Faster frames for student animators
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Pay-as-you-go computer power could soon be helping computer animators finish films faster.
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PHPClasses.org is spotlighting another package from their site today - this time it's a CAPTCHA class that takes things a step further and introduces animation into the mix to make it even harder for bots to get through.   Laszlo Zsidi is a PHP Web developer that has written an harder to break CAPTCHA solution. It consists in generating animated GIF images that exhibit the validation text.   Since the text never appears all at once in each of the animated frames, this solution certainly raises the bar in terms of difficulty for the robots to guess the validation text, making it very hard to defeat, if possible at all.    You can check out the class here, including a sample animated gif file and a download of everything you'll need to get started.
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I don't have an office, and I'm not running a conference, so I hope to hook up with someone, hopefully in the Bay Area, with either of these, to try some experimentation with FlickrFan. First a little background... My first glimpse of how wonderful news photography and screen savers are together was when I visited Andy Rhinehart at the Spartanburg Herald-Journal on 2/15/05. He had to go to a meeting, and left me in his office to check email, update my blog using my laptop. HIs PC of course went into screen saver mode, and started showing pictures of various political leaders in meetings around the world and sporting events, people digging out of snow storms. It didn't take long before my eyes were fixed on his screen.  Later I found out that everyone at AP does this too.  If you have a folder of new pictures on your LAN it makes a fantastic source of distraction. But it's different from video because it's silent. You can have a conversation about what's on the screen without interfering with it, or try to have a conversation about something else entirely.  This is something we noticed about podcasting too, that sometimes less is more. Because there is no video you can: 1. Use your eyes for something else, like driving, walking, doing housework. 2. Use your imagination in ways you can't with video, imagine what the speakers look like, where they are, who else is there. Once your imagination is activated in one direction it goes off in others.  So photocasting or picturecatching, whatever it ends up being called, has a similar "less is more" dimension.  So then I tried an experiment, I put an early version of FlickrFan on a 46-inch screen in my den, and when people would come over to visit I'd leave it running and we'd talk about whatever we were going to talk about, and I wasn't surprised to see the attention drift over to the TV. It's captivating. So I'd like to try it in two new venues to see what happens. 1. In a reception area in an office. Imagine one of the buildings at Microsoft. Or a doctors office, or the lobby of a VC firm. Install a big flatscreen TV on the wall, with a Mac Mini behind it, with a net connection, and let it run. See if people don't gravitate to it. See if people don't want to have meetings in the lobby. (I think some might.) 2. At a conference, like Demo or Davos, scatter four screens around the main lobby (not the meeting room), with one Mac driving them all or each with its own Mac Mini. Again see how it affects the dynamic. You might want to show pictures taken at the conference for a unique recursive effect. Or just use the AP news photo feed. Either would be sufficient to learn how it works. I bet we would learn a lot. Let me know if you decide to give it a try, and by all means please blog about your experiences, share what you learn with the rest of us.
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The DVDirect VRD-MC3 stresses two extremely important attributes: simplicity and reproduction quality.
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Compact kit for the thumb-generation
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The Piethon benchmark contest is beginning to loom, and the language list discusses how scalars should be interpolated and subscripted.
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Here's an interesting Howto on connecting FlickrFan to the Mac desktop. I love this stuff.  Here's a movie that demonstrates this coolest of hacks.
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By edison d. ong. âGet blown away by 3D Java games in brilliant 65K color on the huge 1.9â TFT screen.â. &quot;Excuse me. Did you say 1.9&quot; screen?
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More efficient video compression; receiver add-on for TV.
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A free web-based tool is launched that allows people to build a virtual world in less than a minute.
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This is a cool little feature I've been wanting for a while now.  Every once in a while I'll develop some cool feature in some software that I'm writing and want to show off a screenshot.  The only problem is that without showing how it interacts with the user I can't demo the features raw power.  An animated screenshot would solve this but no existing screenshot tools support animated gif output.  It turns out that 'convert' from ImageMagick supports. Ksnapshot can be used to grab the screens and 'convert' can stitch them together.  Heres what you do:  - Startup ksnapshot and take a series of snaps from your application.  Each   snapshot should be an independent frame in the series.  - Save ...
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A GNOME 2 frontend for the Visual Boy Advance emulator.
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KidBASIC is an easy to use version of BASIC designed to teach young children the basics of computer programming.  It has a built-in graphics mode which lets them draw pictures on screen in minutes, and a set of detailed, easy-to-follow tutorials that introduce programming concepts through fun exercises.   Version 0.3 eliminates the line-numbering syntax of previous versions, replacing it with labels.  Performance has also been increased slightly.  Linux source tarballs are now available.  Help and comments are always welcome.  Check out our web site at http://kidbasic.sourceforge.net for more information.
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In previous issues, I  kept the user experience somewhat spartan which allowed the application to be modified with a mimimum of effort. This time we add points, ellipses, bezier curves and look at a new application class called Control, which allows users to tell the Doodle application what shape they want to draw next. By Guyon Roche. 0404
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Based off of a previous article from Mike Willbanks, Stuart Herbert has posted some of his own thoughts on tuning and tweaking your applications for the best performance you can get out of them.   There's some good advice in there, and I thought it'd be a good idea to quickly add a bit more detail about the separate approaches that Mike raises.   He goes over the APC caching, memcache, the "gzip trick", the "Not Modified" header and optimized SQL statements.   He also mentions one thing that Mike didn't mention - a split between static files (no PHP needed) and their dynamic cousins. Having a more pure Apache (no PHP installed) can help give a minute jump in speed that, depending on the size of the site, could really add up from a user's perspective.
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In a follow-up to a previous blog post, Alexey Zakhlestin shares a few more thoughts on the project and the proper object hierarchy's going for.   actually, I changed it completely 3 times already in my thoughts. I finally "see the light"(tm) and will implement it on a weekend. I think about converting SCGI-part to a simple "driver" and move all http-related stuff to a separate driver-agnostic set of classes. This way, I would be able to implement FastCGI as anther driver without altering applications. If you have any better ideas - let me know.   He also includes a link to another sample application that uses the functionality to create a pie chart (including some benchmarks) with the help of the eZ components framework.
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Pierre-Alain Joye takes a look at building Cairo (a vector-based graphics library for PHP) on a Windows system.    While trying to get the cairo (and pimp) PHP binding ready to be released, I finally sit down and port Wez build cscript to cairo. It still needs some cleanup, a nice summary message but it works already. I tested it with Visual C++ Express Edition but it should work with other versions as well.   My next goal is to add the tests (nmake tests) and fix the nmake instal    He describes the process he went through to try to get things up and running, but is still having a few issues and has required a few tweaks to get it working. He also links to two resources: a ZIP of the development libraries and a ZIP ready to use package.