some other experiments).
And then everything got a bit silly and I made this:
Neat Windows Tools
Posted by Howard Yeend in Programs on March 13, 2009
Most of these tools have a computer security slant, some cannot be classified under any other term than ‘hacking tools’, so be careful when running them, especially if you don’t know what they do. Tools that interact with a network in a potentially dangerous way are marked with ‘D’. Read the rest of this entry »
The Right To Read
Posted by Howard Yeend in Philosophy on March 13, 2009
Taken from http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
For Dan Halbert, the road to Tycho began in college–when Lissa Lenz asked to borrow his computer. Hers had broken down, and unless she could borrow another, she would fail her midterm project. There was no one she dared ask, except Dan.
Interneterata
Posted by Howard Yeend in (misc) on March 13, 2008
Go placidly amid the spam and waste,
and remember what peace there may be in a decent firewall.
As far as possible without surrender
never run untrusted executables.
Post your comments quickly but clearly;
and read the others,
EVEN THE ONES IN CAPS, and the ignorant;
we too were noobs once
The Hacker’s Manifesto
Posted by Howard Yeend in hacking on November 30, 2004
The Conscience of a Hacker
better known as “The Hacker’s Manifesto”.
A prolific and influential piece of writing, January 8, 1986:
Another one got caught today, it’s all over the papers. “Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal”, “Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering”…
Damn kids.
They’re all alike.



